On Holiday in the Archives

Liverpool University Centre for Archive Studies (LUCAS) organised an event on Saturday, with Sefton MBC, at Southport Arts Centre. This was an afternoon of talks and films about what archives can show us about holidays and seaside resorts. There were four films from the North West Film Archive, made by railway companies to encourage visitors to travel to northern resorts, and films showing local people made by cinema owners to encourage visitors to their cinemas. Then Dr Chris Lewis of Victoria County History told us about his investigation into the names of private houses in the seaside town of Goring in West Sussex - an ingenious way to shine light on social history. Allan Brodie of English Heritage showed us some of the evidence he had uncovered that Liverpool (rather than Margate) can make a claim to be the first seaside resort, in the early 18th century. Professor John Walton of Leeds Metropolitan University described some of the lateral thiking and detective work required to track down sparse or scattered records of resort life in Britain (and Spain) in the 19th and 20th centuries. Documented history concerned with these aspects of ordinary lives tends to be thin on the ground, as the whole subject was generally seen as 'trivial'. But there's so much more to history than the 'great and the good'. These archivists and historians were at the seaside, but they were working on illuminating our history... Above: Photo from the collection Papers relating to English concert parties and pierrot shows, held at the University of Exeter. Image courtesy of University of Exeter Library (Special Collections).

I thought she'd left...

My last job for the Archives Hub has been to attend the conference of the Association of Canadian Archivists here in Kingston, Ontario (I know, it’s a tough life). Of course it’s been a wonderful networking opportunity for me too! The presentations were of such a consistently high quality and were so varied in nature that it’s difficult to come up with a summary of the conference as a whole, so I’m just going to mention some of the sessions that particularly stood out for me. On Thursday I was impressed by the reports of outreach work (known as ‘public programming’ here) from Lisa Singer of the Archives of Ontario and Jessica King of the Provincial Archives of Alberta. Obviously these are both relatively well-resourced institutions, but there were plenty of tips there that would also work for smaller institutions, including making a fuss of donors with hand-written thank-you notes or invitations to events, and getting involved with local historical and educational events and organisations. Yesterday there was a session on ‘Selective Memory, Archives and Society’, where Katherine Lagrandeur gave a fascinating talk about the relationship between testimony and archives in Art Spiegelman’s book Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, which chronicles his father’s experiences as a Polish Jew and was written in the form of a graphic novel. This was followed by Marcel Barriault’s look at the survival of records of gay male pornography and erotica, which was also, well, graphic! The session on ‘Archivists and Archives through the lens of Popular Culture’ yesterday afternoon was entertaining and had me scribbling down titles of books and films that I need to catch up on. Tania Aldred reported on her research into archivists in film. No fewer than 19 movies have featured archivists in the period between 1941 and 2004, and Tania pointed out that by far the most positive image was in the film National Treasure, with Diane Kruger in the role of Abigail Chase, but that the word ‘archivist’ was never used to describe her. There is a sequel being filmed now though, so there's still hope... The role archives can play in forming a sense of community was the subject of the session I attended this morning, which was very interesting. Anne Foster described the role of the archives in Bute, Montana, where the community was in decline, but an active oral history project undertaken by high school students was instrumental in rebuilding a sense of pride in the town’s past. In the afternoon I was presenting in a session on technology (my slides are on SlideShare), so I had to miss the session on eliciting user feedback, which included a presentation by Geoff Pick of London Metropolitan Archives. Geoff and I had been sitting next to each other for five hours on the way over on the plane on Sunday before we twigged that we were both archivists and both going to the same conference.

