Archive for March, 2011

The Mass Observation Archive

Monday, March 28th, 2011

We thought it would be useful to say a little bit here about what the Mass Observation Archive is to provide some context to the SALDA Project (and archivists love context).

The Mass Observation Archive specialises in material about everyday life in Britain. It contains papers generated by the original Mass Observation social research organisation (1937 to early 1950s), and newer material collected continuously since 1981. The Archive is in the care of the University of Sussex and is a charitable trust.   We are working on the catalogue data from the early phase which encompasses the Second World War.

Mass Observation started in 1937 as a reaction to the abdication of Edward VIII. There is a history of Mass Observation available on the Mass Observation website.  It is important to stress that it is the catalogue data we are making available, not the documents themselves.

This is an example of a Mass Observation Archive catalogue record using the web interface to our archival management system (CALM) which is called CALMView.  A less blurry version is available here

You can see that the hierarchy is represented above the item description, so “Observations made in the Locarno, Streatham between December 1938 and April 1939”  is in File : Clothes in Dance Halls 1938-40, Subseries: Observations and interviews 1938-40, Series: TC18 Personal Appearence and Clothes, Section: Topic Collections, Collection: Mass Observation Archive.

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Closed

Linked Data – What’s the point of that again?

Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011

A controversial title, but it neatly summarizes the feeling in the SALDA Project camp at the moment. Myself and Fiona Courage (Special Collections Manager and Curator of the Mass Observation Archive) are coming from an archive / library background and are very focused on the end result of the project which should be a set of Linked Open Data comprising our Mass Observation Archive catalogue records. But we’re not really sure what the benefit of this is, so I wanted to ask the RDTF community and beyond for help. We know it is early days for the project and we’re likely to look back at this blog post in a few months time and answer our own question, but right now we seem to have hit a bit of a brick wall.

What we are realising is that, unlike a lot of projects with archives that I have done in the past, it is  perhaps not the end result that is most important but the journey to get there. What we hope to achieve with SALDA is skills and knowledge to make our catalogues Linked Data and use those skills and that knowledge to inform decisions about whether it would be beneficial for make all our data Linked Data. Our journey so far has taught us that we need to refine and review our catalogue data within our archival management system anyway and the changes we are making now in preparation are opening up the data to enable better search results already. When the Mass Observation Archive was catalogued in the 1970s and 1980s abbrievations seem to have been all the rage, so Communist Party became CP and Conscientious Objectors became CO to give a couple of examples.  This was fine in a printed finding aid under the heading of Communist Party, and also fine on a HTML page that users scrolled through. It is not fine for keyword searching. This may seem very basic stuff, but I’m sure there are lots of archives out there that have records that make sense to the archivist and in the printed list, but will not be retrieved via a search engine. If resource discovery is our aim, then making our information clear and accessible is key. Following on from this basic idea of “finding what you search for”, is Linked Data a step on from this? Finding what you search for and a bit more?

Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

CALM records into Encoded Archival Description (EAD)

Monday, March 7th, 2011

I am working on getting our catalogue data ready for export from our archival management system CALM. We are using the Archives Hub EAD 2000 report which exists in CALM. The following fields are now in in our collection level record:

Language “Eng”

Creator Name “Mass Observation Archive”

EHFD publisher “University of Sussex Library”

Country Code “GB”

Origination “Mass Observation”

Repository Code “181”

Guidelines for required fields and common problems with the EAD report are available from the Archives Hub here. For the future, we will need to add these fields to all our collection level records to make them EAD ready.

A quirk with this transfer to EAD is that it is a report, not an export so you cannot highlight a selection of records (called a hitlist in CALM). The Mass Observation Archive is over 23,000 records and is causing CALM to freeze. Very quick and helpful advice from the CALM helpdesk led us to turn off the server and then run the report which seems to work. This method is less good for the rest of the Special Collections staff in the office who need to use CALM and our users who access it through the web interface, so I am rationing my EAD tests to less busy times.

Tags:,
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Out and about in Birmingham and London

Monday, March 7th, 2011

RDTF

On Tuesday 1 March, myelf and Chris Keene, Technical Development Manager for the Library and SALDA project partner attended the start up meeting for the projects running as part of  the JISC Resource Discovery Taskforce, Infrastructure for Resource Discovery (RDTF)

RDTF is due to get a new name soon. I hope they keep the Task Force bit, possibly because it makes me think of G-force from Battle of the planets

The day was very useful for finding out about the other projects running alongside SALDA. Andy McGregor, JISC  Project Manager, impressed upon us the wider implications of the projects, what lessons are can be learnt and the importance of these blogs for disemminating our findings to encourage sharing and collaboration. This is new territory we are in and we are not alone. Common issues of licensing, standards and what vocabularies to use for linked data were discussed during the day, along with an issue that I feel strongly about; what is the added value of linked data for the end user? I hope to answer this question in a future post.

UKAD

The next day I went along to the first UK Archive Discovery Network (UKAD) Forum at TNA.  A really great day, well put together with three plenary  sessions and then 5 groups of 3 parrell sessions running for 30 minutes each with a space outside the rooms for demonstrations and networking. This lent a really buzzy atmosphere to the day, not least because we were discussing the online future of archives and archive data. I really appreciated the opportunity at the start of the day to stand up and introduce ourselves and say who we would be interested in talking to. This got rid of alot of slidling up to people during the lunch breaka nd starring at their badges. Using this forward approach it was a good day for SALDA as I met with Pete Johnston from Eduserve and LOCAH who will be working on the project with us transforming our EAD into RDFs and spoke to Adrian Stevenson and Jane Stevenson at the LOCAH project, whose templates SALDA will using to create linked data.

It was nice to see a University of Sussex reading list screen shot making its way into a presentation on Linked Data by Richard Wallis from Talis, hopefully we will have two blobs on the linked data cloud soon! The semantic web relies on collections of reliable open data to work so that links can be made and it is exciting to think the our Mass Observation Archive catalogue data could be one of these datasets.

A super report of the day by Bethan Ruddock at the Archives hub is available on their blog here.

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »