Spent today at the JISC/CNI meeting in York. A very interesting day, with some excellent speakers. Nicky Ferguson gave an overview of the Resource Discovery Review, which is reporting on the Archives Hub and three other services (Copac, Zetoc and SUNCAT). His summary included information about the survey results. This included the fact that the surveys suggested that 50% of users of these services are librarians or archivists.

The trouble with this, is that I think that the data was somewhat skewed by the way the survey was promoted. A message about the surveys was sent to the JISCmail LIS-LINK list on 16 May 2006. This list has over 750 subscribers, mainly librarians. We also circulated the URL for the Hub survey on the Hub contributors’ list (c.100 archivists and librarians). It is much easier to contact these users than to get in touch with our ‘academic’ users: there isn’t a single list you can use to send a message to the academic researchers.

So although the survey feedback might suggest that our users are mainly archivists or librarians, I am fairly sure that this is more a result of the way that the survey was promoted than a reflection of actual use. My gut feeling is also that librarians and archivists have a sense of ownership of these services which makes them more willing to support them by filling in the survey. I’ve got absolutely no evidence for this though!

I listened to a really interesting talk yesterday ‘Ontology is Overrated’ by Clay Shirkey – http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail470.html.

His main point was that we are sticking to old habits of classification in an online world, even though these habits were brought about by the physical constraints of the shelf, which are no longer applicable. In a physical environment our real goal was to optimise the physical storage and not the intellectual aspect. In reality, ideas can be all over the place, but a book (or archive) has to be one place. He compared the approach of Yahoo to Google: Yahoo persisted with categories and limited cross-references, and Google gave up on the idea of classifying by subject and just went with the principle ‘you stick in your search terms and we’ll find relevant stuff’, and Google has now practically taken over the search engine world. Clay believes that ontologies only work well if you have a limited amount of stuff, if it is clear and if it is stable. Classification schemes effectively mean that we describe something and then ask users to guess how we’ve described it. We should be moving away from all or nothing categorisations. The reality of folksonomies, used in popular services such as del.icio.us, is that each individual categorisation scheme is worth less, but there are many many more of them. If we can find way of creating value by rolling them up over time they will come to outpace professional categorisation schemes, particularly re. robustness and costs.

“Does the world make sense or do we make sense of the world?”

He concluded that if we are to make sense of the world, then there are many points of view and we shouldn’t privilege one version. We can try to make sense of rolling up what is out there to get an aggregate value, but without having an ontological goal and without trying to get a perfect view of the world.

Well, its all food for thought. I do believe that we need to think differently in an online world, and we are going to have to embrace the interactive nature of the Web – many users like services where they have control and they can tag their own content. However, I think that doing away with the idea of professional categorisation is going too far the other way. We need to find imaginative ways to work with both approaches and get the best for all types of user.

Elizabeth Danbury, responsible for training generations of archivists in the UK, at the University of Liverpool and, more recently, at University College London, announced her retirement during a presentation at the FARMER conference for archival educators in Aberystwyth last week. Elizabeth gave a very entertaining presentation at the conference about the changes in archival education in the UK over the last thirty years, ending with the observation that the future is ‘promising and challenging – Good Luck!’.

Vikki, a post

The Archives Hub is currently undergoing a review as part of a more wide-ranging look at of JISC-funded resource discovery services. If you would like to contribute, please take a few moments to complete the questionnaire which has been drawn up by the team undertaking the review.

This survey has now been closed. Thanks if you contributed – we had some very positive feedback: more on that later.

Congratulations to Hub developer Steve and his wife, Helen, on the safe arrival of baby Daniel James Tattersall, born on the 4th of May 2006.

This is as close as you can get to Canterbury Cathedral nowadays without having to pay £6 per person to get within sight of the church. Once inside the cathedral, the first thing you see is a gift shop. There is another one as you leave the cathedral, and you are forced to walk through yet another one as you leave the cathedral’s grounds.

Three days after visiting Canterbury, I was in Paris. There, you can go around Notre Dame for no charge and the cathedral was heaving with visitors. Most museums in the UK reported huge rises in visitor numbers when they stopped charging for entry, so it would be interesting to see how the introduction of charges have affected Canterbury’s footfall. I’m sure it all comes down to whether the churches receive public funding for their upkeep or not, but it does seem a shame to restrict access to the cathedral’s immediate surroundings.

It reminded me of the issue of access to information about archives. The philosophy in the UK has always been that if descriptions of archives are created using public money (whether in a university or local government repository), then that information should be made freely available to the general public. Listing the collections is our core work and that information should be put into a digital form and made as widely available as possible, so that all potential users can become aware of the existence of our materials. Charging for access to archival finding aids would be like the barrier at the Christ Church Gate in Canterbury: irritating and exclusive.