Archives Gateways

In yesterday's keynote at the International Standards for Digital Archives conference Bill Stockting took a retrospective look at the development and methodolgy of the A2A programme led by The National Archives (TNA) in the UK. A2A (Access to Archives) £4,000,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) since its inception in 2000. This money has been awarded to a wide range of content-creation projects in England, creating a database of over 100,000 EAD files, containing over 1,000,000 units of archival description between them. Bill went on to explain that the current phase of A2A (known as Access 4 All) would be the final content creation phase for the programme. This phase ends in March 2008 and Bill explained that the data would be transferred to another TNA system. Options for the future maintenance of the data are currently being investigated. The changing priorities of TNA itself and the main funding agency (HLF) were two of the reasons given by Bill for this change. It has become increasingly difficult for repositories to get funding for simple retroconversion projects from HLF in recent years. Bill also noted that many repositories are now actively converting their paper-based finding aids into electronic format themselves, so there was less of a requirement for a central team to co-ordinate such work. My concern is that it might become more difficult to update existing A2A descriptions and to add new ones as a result of this decision. The information in the database may then become increasingly divergent from the versions of the finding aids that are held in the repositories themselves and that the staff in those archives are continuing to improve and build upon. Stefano Vitali was the next speaker. He demonstrated the use of EAC and EAD in the online guide to the State Archives of Florence. The interface was impressive. One area that bothers me slightly about separating out the authority file information from the EAD is that it might become confusing to novice users. One moment you're looking at a collection description, with its own internal navigation, then if you follow a link to a separate authority file, you find yourself in a different record. This could be confusing for the uninitiated. Perhaps it is better to incorporate elements from both EAD and EAC within one display. Blanca Desantes Fernández showed us the Censo-Guía de Archivos de España e Iberoamérica. This is a top-level guide to institutions holding material relating to Spain and Latin America. An XML DTD for describing archival institutions was developed for this project: Encoded Archival Guide (EAG). Blanca explained that this is now being taken forward by the International Council of Archives as a new archival standard: International Standard for Institutions with Archival Holdings (ISIAH). The final session was a panel discussion about a proposed new European gateway to archives. This was interesting. It seems to be a response from European national archivists to The European Library, which is building a union catalogue of holdings of national libraries. The archive gateway's scope seems unclear at present and there does not appear to have been any attempt at establishing whether there is public demand for such a system. A seven-year timescale was mentioned, but no funding has yet been secured and the scope seems potentially limitless. I don't feel that the European archive world has the building blocks in place for such a project yet (unlike the national libraries). But if the project were to focus on making it possible to create those building blocks, then that would be a good place to start. Something like the Spanish project might be a sensible target for an initial project.

Neuer Post

Blogger knows I'm in Germany - the interface is all in German. Neat. And just a teeny bit creepy. I'm here with Jane at the International Standards for Digital Archives conference. Lots of presentations about EAD, EAC, METS and related standards. I was talking about the Spokes software yesterday (the EAD day). The picture shows the inside of the Umspannwerk Ost restaurant where we had dinner last night. It used to be an electrical substation. The conference venue (the Umweltforum) used to be a church. They're good at recycling here. Today was all about EAC and METS - Daniel Pitti was one of the speakers giving the background to EAC in the morning. Apparently there have been complaints about the complexity of the standard, so Daniel was asking for more details on this problem, as work is about to start on rebuilding it 'from the ground up'. I enjoyed his closing comment which was along the lines of "it doesn't matter what you do in the privacy of your own repository, but if you're going outside, please dress up in a standard" (or a nice hat, of course).

BBC 2.0

The Archives Hub's funding body, JISC, held a one-day conference on Tuesday in Birmingham. One of the keynotes was by Tom Loosemore, of the BBC's Future Media and Technology section. The slides and notes of Tom's talk on the fifteen Web Principles of BBC 2.0 are worth a look. The image of BBC2 on its opening night has been taken from The Ident Zone. The logos from the BBC's own site can't be shared on the web (cf. Principle #13).

Travel tip for Berlin conference

I'll be talking about the Archives Hub at the International Standards for Digital Archives Conference which runs from 24-26 April in Berlin. I'd booked my flights a month or so back, but discovered yesterday that British Airways had cancelled them. Great. Couldn't alter the booking online, so I spent 10 minutes on hold on the 0870 number trying to get through to the airline to get alternative flights. Then my brighter other half used the brilliant 'Say No to 0870' site to see if there was an alternative, cheaper number. Even better, there's a freephone number: 0800 123111 and my call to that number was answered straight away (as BA have pay for those calls). Thought I'd share this just in case anyone else is in the same situation!

From our special correspondent

The 2006 Conference: New Delhi, 10-15 December of the International Planning History Society has been a very successful event. The conferences were varied and rich, and the presentation of Town and Townscape: the work and life of Thomas Sharp was well received! The participants coming from all over the world were willing to share ideas and conversations and why not, a glass of wine or an Indian beer after the intense presentations! New Delhi is a vibrant cosmopolitan city and have so many things to see and experience... and we have so little time. It is a very remarkable place that has to be visited sometime, the food was delicious and the people so nice. Jantar Mantar (photograph above) is located on Sansad Marg between Connaught Place and Rashtrapati Bhavan. It is one of the five astronomical observatories across India built in the 18th century. The name of Jantar Mantar derives from corruptions of the words 'yantra' (instrument) and 'mantra' (formula). It is a fabulous site! Report and photo by Laura Fernandez, Project Archivist of the Thomas Sharp Project, School of Architecture, Planning & Landscape, and Special Collections, Robinson Library, Newcastle University.

