Transcript Innovative ways, sustainable means The Archives Hub and AIM25 Jane Stevenson and Geoff Browell 16 March 2009

Innovative ways, sustainable
means
The Archives Hub and AIM25
Jane Stevenson and Geoff Browell
16 March 2009
Hub and AIM25 benefits
• Locate archives across a range of
institutions
• Save time and resources
• Search by subject / name / place
• Focus for archive community
• Promotion of standards for robust and
sustainable descriptions
• Innovation and experimentation
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JISC Information Environment
• Providing a range of meaningful, rich and
innovative methods of accessing electronic
materials
• A collaborative landscape of service providers
who work together to seamlessly cater for the
needs of the community on a national basis
• Underpinned by real world interoperability, based
upon a common standards framework
JISC Information Environment Development Strategy [2001]
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British Archives: the vision
“Our vision of the future of British archives is of
a flow of archival information which takes
account of all the opportunities offered by
digital networks and offers opportunity for
exploration - historical, personal, social - to
the broadest possible range of people
wherever they can use it - in the home, the
classroom or the office.”
British Archives: The Way Forward (NCA, 2000)
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The Archives 2.0 Manifesto
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Positive
Active
Responsive
Open
Interactive
Experimental
User-focused
Participatory
http://www.archivesnext.com
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A new Mindset
• An open and flexible approach to access,
archives 2.0 should, fundamentally, be
about developing a collaborative,
transparent and user-focused approach,
based on agreed standards, that enables
others to engage with us and with the data
that we hold on their own terms.
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Implementation
• How to move forward in a sustainable
way?
• What underlies an effective Archives 2.0
approach?
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Underlying principles of the Hub
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Data – standards, quality
Software – open source
System – interoperable, distributed
Development – user-focused, innovative
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Data
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EAD – Encoded Archival Description
ISAD(G)
Indexing standards
Manual data editing
Validation through Template for data
creation and editing
• Training and raising awareness
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Software
• Cheshire 3 and Cheshire for Archives
– Open source
– Flexible
– In-house development
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Interoperable System
• Ability to interoperate – exchange data
between systems
• Data working for benefit of users
• The Archives Hub and AIM25 - EAD
• CALM and AdLib
• Datasets?
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Distributed System
• Spokes institutions
– control
– administer
– customised web interface
• Hosted spokes
Flickr cc licence : Thomas Hawk
http://kirkland.dur.ac.uk/ead/
http://cheshire.cent.gla.ac.uk/ead/search.html
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Open System
• Machine-to-machine interfaces
• Z39.50; OAI-PMH; SRU
• Genesis portal for Women’s Studies –
SRU search of the Hub
To be a part of the JISC-IE,
content providers need to
support machine- oriented
interfaces to their resources.
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Development
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Steering Committee
Contributors’ Forum
Contributors’ Community
Blog, newsletters, email lists
National Archives Network
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National Archive Network
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AIM25
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10 years-old
10,000 descriptions
100 partners
Up to 2m hits per month
Google-visible
Becoming a hub for London
LMA latest partner
2008-2009 upgrade – new descriptions, improved
website, interoperability with M25
• Partner-led with central indexing standards
• Forum to lead on standards, fundraising, sector issues
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AIM25 and Archives 2.0
• Asked ourselves - who uses it?
• Avoid features for sake of it – what is the
demand? Do users have the time – vast majority
of users are under 1 minute
• If colleagues don’t know what a tag cloud or
social networking are, will users?
• Can we afford it or do others do it better already
– Facebook?
• Most users are probably not Californian
teenagers
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AIM25: What did we do?
• Moderated Web 2.0 – democracy or
benign dictatorship?
• Avoided social networking
• Hybrid tag clouds
• Information alerts on new collections –
RSS
• Improving searching with cross searching
with M25 – (‘isn’t it all just information?’)
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Benefits
• More contemporary feel
• Help with fundraising
• Users able to sift information more effectively and crosssearch
• Helps cultivate a ‘brand’. As catalogue information
becomes more easily retrievable and machine-readable,
so the ‘extra features’ and the trusted name become
more important
• These extras might include podcast lectures, National
Curriculum tie-ins or dramatic re-enactments, extra
bibliographic or catalogue content (‘you’re interested in
that item, have you seen this?’), mapping or the ability to
interact with other users
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Right and wrong reasons
• Right: improves the work of Archives,
collecting, preserving and making records
accessible for current and future
generations
• Wrong: for its own sake; next ‘thing’;
pressure to be fashionable; ‘cure-all’ or
technical shortcut
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Archives 2.0: Barriers
• Legal barriers (can’t publish everything)
• Cost barriers (hidden costs such as training, IT
development, policing UGC)
• Conflicting audiences (all things to all men)
• Over-expectations (limited resources of sector): will
users become restive if they are used to Flickr or
Facebook and get FORTRAN?
• Can’t manage resulting demand
• Knowledge/training gap (many archivists are unfamiliar
with standards or terminology)
• Danger of following fashion for its own sake – when is a
paradigm shift not a paradigm shift?
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Searching Questions
• How far do we want users to be sharing and
engaging – do they want to?
• Danger of users thinking everything is up for
grabs, ‘Can’t I just publish any photograph I
come across in your archive?’
• Role of the finding aid and its integrity –
reliability of catalogues. What role is there for
expert input?
• Danger of ‘never mind the quality, feel the width’
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Talking points
• Better market research needed
• Greater standardisation of statistics to gauge usage
• Do users want it and can we afford the time, money and
energy to handle the consequences?
• Will management understand the implications or do they
think it is technological panacea? (‘Can’t you just digitise
everything?’)
• Archivists need to understand the implications in order to
educate institutions of the costs/benefits
• Technologising the relationships which archivists have
always cultivated – with donors, users and the public. So
is it doing more of what we do well already?
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Talking points
• Do we get the basics right first? (cataloguing
backlogs, basic digitisation and improved
physical access)
• Standards – electronic and ethical
• The role of the archivist from intercessor/
intermediary to facilitator in a personal
relationship or journey of discovery through
records: an Archive equivalent of the Protestant
Reformation?
• Knowledge, expertise and interpretive skills
remain at the heart of the profession
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Archives 2.0 will be…
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Relevant
Sustainable
Skills-based
Fun
Result in greater co-operation and
networking between all types of archive
institution
• A journey not a destination
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Contact details
• Jane Stevenson: [email protected]
• Geoff Browell: [email protected]
Visit the National Archives Network social space:
http://archivesnetwork.ning.com/
Check out the Hub blog:
http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/blog/
Check out the Archives Hub twitter
http://twitter.com/archiveshub
16 March 2009