Practical First Steps

Last week I helped organise a training day on born-digital archives for the East of England Regional Archive Council. I was joined by Chris Hilton from the Wellcome Library, Ellie Robinson from LSE and Grant Young from Cambridge University Library. The day followed a similar pattern to an event hosted in Hull last November. There were four main elements to the day:

Institutional Overview
The four of us gave a brief overview of the development of digital preservation in our respective institutions and included Chris’s now legendary simplification of OAIS to "Get Stuff - Put stuff somewhere - Keep stuff safe & Show stuff to people".  Ellie talked through the development at LSE from a risk analysis perspective to get institutional backing to then moving on to actually doing it - the latter sentiment being one of the mantras for the day. Grant talked about his work with digital content - much of it digitised rather than born-digital but now occupying an eye-watering 67TB (both LSE and Hull have about 120GB of born-digital material).

Practical First Steps
The four of us then gave a short presentation offering some practical tips; I looked at conducting a survey to identify material already held in the archives and how this often meant the media had been accessioned but not the contents! Chris shared the experiences at Wellcome of 'Dealing with depositors', Ellie looked at 'Handling born-digital material' including accessioning, virus check and other stages at LSE and Grant talked about 'Issues around File Formats' highlighting a number of challenges and suggesting strategies that could be adopted.

Questions and Answers

The day also included two question and answer sessions designed to get delegates talking about the particular aspects and issues of concern to them. Questions touched on a range of topics including depositors, DRAMBORA, how to approach hybrid collections and depositor agreements. We also heard of work being conducted in a number of local authority archives and hopefully they will share their work and experiences with colleagues in the near future.


Demonstrations
Delegates were split into four groups and given demonstrations on using Karen's Directory Printer, DROID and also using FTK Imager with a write-blocker to read a PC hard drive (from my garage) the fourth diversion was a look at two different born-digital scenarios for delegates to consider how they might respond.

There was common agreement on the need to do something, and widespread acknowledgement that there wasn't a single solution or approach. Wellcome, LSE and Hull were all looking at the issue of bulk-ingest into repositories whilst retaining the relationships between files as represented through an often complex series of folders. It so happens that at Hull one of our developers is looking at this very issue so I hope to have an update on this in the next few weeks.

A key theme of the day was collaborating and helpline colleagues and in this spirit all of the presentations are now available on the Hull History Centre born-digital archive pages - thanks to all of the speakers for making this an interesting and informative day.

Not a typical week

At the end of the AIMS project I returned to my post as Senior Archivist with digital archives added to my todo list alongside public searchroom duty, working with paper collections, responsibilities for maintaining our website and online catalogue, managing staff and volunteers etc etc.

This week has not been typical.

Monday
Accession two recent deposits including a small set of floppy disks created between 1995-1999 using a Psion (I think judging by some of the data visible using FTKImager).  The other item was a CD with minutes created in the last couple of years by a charity – so nothing to worry about in terms of formatting but it did highlight issues around filename consistency. I contacted the depositor and they were happy to receive suggestions about future naming conventions which will be a great help. I was also able to ask about material that reflected the complete range of activities of the charity and hope that further material will be forthcoming.

Tuesday

One of the outcomes following the publication of the AIMS White Paper has been to share experiences with colleagues in other institutions. On Tuesday our guests were Nancy McGovern and Kari Smith from MIT and it was a great opportunity to share experiences and discuss aspects surrounding processes, workflows and tools. As always I came away with a list of other tools to try and research papers to look out for! We were joined by my colleague Chris Awre who talked about the work at Hull using Fedora for our institutional repository and in particular Hydra and the opportunity this offered for sharing development work.

Wednesday

Spent some of Wednesday preparing for a one day workshop at Cambridge about born-digital archives next week. The day is designed to encourage colleagues to take the first steps and will include colleagues from LSE and the Wellcome Library and will feature demonstrations of write-blocker hardware and tools including Karen’s Directory Printer and DROID.

Thursday

Received an email out of the blue from a colleague working in Vancouver, which was really nice – they had been following the AIMS Blog and wanted to ask some questions and I was happy to clarify a few aspects that had been mentioned. In replying I also sought more information about their own experiences and whether we had tackled email. Whilst we haven’t tackled this explicitly (yet) I have had a play with the MUSE tool which gives a unique perspective on the stuff with-in an 'mbox' file and offers a sentiment graph that instantly grabs you.

