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Approaches to 'Archives 2.0' from the perspective of the Archives Hub and AIM25 services
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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
16 March 2009
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
• 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
• Data – standards, quality
• Software – open source
• System – interoperable, distributed
• Development – user-focused, innovative
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Data
• 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?
16 March 2009
Distributed System
• Spokes institutions– control– administer– customised web interface
• Hosted spokes
http://kirkland.dur.ac.uk/ead/
http://cheshire.cent.gla.ac.uk/ead/search.html
Flickr cc licence : Thomas Hawk
16 March 2009
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
• Steering Committee
• Contributors’ Forum
• Contributors’ Community
• Blog, newsletters, email lists
• National Archives Network
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National Archive Network
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16 March 2009
AIM25
• 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
16 March 2009
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?’)
16 March 2009
Benefits
• More contemporary feel• Help with fundraising• Users able to sift information more effectively and cross-
search• 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
16 March 2009
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…
• Relevant
• Sustainable
• Skills-based
• Fun
• Result in greater co-operation and networking between all types of archive institution
• A journey not a destination
16 March 2009
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 twitterhttp://twitter.com/archiveshub
