Sustainable content: visits to contributors

I recently visited two of the contributors to the Archives Hub sustainable content development project. The archivists at Queen Mary, University of London (QMUL) and the BT Archives were nice enough to let me drink their tea, and see how they used CALM. Axiell, developers of the CALM software, have kindly let us have access to a trial version of CALM to help with this project, but it’s very different to seeing the full thing in action in a busy archive. I’ve never had chance to play with a full version of CALM before, especially not one populated with nice juicy descriptions, and I passed some instructive and enjoyable time poking around and experimenting with exports. What was especially valuable was discovering the answer (or, at least, an answer) to the problems of the non-exporting geogname, persname and corpname fields. These access points are very important to the Hub, and they were exporting – in most cases – as empty tags. This was why I chose to visit QMUL and BT – they had got these elusive fields to export, and I wanted to find out how. Now I just have to figure out how to use that knowledge! I have more visits coming up, to Seven Stories in Newcastle, and to Senate House, which will be my first experience with an AdLib system, and I’m sure that these will be just as interesting and profitable.