Edinburgh Digital Preservation Roadshow, November 2009

Just a quick place-marking type post to point people towards the presentation slides from today’s Edinburgh Digital Preservation Roadshow, particularly those from Jane Brown on the National Archive of Scotland’s Digital Data Archive.  NAS has written an in-house workflow tool for ingest in .NET, and, interestingly, are proposing to follow the Australians in an up-front normalisation to open-source strategy, rather than the migration model favoured by The National Archives in London. Local archivists may be particularly interested because NAS are users of the Calm collections management system, which is in widespread use across the sector in the UK. I wondered during the presentation why I’d not encountered the Digital Data Archive before, but apparently this was its first public outing.  It looks an impressive achievement, considering that they estimate the total staff resource on the project to approximate to only one full time equivalent over the last four to five years.  I am due to visit the NAS soon, so hopefully more to follow…

Women and the history of computing in West Yorkshire

Last week I goaded a couple of male colleagues into posting a (deliberately provocative) thread on the archives2.0 ning forum linking the high proportion of women in the archives profession (at least this is the case in the UK) with a slow take-up of web2.0 technologies.  From the ensuing discussion, it appears nobody really agrees with this premise, so maybe we need to change the title of the thread! 

However, it did catch the attention of a colleague who works at the Dutch Institute of Women’s History, and hence has a particular interest in gender issues.  She points out that my blog header includes a picture of a woman with an early computer.  Indeed, there are two women in the header pictured with computers – so I thought as an August bank holiday kind of post, I would tell you a little about both of them.

As it happens, I know quite a lot about the woman in the oldest photograph:

Miss Rowena Wilby with the West Riding County Council's 'Electronic Brain' January 1958

Her name is Rowena Wilby, and she was just 18 when this photograph was taken for a press call to announce the arrival of the West Riding County Council’s new ‘Electronic Brain’ in January 1958.  In 1955, (a full two years before a government grant provided Leeds University with its first computer), the Council had resolved “that an order be placed immediately with the British Tabulating Machine Company Ltd. for a Hollerith Electronic Computer, at an estimated cost of £28,000”[1].  The West Riding was the first local authority to order a HEC-4 (Type 1201) computer, which was duly delivered in December 1957.

As well as photographs of the new computer, which was used primarily for payroll and the occasional calculation for the Highways Department, West Yorkshire Archive Service, Wakefield also holds a diary which documents the installation of the new computer at County Hall, Wakefield.  It appears to have been something of a temperamental beast, frequently ‘jumping out of programme’ and requiring constant attention:

Diary recording the installation of the West Riding County Council's first electronic computer, 1958

Unfortunately, it seems unlikely that Miss Wilby played a major part in the arrival of computing to West Yorkshire.  The Council minutes record the names of those chosen for special training at the premises of the British Tabulating Machine Co., and none of them are women.  It is more probable that Rowena Wilby was recruited as a photogenic candidate from amongst the ranks of a small army of female card punchers and tabulating machine operators who had been employed in the West Riding Treasurer’s Department since before the second world war:

Punching cards at County Hall, Wakefield. Annoyingly, I can't quite read the date on the calendar in the room! Probably 1940s or 1950s.

Woman with a Holllerith Machine at County Hall, Wakefield. Not dated. 1940s or 1950s.

About the second woman in the blog header, I know rather less, except that this was one of a series of posed photographs taken sometime in the 1980s to illustrate the history of computing at West Yorkshire Police.  The West Riding Constabulary was one of the first departments to book computer time on the County Council’s Type 1201, and in time their needs grew to the extent that the police acquired their own computer.  This photograph shows a civilian police officer using the UNIVAC computer which was in use in the 1980s:

Civilian police officer with UNIVAC computer, 1980s

All images reproduced by permission of West Yorkshire Archive Service.