Friday

What better for a Friday afternoon than a quick spell of taking photographs of the floppy disks I accessioned on Monday. It took longer than it should have done due to lack of practice and the need to find something to prop up the disk so we could capture the information written on the edge of the disk – our conservator Christine found a small clear display stand that is ideal and this has been requisitioned for future photographic needs.

This hasn't been a typical week – I have probably done more in the last five days than the preceding two months - but then things rarely are in archives – and for many working in the profession the range and variety is one of the best parts of the job.

Brith Gof

Last week I was fortunate to be invited to a two day workshop hosted by the National Library of Wales (NLW) at Aberystwyth. The workshop brought together archivists, academics, library and ICT staff and students to discuss the “challenges” surrounding the Brith Gof and Clifford McLucas collections. The primary focus was on aspects of the digital preservation – with a range of media and carriers including floppy disks, zip drives, SyQuest cartridges (a new one to me) and Mac Book G4 amongst these two collections.

Discussions touched a wide range of topics and issues including digital forensics, cataloguing hybrid collections, digital curation, emulation and access. There was also a reminder of the complexity of intellectual property rights for performance material where different rights might be held for the set design, the score etc etc.

There was also a public event where a number of items from the collections were used as prompts by Professor Mike Pearson, co-founder of Brith Gof, to stimulate his recollections of Brith Gof. The range of items selected highlighted the rich nature of the collections that includes photographs, videos, set designs, huge banners (aswell as the more traditional paper archives). One aspect that is also being considered is how to capture/record the impact that Brith Gof had on those watching the performance.

I talked about the AIMS project and highlighted a number of the questions and issues that had arisen from our shared experiences that we have captured in our White Paper. I really enjoyed the discussions, the informal nature and the reminder about making a deliberate effort to engage and attract a range of audiences.

Today is International Archives Day (twitter #archday12) to see what everybody has been saying.

UKAD Archives Discovery Forum 2012

A few reflections on the UKAD Archives Discovery Forum 2012 that I attended yesterday

The day started with a really interesting keynote piece from Bill Thompson (BBC) about his role in using the archives to forge partnerships with a range of organisations and he highlighted the range and diversity by talking about several projects including a project this summer with the Arts Council, the centenary of the First World War and an exciting initiative called Digital Public Space (diagram on collectionslink website)

Joy Palmer (MIMAS) gave a talk about the JISC Discovery programme and the ongoing work to demystify aspects like APIs, persistent URIs, user interfaces and measuring both impact and value.

Teresa Doherty (The Women's Library) then spoke about name authority records and how you can help make your collections more discoverable by adding links to the archives from relevant biographical pages on Wikipedia - something we started to do at Hull several years ago but this was a useful reminder to revisit this simple approach that can have a huge impact on the visibility of your collections.

After a great networking opportunity called lunch Lindsay Ould (Kings College London) talked us through the JISC funded FIDO project (Forensic Information in Digital Objects) and their experiences, highlighting a range of technical, skills-based and ethical issues and also their use of OS Forensics software.

I then gave a presentation about born-digital archives, but took a different approach - instead of focussing on the work we have undertaken at Hull I presented a very brief SWOT analysis to highlight many of the issues we have experienced.

There was then a series of short presentations including Sam Velumyl (The National Archives) who gave an overview of the TNA Finding Archives project , Teresa Dixon (West Yorkshire Archives Service) spoke about the History to Herstory website which features over 80,000 images including the Amy Johnson letters held at the Hull History Centre.

Kimberly Kowal (British Library) spoke about a crowd-sourcing map project which saw 725 maps geo-referenced in a week (see a blog entry about this project) and Alison Cullingford spoke about the Research Libraries UK Unique and Distinctive Collections project.

The final session was from Bill Stockting (British Library) about the completion of the Integrating Archives and Manuscripts System - bringing a vast number of legacy data sources and systems and over 1.5m records together and this now sits behind the http://searcharchives.bl.uk/ site.

Despite all of this there were a host of other sessions I would like to have attended including linked data, the National Archives new catalogue and the Old Maps online project.

Update 2nd April - slides from the sessions have been added to The National Archives website, see the Documenting Collections page

Archives and Society

Two weeks ago I spoke at the Archives and Society series of tasks held at the Institute of Historical Research about the progress and work at Hull as a result of the AIMS project. Whilst highlighting the AIMS White Paper the bulk of the talk was about the practical steps we had taken at Hull with born-digital archives; starting with a simple survey of collections and then followed by photography of media and creating a forensic workstation (a tale told in multiple parts see - part 1, part 2 and part 3).