Thanks for the memories

Amanda and I attended an excellent colloquium this week, 'Memories for Life'. This was the culmination of a project that sought to bring together a diverse range of academics with the aim of understanding more about how memory works and developing the technologies to enhance it: http://www.memoriesforlife.org/ The expert and very excellent panelists covered aspects of device engineering, computer science, psychology and neuroscience as well as ethical and legal issues. The stuff of our digital life may be created and controlled by us or it may be held externally, evidence of our interactions with the world around us. The colloquium looked at ways this stuff is growing, questioned how it is being used and how it might be used and looked at the implications for us as individuals and as a community. As a magician in a former life, Professor Richard Wiseman showed us how magic tricks illustrate the sleight of hand that can fool us into certain beliefs that are not in fact true. To some extent magic actually manipulates memory and shows us that we can't necessary trust what we see (or think we see). Similarly, Richard explained how psychological experiments that he has been involved with show just how open we are to suggestion. One example he gave was a séance that was set up as an experiment. The medium (an actor) was asked to suggest that as well as some of the objects on the table moving (they were moved with a stick whilst in a pitch black room), the table itself moved. This had not in fact happened, but when questioned later about a third of the participants believed the table had moved, although most of them did not recollect that it was the medium who had suggested this to them. It seems that the smallest and most seemingly insignificant of comments can lead people to recall the improbable and maybe the impossible! So much for the trust that we place in memory... Professor Yorick Wilks introduced us to the 'Companion', rather endearingly referred to by him as the furry handbag. This is currently a rather blue skies concept for a digital friend that will help organise an individual's memories. It will learn what the individual likes and dislikes and deal with their vast digital memories. For example, the person may show the Companion some family photos and talk about who is who, what they are doing and when things took place, and the Companion will learn and piece things together. The idea would be to build up a relationship of trust and maybe even a kind of friendship which would in reality be based on effective machine learning and the use of natural language...and of course furry handbags would also be able to talk to eachother and this may help people who are isolated, particularly elderly people who may live by themselves. For more about this fascinating project see http://nlp.shef.ac.uk/companions. Coming back to ground that archivists are maybe more familiar with, Anna Sebba, a biographer, talked about the sources that have particular value for her, and especially the importance of physical evidence such as tear-stained love letters and even letters smeared with mud from wartime trenches. The challenges of digital material are great, but the same process of skilled selection will apply. A biographer inevitably shapes a person's life, and of course the person may shape their own life to some extent by what they select to keep and what they throw away. However, it is now much more likely that records relating to an individual will be strewn throughout the digital environment, so the control that an individual can exercise over how they are represented is diminishing. This idea was developed by Professor Jonathan Zittrain, who gave a very entertaining talk about ubiquitous data and the madness of crowds. He portrayed very effectively the fact that we have gone beyond big brother watching you to a situation where everyone is effectively watching everyone else, albeit without any particular controlling or malevolent motivation. You may think you are pretty much an anonymous individual, but who knows where your picture or parts of your life story might end up. Web sites like Flickr and MySpace offer the opportunity for everyone to represent themselves and their friends and families, but people may also find themselves represented in the lives and events of strangers. In the world we now live in anything out of the norm is likely to be recorded by someone on their phone or digital camera and likely as not posted to a site like YouTube. There does seem to be a fascination with watching the ordinary and maybe even the mundane: Texas Border Watch is a great example of a US federal authority benefiting from this. Texans were prepared to watch hours of video footage of the border fence in order to report any suspicious activity - http://www.texasborderwatch.com/ (currently closed for a revamp). We may have baggage from our life that we would rather drop, but this will become increasingly difficult when so much of life is now digitally recorded. Your faux pas or misdemeanors may end up being posted to the world. On the other hand, the rise of social software has created communities and enabled people who may feel isolated to make connections. The 'long tail' also allows people to find others all over the world who may share the most obscure and minority interests. For more about this concept see http://longtail.typepad.com/. The ethical issues surrounding this whole area are complex. The point was made that we often do things because we can, but maybe we should be asking whether we really want to, who will benefit from it and whether it is actually ethical.The structure that is put around data may have profound implications for selection and access in the future, and this is something that we as archivists need to think about. There was mention of XML, in relation to the People's War site, which is being preserved for the future - http://www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar/. This is the practical side of thinking about preserving data for the future, but it also behoves us to think more about all of these complex and fascinating wider issues, and that is exactly what this colloquium did so well. The colloquium left me with a brain full of ideas (which have now become memories of course). I was left with the curious idea that in a way we are increasingly outsourcing memories into the environment, and we may soon take for granted the idea that our memories are stored both in our brains and in the digital environment.

