Sustainable content project

You may have heard about the JISC-funded project that the Archives Hub is currently working on, to improve export routines from CALM and AdLib into the Hub and AIM25 – I’ve been filling various mailing-lists with requests for volunteers. I’m going to be posting progress updates on the blog as the project goes along. The project started in April, and is scheduled to run for 12 months. The idea is to enable archives that use CALM and AdLib to easily provide the descriptions to the Archives Hub and AIM25. No need to create new records, just export them. Most of my work so far has been liaising with potential participants: we’ve had 20 volunteers so far, from a nice range of institutions. Once we’ve finalised who we’ll be working with, I’ll post a list here. Alongside this, I’ve been building a database to handle the data we’ll be getting in from the participants. It’s just a fairly simple Access database, but I’m very happy with it, for a number of reasons: partly because it’s the most complicated database I’ve ever designed; partly because there’s a nice sense of security in knowing that I’m prepared for data to start coming in. What pleases me most, though, is how building the database forced me to step back and look at the project in more detail. To build the database I had to know exactly what information we wanted to put into it, and what we wanted to get out. This led to a really good brainstorming session with Jane where we clarified the aims of the project, and exactly how we want to achieve them. Data has just started coming in from some of our volunteers, so there’s a lot of EAD/XML in my future! The images shows a shot of the database containing some dummy data.