I sought to encourage those present to download software like Karen's Directory Printer and DROID and to have a go - using a few test files will help increase your familiarity with many of the issues associated with digital preservation.

I managed to stop in time for questions - and these included aspects relating to the fact that the issues I raised were not "new" and whether we would still be making the same case in 5 years time (I hope not) and the need for automated tools to help us cope with the sheer volume of material (an obvious need) and the associated risk of releasing material that you haven't explicitly checked because of the sheer volume of files..

A PDF version of the slides is available - the talk was also recorded and I will add a link to the podcast when it is available.

AIMS White Paper now available

After a huge amount of effort the AIMS White Paper has finally been finished and is now available online.

The White Paper is intended as a framework for guide good practice in terms of archival tasks and objectives necessary for success. It builds upon the experiences of the four partner institutions - the universities of Hull, Stanford, Virginia and Yale - to process a range of collections with an array of format and media issues and using different software – we were keen to make this software agnostic and have gone back to the archival principles at the heart of the processes.

In many areas we found many similarities with existing practice with paper records and for some aspects we found there were multiple ways of achieving certain goals and we didn't want to be prescriptive in any way.  So instead it highlights key decision points and aspects of policy that may be determined at an institutional level and is intended to help people making the same journey that we have made – finding out about projects, tools & case studies and starting to build knowledge, skills & infrastructure.  

Although the publication of the White Paper officially marks the end of the AIMS project the institutions intend to continue collaborating and sharing their experiences on this blog.

We welcome your comments and feedback to the White Paper on this blog – whether you have implemented the framework or just found the guidance useful.

AIMS@SAA Part One: CREW Workshop

CREW: Collecting Repositories and E-Records Workshop
SAA 2011
Chicago, IL 8/23/2011

The AIMS partners hosted a workshop in the run-up to the 2011 SAA Annual Meeting in August. 45 participants from the US and Canada joined us in exploring the challenges, opportunities and strategies for managing born-digital records in collecting repositories.

The workshop was organized around the 4 main functions of stewardship that the AIMS project has focused on: Collection Development, Accessioning, Arrangement and Description, and Discovery and Access. In addition to the AIMS crew (no pun intended) presenting on the research done through the AIMS project, several guest presenters showcased case studies from their own hands-on approaches to managing born-digital materials. Seth Shaw, from Duke University discussed the evolution of electronic record accessioning at Duke University and his development of the Duke Data Accessioner. Gabriela Redwine discussed work done in arrangement and description at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Finally, Erin O’Meara showcased work done at the University of the North Carolina at Chapel Hill to facilitate access to born-digital records through finding aid interfaces.

In between presentations the participants engaged in lively discussions around provocative questions and hypothetical scenarios. At the end of the event, the AIMS partners felt they had gained just as much from the day’s activities as they hoped the participants had. Ideas that were discussed and case study examples will help strengthen the findings of the white paper due out this fall.

See the workshop presentations after the jump! 

AIMS at SAA

Today's post is just a brief announcement...The AIMS team will be taking part in two events at next week's Society of American Archivists Annual Meeting. The first is a workshop we've developed to provide an opportunity for archivists and technologists to discuss issues related to collection development, accessioning, appraisal, arrangement and description, and discovery and access of these materials. Unfortunately, space issues have required us to limit registration and it is now full. However, we promise to post a longer recap to this blog after the event.

No such limitations exist for our other SAA event, a presentation entitled Born-Digital Archives in Collecting Repositories: Turning Challenges into Byte-Size Opportunities, which will be given August 27th at 8 a.m. At this presentation the AIMS Digital Archivists will describe a bit of the high-level framework being developed by the AIMS project to characterize archival workflows for born-digital materials in archival repositories.

We hope to see you there!

AIMS: the UnConference

Not two full weeks into my new job as Digital Archivist at UVa on the AIMS grant, I rolled up my sleeves to facilitate and host an unconference with my fellow Digital Archivists. Our unconference would be two full days of discussions, demonstrations, lightning talks, and networking with digital archivists from around the globe. At first the thought was a little terrifying – I’m not even fully sure I know what this job is yet, how could I actually lead discussions on the salient topics? But my fears were baseless: all the unconference attendees were thoughtful, articulate, and lively participants. I learned much more from them than they probably did from me.

