Blog for history

October 13, 2006 / Amanda Hill

The History Matters campaign is organising a mass “One Day in History” blog in the UK on 17 October 2006. The entries submitted will be kept as part of the British Library’s web archive. It’s an internet-enabled version of the ideas behind the Mass-Observation movement.

From the site:

…a society out of touch with its past cannot have confidence in its future. History helps us to know where we come from and to explain the world as it is.

But one post in the site’s forum does point out that there is a distinct lack of mention of archives on the site, and apparent lack of involvement of archive-related organisations:

Sadly, it seems that they have been largely overlooked even by campaigners dedicated to promoting history and heritage.

Baden-W

October 12, 2006 / Amanda Hill

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

October 11, 2006 / Amanda Hill

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

October 6, 2006 / Amanda Hill

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

October 2, 2006 / Jane Stevenson

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

September 25, 2006 / Amanda Hill

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 21, 2006 / Jane Stevenson

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…

September 15, 2006 / Amanda Hill

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)

September 14, 2006 / Jane Stevenson

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

September 12, 2006 / Jane Stevenson

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.