"For archivists with strong geeky tendencies"

Yesterday saw the first meeting of the Data Standards Group of the Society of Archivists under its new name. It was formerly known as the EAD/Data Exchange Group. The new name reflects a new, broader remit for the group, which is now providing a focus for digital preservation as well as data exchange. This was evident in the talks that were given by Susan Thomas and Dave Thompson at the meeting, which was held at the British Library. Susan talked about the work of the Paradigm project, which is investigating the issues surrounding the acquisition and processing of personal digital materials. Susan described some of the software that has proved useful to the project, much of which has been developed for use by police investigators, whose requirements for an audit trail of untampered-with-data are similar to those of archivists. The findings of the project are being written up into a Workbook, which is building up into an exceptional, practical, resource for anyone faced with the task of dealing with the accession of electronic records. Dave's talk on the UKWAC project described some of the technical and political challenges involved with the preservation of web sites and focused on the skills needed for staff involved with this sort of work. His conclusion was the title to this entry. I think this description encompasses the majority of members of the Data Standards Group. Sir Eduardo Paolozzi's statue of Newton in the British Library's Piazza

From our special correspondent

Sofia 2006: 8-10 November - Globalization, Digitization, Access, and Preservation of Cultural Heritage - has been a successful conference where the participants had the opportunity to share knowledge, learn and meet new friends. Sofia is a cultural city with extraordinary buildings like the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral. The Bulgarians are very friendly people and proud of sharing the beauty of their country with visitors. The high quality of their cuisine and their smooth wines with a strong tradition in the whole country was the perfect attraction to add to the Conference. Just a little note for future tourists: nodding your head in Bulgaria means No and shaking it means Yes, you can get into funny situations if you don't remember this! Report and photo by Laura Fernandez, Project Archivist of the Thomas Sharp Project, School of Architecture, Planning & Landscape, and Special Collections, Robinson Library, Newcastle University.

The new digital archivist meets South Park

I've created a PDF of the talk I gave to the Society of Archivists' Conference, succinctly titled 'The New Digital Archivist: from relative isolation to global interoperability', the talk is based on the premise of an archivist who does not actually have any archives to look after! In other words, the kind of archivist who works on a service such as the Archives Hub :-) What sorts of skills do we need and will more archivists require these sorts of skills in the future? The talk is available from our website on the Introduction page at http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/introduction.shtml under 'Presentations'. South Park character creations are by permission of Zwerg-im-Bikini (Janina Koppel) http://www.sp-studio.de/ P.S. Our software developer is supposed to look thoughtful and not grumpy!

Journey through time and space

At the Society of Archivist's annual conference, I presented a talk as part of Louise Craven's 'What are Archives? Use and Users' programme. The complete text and images of my talk are now on the Hub website.

The Tomorrow People

I attended the Society of Archivists' conference last week. It was quite a long and full programme, extending from Tuesday afternoon to Friday morning. The theme was 'Education, Development and Tomorrow's Professionals'. I used to want to be one of the Tomorrow People when I was a kid and at this conference I gave a talk on myself as a 'tomorrow's professional'. Well, I'm not able to teleport and I'm not telepathic, which is a shame, but I thought it was worth raising the subject of an archivists, such as myself, who do not actually look after archives, be they paper or binary. As I work for the Hub, an archival gateway, my work is all about enabling cross-searching of descriptions of archives. I hope that I made the case for the importance of archivists being willing to become more technically-aware and the importance of understanding technical concepts and language to a degree in order to work successfully with software developers and systems support staff. Whilst the majority of archivists are not likely to need to gain an in-depth knowledge of systems, metadata standards, protocols, etc., it is going to be necessary for an increasing minority to be willing to work more closely with new technologies. In addition, we need to be aware of the way that younger people especially are working with the Web. The morning session during which I gave my presentation was introduced with a very fine paper by Louise Craven from The National Archives talking about new ways of thinking about archives and the status of community archives and internet archives. Caroline Williams from LUCAS then talked very eloquently about the new prioritising of personal papers, which have traditionally been under-valued compared to organisational archives. Both of these papers raised the concept of context, which is so central to the way that we think about archives. The lively discussion after the session continued this theme. We usually think in terms of archival context, but it is something that is worth thinking about in a broader framework. For instance, the whole issue of context on the Web and the way that people use Web resources is well worthy of further thought. It may be that archivists find it increasingly difficult to promote the importance of archival context in an age where users so often create their own context. In the end, documents can have any number of contexts, and this will affect the way that they are interpreted. Maybe all we can do is to ensure that the archival context is maintained, for those who want to recognise it.