The unconference was held on the 13th and 14th of May at the Omni Hotel in Charlottesville. The 27 participants represented libraries, archives, museums, and digital humanities centers across the US, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Despite the differences in our institutions, backgrounds, and training, we learned that we not only shared similar challenges, but also the same hopes for collaboration and innovation.

The first day started off with a round of lightning talks. Each participant had 5 minutes to present a topic, project, problem or idea that they were interested in talking about. The variety in the talks was remarkable to me, traversing the breadth and depth of all that can be thought of as “born-digital” and the many processes involved in managing it. The lightning talks were also great way to get an introduction to each participant as well as their perspective or the particular issues they were dealing with in their institution. A brief outline of each of the talks is available on the AIMS Unconference Wiki.

Digital Collaboration Colloquium

On Tuesday I attended the Digital Collaboration Colloquium event in Sheffield organised to mark the end of the White Rose Libraries LIFE-SHARE Project.

The day included a number of talks about how institutions can collaborate including an interesting account of the Wales Higher Education Libraries Forum (WHELF) and experiences from the Victoria & Albert Museum. Although the majority of examples focussed on digitisation the principles and lessons learnt were all equally appropriate to a born-digital context.

As part of the day I presented a Pecha Kucha session on the AIMS project and some of the digital collaboration tools that we have found to be effective including Skype and GoogleDocs. In you are not familiar with this format it involves a presentation of 20 slides, changing automatically every 20 seconds and despite cutting the content quite heavily I still found myself chasing to keep-up with the changes. Other sessions looked at digitisation in-situ in a public setting – bringing behind the scenes in-front of the curtain, and other sessions on the Knitting patterns project at Southampton, the Addressing History project based at EDINA and the Yorkshire Playbills project.

The afternoon included a presentation form our hosts on the LIFE-SHARE project and their experiences of the collaboration continuum and a roundtable session that led to a good discussion between panel and audience. With alot covered in a relaxed and friendly atmosphere there was plenty of networking and I’m sure everybody took something from the day.

The presentations are available via slideshare

Arrangement and Description of born-digital archives

For the last two months the Digital Archivists have been trying to define the requirements of a tool to enable archivists to arrange and describe born-digital archives. To do this we have stood-back and reviewed the traditional skills and processes and whether changes are required or appropriate to accommodate the particular issues surrounding born-digital archives.

The components we identified were as follows:
• Graphical User Interface – needs to be clean and easy to use
• Intellectual Arrangement - must be easy and instinctive for archivists to use
• Appraisal – born-digital archives need to be appraised as much as their paper predecessors
• Rights and Permissions – to enable the management of access to the born-digital archives and also to demonstrate to 3rd part depositors that the material is safe in your care
• Descriptive Metadata – a term we have been using to relate to description information and to explicitly distinguish this from the technical metadata about each file
• Import/Export functionality – to import/export data with other tools
• Reporting – to provide a range of "views" for managing the digital assets

Through a series of user stories and scenarios we have sought to clearly explain the requirement and how this might relate to other functionality.

This work has been under-taken predominantly through the use of GoogleDocs and created a document that we can all access and edit, create diagrams and include screenshots as necessary. Over weeks hundreds of comments have been added, and the text subjected to a comprehensive review and refinement process by numerous staff across the four partners.

Each institution has now scored and prioritised these features and as befits a collaborative initiative like the AIMS project allow us to identify a core group of features and functionality that we feel will be of greatest use to our institution and the wider archival community.

With the exception of intellectual arrangement most tasks and processes are not unique to archives so there is already a body of knowledge and experience in how to approach the task. For intellectual arrangement we have to be clear and precise about what we need and want we didn’t, for example a single intellectual arrangement when multiple versions would be possible in a digital environment.

Over the next few months we will be refining and reviewing these requirements, very much aware that there are only seven months of the project remaining. We also intend to discuss those aspects we identified as "critical" in future blog postings.

Tell us what tools you use with born-digital archives...

CALM Digital Records meeting

The last week has been a busy one with two deposits of born digital material (16GB representing more than 27,000 digital files) and a meeting with users of the CALM software to discuss digital records.

