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

A Tale of Two conferences

Last week I was fortunate to be part of the AIMS team presenting our work at the SAA Conference in Chicago. Despite the Saturday 8am start of our session and the impending threat of Hurricane Irene well over 150 delegates turned-out to hear our presentation which included both an introduction to the AIMS framework and reporting our practical experiences through case studies. If you missed it or want to relive it the presentations are available online via Slideshare.

On Friday I spoke at the ARA conference in Edinburgh – the theme of which was advocacy and as part of a Data Standards Group I spoke about the skill set that I had acquired during my change of role from archivist to digital archivist as a result of the AIMS project.

Although the two presentations were different in content and context they both included the same message – an attempt to breakdown the perceptions and myths surrounding born digital archives. In talking about skills in Edinburgh I sought to highlight the relevance of the traditional archive skills in the digital age and to encourage more individuals to do something.

It also raised the question – something that arose in the AIMS unconference in Charlottesville and the UK workshop in London, of when will digital archives become “the norm”. We don’t know the exact answer to this, but I do know it is necessary if we are to successfully manage the challenges of born-digital archives and strive to meet the increasing expectations of our users.

Friday also marked the end of a six month contract during which Nicola Herbert has helped us with the practical elements of digital preservation at Hull. I would like to thank Nicola for her hard work and direct users to her guest blogs on photography of media and write-blockers.

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.

Other Highlights from the DLF Fall Forum

A few weeks ago I got the opportunity to attend the Digital Library Federation's Fall Forum in Palo Alto, California. This is the same conference for which Peter previously announced his session on born digital archives. In addition to Peter's session, there were a number of other sessions that were of interest to those working with digital archives.

I attended the working session on curation micro-services, led by Stephen Abrams of the California Digital Library, Delphine Khanna from University of Pennsylvania, and Katherine Kott from Stanford University. (Patricia Hswe from Pennsylvania State University was supposed to be one of the discussion leaders, but she was unable to attend the Fall Forum.) The micro-services approach is a philosophical and technical methodology for the architecture of digital curation environments. This approach values simplicity and modularity, which allows "minimally sufficient" components to be recombined. Furthermore, the strength of curation micro-services is the relative ease by which they can be redesigned and replaced as necessary. The slides from the beginning part of the session can be found here.

There was also a reading session at the DLF Fall Forum on "Reimagining METS." The session's discussion revolved around ideas put forth in a white paper distributed in advance of the conference. The majority (if not all) of the METS Editorial Board facilitated the discussion, which was very high level and incredibly interesting. Much of the discussion seemed to imply the requirement that METS actually needed to change. The most interesting potential idea that seemed to get a fair amount of traction was to consider whether METS should focus on its strength in packaging and abdicate some of its functionality to other standards that arguably do it better (e.g., OAI-ORE for structure).

On the last day, I went to the workshop on JHOVE2, which is the successor project to the JHOVE framework for characterization. JHOVE2 has an notably different architecture and expanded feature set, which expands characterization to include other processes, including identification, validation, feature extraction, and assessments based on user-defined policies. Additionally, users will be able to define format characterization and validation files for complex digital objects, such as GIS shapefiles. The presenters stated that future development for JHOVE2 will include a GUI to assist in rule set development. From the standpoint of a digital archivist, this tool will be essential in any of the further work that we do.

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...