Deutsche Welle reports that the proposed sale of 3,600 manuscripts from the State Library at Karlsruhe has been blocked by the culture minister, Bernd Neumann. The items were going to be sold to raise money to finance the repair of Salem Castle, now a school.
Contributors’ Training Day
The Archives Hub will be holding a free training/information day in Manchester for archivists and information professionals who would like to contribute information about their archives to the service.
Date: Tuesday 5 December 2006
Location: Kilburn Building, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL. (maps)
Time: 11.00 – 16.30.
Lunch: a free lunch will be provided
The day will include:
A short introduction to the Archives Hub and to latest developments, including the new Spokes software.
A short introduction to the benefits of XML and to using EAD
Using the online template to create descriptions
Indexing for the Archives Hub
Hands on experience of creating records using the template
Please email Jane if you’d like to attend this event.
Preserving digital records of politicians
An interview about the JISC-funded Paradigm project is now available on the Digital Preservation Coalition’s site. The project manager, Susan Thomas (a former Hub contributor), talked to Kieron Niven about the challenges faced in preserving the personal digital records of politicians. The project, which is a collaboration between the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford and the John Rylands University Library at The University of Manchester now has a mailing list for news on the project.
The new digital archivist meets South Park
I’ve created a PDF of the talk I gave to the Society of Archivists’ Conference, succinctly titled ‘The New Digital Archivist: from relative isolation to global interoperability’, the talk is based on the premise of an archivist who does not actually have any archives to look after! In other words, the kind of archivist who works on a service such as the Archives Hub :-)
What sorts of skills do we need and will more archivists require these sorts of skills in the future?
The talk is available from our website on the Introduction page at http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/introduction.shtml under ‘Presentations’.
South Park character creations are by permission of Zwerg-im-Bikini (Janina Koppel)
http://www.sp-studio.de/
P.S. Our software developer is supposed to look thoughtful and not grumpy!
Web archiving milestone
Good to see in the Washington Post that the British Library’s UK Web Archiving Consortium shares the Hub team’s high opinion of the Nice Cup of Tea and a Sit Down site.
Wormwood
September’s featureis on the theme of nuclear power and nuclear weapons, and takes its title from the stunning BBC television drama Edge of Darkness (1985). It’s difficult to think about nukes without going apocalyptic – early drafts for this feature had the working title "Wormwood", from Revelation 8:10-11.
And we thought indexing for the Hub was hard…
An accidental posting by Ellen Chapman (of the Archives & Manuscripts Department at the University of Hawaii at Manoa) to the US Archives and Archivists mailing list brightened my morning today. It was a link to an article by Philip O’Leary in the most recent edition of the Annals of Improbable Research about the complexities of indexing Celtic languages. The article is available in PDF format, and is definitely worth reading if you’ve been struggling with creating index terms in English.
EAD has a new schema (nearly)
I have been looking at the beta version of the new EAD schema today. This will eventually replace the DTD that we currently use to validate our EAD files. Usually when I investigate new standards and technologies, the way is fraught with problems, but this was almost indecently easy…..Actually, I should make clear that I mean easy to link to and validate some test documents. When it comes to actually thinking about making all of our Hub data validate to the schema, that may throw up far more issues. It seems that the main changes for us will be to do with the values for date ranges, the use of xlink to create links, and the need to change the repository code values (i’m still a little unclear about how this will actually work).
Isn’t it nice when something turns out to be far more straightforward than you thought it would be!
Journey through time and space
At the Society of Archivist‘s annual conference, I presented a talk as part of Louise Craven’s ‘What are Archives? Use and Users’ programme. The complete text and images of my talk are now on the Hub website.
The Tomorrow People
I attended the Society of Archivists’ conference last week. It was quite a long and full programme, extending from Tuesday afternoon to Friday morning. The theme was ‘Education, Development and Tomorrow’s Professionals’. I used to want to be one of the Tomorrow People when I was a kid and at this conference I gave a talk on myself as a ‘tomorrow’s professional’. Well, I’m not able to teleport and I’m not telepathic, which is a shame, but I thought it was worth raising the subject of an archivists, such as myself, who do not actually look after archives, be they paper or binary. As I work for the Hub, an archival gateway, my work is all about enabling cross-searching of descriptions of archives.
I hope that I made the case for the importance of archivists being willing to become more technically-aware and the importance of understanding technical concepts and language to a degree in order to work successfully with software developers and systems support staff. Whilst the majority of archivists are not likely to need to gain an in-depth knowledge of systems, metadata standards, protocols, etc., it is going to be necessary for an increasing minority to be willing to work more closely with new technologies. In addition, we need to be aware of the way that younger people especially are working with the Web.
The morning session during which I gave my presentation was introduced with a very fine paper by Louise Craven from The National Archives talking about new ways of thinking about archives and the status of community archives and internet archives. Caroline Williams from LUCAS then talked very eloquently about the new prioritising of personal papers, which have traditionally been under-valued compared to organisational archives. Both of these papers raised the concept of context, which is so central to the way that we think about archives. The lively discussion after the session continued this theme.
We usually think in terms of archival context, but it is something that is worth thinking about in a broader framework. For instance, the whole issue of context on the Web and the way that people use Web resources is well worthy of further thought. It may be that archivists find it increasingly difficult to promote the importance of archival context in an age where users so often create their own context. In the end, documents can have any number of contexts, and this will affect the way that they are interpreted. Maybe all we can do is to ensure that the archival context is maintained, for those who want to recognise it.