Well worth going to see

The CILIP Rare Books and Special Collections Group Conference was fascinating: there were some excellent, thought-provoking presentations and an opportunity to see the Giant's Causeway (described by Samuel Johnson as "worth seeing, yes, but not worth going to see"). The slides from the presentation I gave on the Archives Hub are available in PDF format. In the talk I mentioned that we have recently changed the collecting policy of the Hub to make it possible for institutions beyond the higher and further education sectors to contribute descriptions to the service. This formalised the existing situation, where some such institutions were already represented on the service through involvement with collaborative projects, and also brought us into line with the practice of our sister service, COPAC, which describes books and other printed materials in a range of research libraries.

Conference season

Members of the Archives Hub team will be out and about this week speaking at two conferences. Paddy and Jane are both going to be at the Society of Archivists' Conference in Lancaster, with talks entitled Permitted use and users: fallout shelter's sealed environment and The new Digital Archivist: From relative isolation to global interoperability, respectively. I'll be crossing the Irish Sea to Coleraine, where I'm talking about the Archives Hub in Opening up the archives: from basement to browser in the conference of the CILIP Rare Books and Special Collections Group.

Digression

Spent yesterday in Wolverhampton at the Collection Description & Cultural Portals event, organised by Rachel Cockett of MLA West Midlands. I was talking about the Archives Hub and my other project, the Information Environment Service Registry (IESR): the first time ever that I've talked about both services at the same event. The principle difference between the two is that IESR is supposed to be a machine-to-machine service for use by other applications, rather than being aimed at human users, which is the main focus of the Archives Hub. Although the developments we're planning for the next few years will ensure that the Hub will be almost as interoperable as the IESR. The collections described within IESR are electronic resources, rather than the physical collections of archives that you find in the Hub. Its main aim is to help owners of these resources advertise their existence; the developers of portals and cross-searching services can use IESR to identify relevant resources for their users, then. The IESR also holds information about the technical connection details for resources: the Hub's Z39.50 service is described in there, for example. This helps the developers to set up their applications so that they can interact with the resources they want to provide for their users. As you see, now I've talked about the Hub and the IESR in the same presentation, I can't stop myself. Will try to desist in the future and keep this blog an IESR-free zone.

New ways of learning

With the advent of Web 2.0 people are communicating, sharing and learning in new ways. Essentially Web 2.0 is about flexible applications that are consumer orientated, lightweight, simple, informal and interoperable. You may have come across Flickr, Del.icio.us, MySpace, and various other applications (there are zillions of them out there). Jane has recently been looking at 43things, which provides a place for people to express their interests and ambitions and to team up with others with the same goals to set targets and discuss issues. Yesterday Jane went to a very interesting talk by Scott Wilson of CETIS about Web 2.0 and how it might influence learning within the higher and further education communities. It seems that Web 2.0 heralds a move away from heavyweight, industrial-scale services to smaller, flexible services that provide people with a greater sense of individual ownership. We also like the idea that these services blur the boundaries between learning, which can be considered formal and structured, and leisure interests. Jane's aims on 43things include both practising yoga regularly and learning XSLT. The Archives Hub has been looking to embrace these new technologies. We have RSS for feeds for our Collection of the Month, and needless to say we also have a blog. We are currently looking at providing modules that people can use in 'mash-ups'. If that means nothing to you (and it didn't mean anything to us until recently), the idea is that people combine content and services in ways that suit them. For example, rather than coming to the Hub website to search, they can incorporate a Hub search facility within their own personalised page. We have now created modules to enable people to do this for their own personalised home pages with netvibes and Google homepage. There are clearly questions, problems and challenges with Web 2.0, but it is a reality and it is a very interesting and exciting new era. Any move towards simplicity, flexibility and the creation of global communities for sharing and learning can't be bad. There's a really good introduction to Web 2.0 in the archival context in a talk by Peter Van Garderen which he gave at the recent Association of Canadian Archivists conference in St. John's, Newfoundland. If you've got a spare half-hour, we can highly recommend the webcast of the talk on Peter's site. Peter is doing a PhD on access to digital archives, and has some excellent ideas about the ways in which archives can take part in the future digital landscape.