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.

Researchers' Use of Academic Libraries

A new report has been published by the Research Information Network (RIN) and the Consortium of Research Libraries (CURL): Researchers' Use of Academic Libraries and their Services [pdf format]. This is based on information gathered from more than 2,000 UK researchers and 300 librarians. After being somewhat critical in an earlier post about the RIN's Researchers and Discovery Services report, I feel honour-bound to record here that this report is much more comprehensive and well-written. Its authors are Sheridan Brown and Alma Swan of Key Perspectives Ltd. The report covers a number of areas, including the impact of digital services, problems of attracting enough funding, communication between library staff and researchers, and changing patterns of use. Archive services within academic libraries get a number of mentions, with the interesting statistic that:

Archives are rated "very useful" by 50% of arts and humanities researchers and special collections by 46%. By comparison the figures for life science researchers are 10% and 8%.

Really? 10% of life scientists find archives "very useful"? Wow! The report also noted that:

Most researchers use digital finding aids to locate both digital and print-based resources. Print finding aids are used by very few researchers, and these are mainly in the arts and humanities. This highlights the need for libraries to ensure that they provide online high-quality metadata for their holdings, and that they address cataloguing backlogs. Information resources that cannot be found electronically may well be overlooked, since few researchers will invest the time required to track down items that cannot be quickly be identified using digital finding aids.

And in the same vein:

Libraries have made significant efforts to optimise the visibility and usage of their archival or special collection material through digitisation programmes. Feedback from researchers is very positive, but many information resources that could be useful to researchers remain under-used currently, mainly because they exist only in hardcopy or are inadequately catalogued.

and:

...material that is digitised and for which there is easily-available and accurate metadata will be visible and usable by scholars. What remains in print may well be sought out, but probably only if it is digitally catalogued. Indeed, some researchers as well as librarians pointed out that more use would be made of library holdings overall – especially special collection materials – if they were all properly and accurately catalogued so that resource discovery tools could locate them effectively. Librarians acknowledge that there is much to be done in this area, but cite inadequate resources – time and staff expertise – as the cause of cataloguing backlogs and deficiencies.

I suppose that I would like to have seen the occasional mention of archivists in the report - especially as one of the 'key roles for future librarians' identified by all participants was to be custodians of archives and special collections. But that is only a minor gripe. What would be really good would be to see this recognition of the funding deficiencies and the importance of access to digital information about archives (even to life scientists) translated into a funding programme to help in the continuing task of converting hard-copy archive catalogues into electronic form and to start work on the huge backlog of uncatalogued materials. Or the community could just pay for another report to be written on the subject instead... ;-)