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[1] West Riding County Council minutes 19 October 1955 – West Yorkshire Archive Service, Wakefield: WR/52 p.242.  The ‘Purchasing Power’ calculator at http://measuringworth.com/calculators/ppoweruk/ estimates £28,000 in 1955 to be the equivalent of just over half a million pounds in today’s terms.

Digital Innovation?

Stumbled across this (anonymous – I have my theories!) posting, Getting to Grips with Digital Preservation, on the Collections Trust’s OpenCulture blog, and the point about abandoning the phrase ‘digital preservation’ has struck something of a chord.  “Digital Preservation sounds like a tautology anyway – Digital is fast-moving, energetic, ever-changing, Preservation is, well, it’s dull, isn’t it?”

One of the most alarming pieces of feedback I’ve read from the recent Society of Archivists’ digital preservation roadshow series said something along the lines of ‘its a difficult subject to make interesting, but the speakers did quite well’.  Why should it be a difficult subject to make interesting?  Digital curation is a an innovative, fast-moving discipline, with a vibrant international research base, and nobody – if they’re really being honest – knows what the right answers are.  Or at the most, they may have a few potentially right answers to a small subset of the questions.  We’re living through the greatest revolution in recorded information creation and use since probably the invention of the printing press, and a professional archivist doesn’t find that interesting?!

One of the points I make in my roadshow presentation is that all the propaganda surrounding digital preservation – all that stuff about digital black holes in history – has actually been very effective.  Only not perhaps, where we hoped it would hit home, amongst users and record creators, as amongst recordkeeping professionals ourselves.  And then there’s the problem with digital preservation theory - unfortunately, you can learn to use all the jargon in the world but  it won’t actually preserve anything. 

If the digital preservation marketing strategy is working so well amongst archives and records professionals, then god help us when it comes to trying to persuade information creators and users to take an interest!

As campaigning organisations of various other kinds take a deliberate step away from thundering scare stories towards softer advocacy strategies promoting the benefits of their chosen cause, I agree with the OpenCulture blogger that the digital preservation community needs to become much more sophisticated in the way seeks to promote itself in the quest for longer-term sustainability of digital content. 

Did you hear about the amazing success story of the re-created BBC Domesday project?

Missing Links – the Enduring Web, British Library 21st July 2009

Finally getting around to posting a little something about the web archiving conference held at the British Library a couple of weeks ago.

From a local archives perspective, it was particularly interesting to hear a number of presenters acknowledge the complexity and cost of implementation and use of currently available web archiving tools.  Richard Davis, talking about the ArchivePress blog archiving project, went so far as to argue that this was using a ‘hammer to crack a nut’, and we’ll certainly be keeping an eye out at West Yorkshire Archive Service for potential new use cases for ArchivePress’s feed-focused methodology and tools.   ArchivePress should really appeal to my fellow local authority archivist colleague Alan who is always on the look-out for self-sufficiency in digital preservation solutions.

I also noted Jeffrey van der Hoeven’s suggestion that smaller archives might in future be able to benefit from the online GRATE (Global Remote Access to Emulation Services) tool developed as part of the Planets project, offering emulation over the internet through a browser without the need to install any software locally.

Permission to harvest websites, particularly in the absence of updated legal deposit legislation in the UK, was another theme which kept cropping up throughout the day.  So here is a good immediate opportunity for local archivists to get involved in suggesting sites for the UK Web Archive, making the most of our local network of contacts.  Although I still think there is a gap here in the European web archiving community for an Archive-It type service to enable local archivists to scope and run their own crawls to capture at-risk sites at sometimes very short notice, as we had to at West Yorkshire Archive Service with the MLA Yorkshire website.

Archivists do not (or should not) see websites in isolation – they are usually one part of a much wider organisational archival legacy.  To my mind, the ‘web archiving’ community is at present too heavily influenced by a library model and mindset, which concentrates on thematic content and pays too little attention to more archival concerns, such as provenance and context.  So I was pleased to see this picked up in the posting and comments on Jonathan Clark’s blog about the Enduring Links event.