Adrian Brown (Parliamentary Archives) convenor of the meeting, hosted by The National Archives, reported on the main findings from a survey of CALM users conducted at the end of 2009. It was clear from the meeting that many archivists were actively investigating the options and issues surrounding a digital repository but that the lack of a digital repository with-in their organisation and the need for training were huge obstacles that needed to be overcome.

I gave a brief outline of the AIMS project and presented a diagram to highlight our current thinking about how Fedora and born-digital material can be integrated into our workflows. [This model is currently still conceptual but we will be working with Axiell to progress this – comments welcomed]. Natalie Walters (Wellcome Library) highlighted their work and how she had found that many of the professional archive skills used to handle and manage paper archives still applied in the born digital arena. Malcolm Todd (The National Archives) talked about four key aspects to digital repository technology modularity, interoperability, sustainability and cost effectiveness all of which are being actively embraced by the AIMS project.

Malcolm Howitt and Nigel Pegg (Axiell) spoke about their plans to extend CALM to link to digital repositories and it is hoped that we can work closely with them on this.

The rest of the meeting was spent discussing and identifying issues surrounding cataloguing and metadata; accession and ingest; user access and best practice. A number of common themes emerged:
• That the differences between paper and digital archives are often exaggerated with issues like provenance and integrity key to both
• That depositor’s perception of digital archives is very different to paper and that by acting promptly archivists is the only way we can avoid technological obsolesce and a digital dark hole in the historical record
• The need for archives staff to be actively involved in the digital repository and not leave it for ICT staff to develop/manage exclusively
• That born digital archives may open-up the archives to new audiences
• A desire to share experiences, documentation etc for the wider benefit of the profession
• A need for more opportunities for “hands-on” experiences with born-digital archives and repository to increase familiarity with-in the archives profession

Introduction

The Born Digital Archives is the blog of the AIMS team. We hope to stimulate dialog about practical solutions to archiving materials that originate in digital form. We invite all concerned archivists to chime in with questions and comments via the "comments" to each post. AIMS is inclusive with the intention to create open source solutions that are useful to both small and large institutions.

AIMS is “Born Digital Collections: An Inter-Institutional Model for Stewardship". Funded for two years by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the four partners are The University of Virginia Library, Stanford University, the University of Hull, and Yale University. The purpose of AIMS is to implement best practices. AIMS will create and deploy open source software to manage the all steps in the acquisition, conservation, and eventual dissemination of digital collections. Given that we all have somewhat different administrative, hardware, and software needs, AIMS will strive to use portable open source tools which integrate reasonably seamlessly, and allow archivists a flexible workflow. We plan to process several important collections of born digital media, using Hydra to handle discovery. Hydra is based on the Fedora Commons Repository Software.

The AIMS digital archivists have the mandate to nurture a global community by publishing our lessons online, writing manuscripts, attending conferences, and generally being evangelists for born digital. We are optimistic that we can create (or discover) workable solutions to real-world problems involved with processing and preservation of digital objects. The work flow is wide ranging. Archivists often work with donors early in the process. Many collections pose technical and intellectual challenges such as arrangement or presentation. Legal aspects are involved in authority and access. Collections are sometimes ingested into content management systems. Of course, the eventual goal is to make the documents available via discovery by the general public, as well as accessible to scholarly research.

The AIMS team includes a software engineer, and our team is working closely with other software developers. We use normal software development conventions and open source software that runs on commodity hardware. We are agnostic about user interface and operating system so that our solutions will be portable, sustainable, easy to use, and accessible to the broadest possible audience.

Digital Lives Research Seminar

On Monday I attended the Digital Lives Research Seminar Authenticity, Forensics, Materiality, Virtuality and Emulation and the presentations will be appearing online soon via the Digital Lives pages

There was a packed programme of speakers with a huge array of experience, of direct relevance to the AIMS work were the following:

Helen Broderick, British Library described her work as Curator, Modern Literary Manuscripts including cataloguing the born-digital material in the Ronald Harwood archive. The paper part of the collection had already been listed by a colleague and Helen encouraged hybrid collections to be tackled as single entity and this is what I intend to do with the Stephen Gallagher material at Hull.

Helen described using QuickView Plus software to view and used two screens (one to display the digital file and the second to record descriptive notes). Other thorny issues to be tackled include email and how this could be made available to others without infringing Data Protection and other privacy concerns.

Seth Shaw, Duke University gave an account of the current work at Duke, openly admitting that work on arrangement and description was very sporadic! They are looking to standardise their policies, documentation etc with the search interface another element on his todo list! It was clear that practice was being shaped by their experiences echoing the underlying element of the best practice guidelines that AIMS will produce based upon our combined experiences.

It was good to see colleague Michael Olson, Stanford University who gave an account of the forensics work at Stanford including the approach adopted for the Stephen J Gould material and outlined the resources in the Forensics Lab.

Gabriela Redwine, Harry Ransom Centre (University of Texas) provided an update on the forthcoming Computer Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections (see http://mith.info/forensics/) due to be published later this year. It came as no surprise to those present that the biggest challenge the research had identified was legacy hardware and software; other challenges included trust and authenticity. This led to a discussion around some of the ethical issues surrounding born digital materials and that we should be looking to multiple sources of information to build-up a complete picture (metadata, creator and forensics).

Erika Farr & Naomi Nelson, Emory University gave a fascinating account of their work on the digital material in the Salman Rushdie archive and the multi-disciplinary approach to tackling this collection. After discussion and consideration they agreed to respect the hybrid nature of the material; to balance the needs of the researcher and the donor but also the desire to provide an authentic ‘experience’. They had originally distinguished between paper and born-digital material with separate agreements but quickly revised this to one based on content and NOT format. They discussed with the donor his relationship with the PC and how he used it whether he customised parts etc to understand this aspect better. They were even able to recover files from a laptop he had accidentally damaged. The use of an emulator does give a totally different perspective to the born digital material that simply allowing access to the content can ever do. Whether this approach is always possible or practical remains to be seen.

Our host Jeremy John, British Library described their approach and workstream including imaging the disk and creation of digital replicates – viewed via original software and emulator and then facsimile versions for user viewing. He encouraged using hash values generated by two systems as additional level of verification. The British Library policy was to disk image wherever possible and were actively using emulators using a virtual machine based on the original hardware OS.

I was able to give a quick introduction to the AIMS project and from the questions that followed some of our work regarding access and use is of particular interest to others.

Jeff Ubois highlighted the main issues that arose from the Personal Digital Archiving Conference 2010 earlier this year including complexity of media with the need to compare donor agreements, interface design, suitability of tools re Facebook etc identified for future consideration and action. He also spoke about the public/private boundaries and mentioned a Research Libraries Group project ‘Good Terms’ about engaging with public companies for digitisation programs.

ECA 2010

A few weeks ago I was fortunate enough to present a poster about the AIMS project at the 8th European Conference on Digital Archiving at Geneva. The poster attracted a fair amount of interest and in particular the intention to share the tools and best practice with other institutions – many of the other sessions and some posters presenting what were quite institution-specific solutions.

Reflections on the conference

– though with 7 simultaneous sessions there was only some much any one person could see!

Programme & keynote speeches 

First session after the initial keynote welcome was an interesting session “Envisioning Archival Description” by Victoria Lemieux & Geoffrey Yeo about using visualisation software to represent data and reflect relationships between words, as tested using the British Cabinet papers. There wasn’t enough time for a live demonstration, but the potential of offering an intuitive visual mechanism for looking at large volumes of data was really interesting. Information about word frequency for example could also be used by the archivist to assist with describing the records. The $64,000 questions are the cost of the software and what data / formats this is appropriate for?

There was also a good overview from Robert Sharpe of Tessella about obsolescence, characterisation and preservation planning with particular emphasis on the Planets Framework of tools.

Jaap Kamps “What makes a User Click?” was a timely reminder of the different search strategies between experts and novices and something we must return to when considering making born digital archives accessible on-line.

Jane Stevenson gave a review of the Archives EAD editor for the Archives Hub that can now include links to digital objects but emphasised that the files need to be stored locally – they are not a repository. Also reminded me that we (Hull University) owe the Hub some data!

Day 1 ended with a session by Daniel Pitti, who I met many years ago as EAD took-off in the UK, giving an account of a new 2 year project which seeks to create tools to automatically extract authority records using the new Encoded Archival Context-Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families (EAC-CPF) standard. The project will start with an initial body of more than 30,000  EAD finding aids and look to combine this with more than 10m name authorities from the Library of Congress and OCLC. The aim is to take a step beyond personal name indexes and show a network of relationships (eg between correspondents). With the University of Virginia being one of the project partners it is hoped that AIMS can collaborate with this project further down the line.

Days 2 and 3 to follow...