Lastly in my round-up, Cathy Smith from TNA had some interesting points to make from a user perspective.  She suggested that although users might prefer a single view of a national web collection, this did not necessarily imply a single repository – although collecting institutions still need to work together to eliminate overlap and to coordinate presentation.  This – and the following paper on TNA’s Digital Continuity project – set me thinking, not for the first time, about some potential problems with the geographically defined collecting remits of UK local authority archive services in a digital world.  After all, to the user, local and central government websites are indistinguishable at the .gov.uk domain level, not to mention that much central government policy succeeds or fails depending on how it is delivered at local level.  Follow almost any route through DirectGov and you will end up at a search page for local services.  Websites, unlike paper filing series, do not have distinct, defined limits.  One of the problems with the digital preservation self-sufficiency argument is that the very nature of the digital world – and increasingly so in an era of mash-ups and personalised content – is the exact opposite, highly interdependent and complex.  So TNA’s harvesting of central government websites may be of limited value over the long-term, unless it is accompanied by an equally enthusiastic campaign to capture content across local government in the UK.

Slides from all the presentations are available on the DPC website.

TNA Web Archive

Spotted in TNA’s web archive as I was preparing a presentation earlier this week.  What happens if you are still viewing the archived site at 5.01pm*, I wonder?

* hint , look at the restrictions on use!

Society of Archivists Digital Preservation Roadshows

I’d also failed to get round to a posting about the Society of Archivists’ Digital Preservation Roadshows, which I’ve helped to organise. These are being run around the UK and Ireland by the Society of Archivists in partnership with the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), The National Archives, the Planets project and Cymal.

The events aim to raise awareness of the issues, to demonstrate that there are solutions that don’t involve spending large amounts of money, and to show how to take the first, small, incremental steps in this field. I’m presenting a case study at each event about WYAS’ work on the MLA Yorkshire archive.

The programme and presentations are now available from the pilot roadshow in Gloucester and last Friday’s event at York. Hope people are enjoying them – feedback from Gloucester was good, and there’ll be an article from a couple of delegates featuring in the August edition of ARC – watch this space!

Self-publicity round-up

Long time, no post.  Ok, I am officially rubbish at this blogging business (I even forgot the password for this site and had to re-set it!), but I have been busy.  Where do other people find the time?

Anyway, partly I have been busy on writing up my Fellowship trip for various publications, so I thought I would link them all here, for reference:

• Article in (the last ever edition of – I don’t think my article killed it off!) Recordkeeping April 2009
• Article in the Society of Archivists’ ARC magazine, June 2009
• My full Fellowship report on the WCMT website

Web 2.0 in Local Government

Reading about the Foreign Office and the Treasury’s use of YouTube (see http://www.youtube.com/hmtreasuryuk and http://www.youtube.com/user/ukforeignoffice), government department bloggers, use of RSS and Flickr (for example, http://www.flickr.com/photos/foreignoffice/) in the 30 Year Rule Review got me wondering about the use of Web 2.0 services in West Yorkshire’s local authorities.

So I decided to find out!  The results of my search are, I think, quite interesting. 

All of the five Metropolitan Councils in West Yorkshire make use of RSS on their websites, except, apparently, Bradford.  The Council Press departments are getting into Twitter too, to keep local people up to date with current events in Wakefield, Kirklees and Leeds. 

Blogs were harder to track down – I’m sure there must be plenty of bloggers working in local government, but it seems they don’t want to identify themselves!  http://www.newgarforthlibrary.blogspot.com/ is an example of a blog being used to generate support and give updates on a council building project.  http://www.avhlblog.com/, is written by four members of staff at Aire Valley Homes, one of the arms-length management organisations (ALMOs) in Leeds, managing housing on behalf of the Council.  Blogging doesn’t appear yet to have had the take-up amongst local councillors as it has amongst MPs, although Councillor Clive Hudson’s Cleaner Greener blog is an interesting example, hosted by blogspot under the wakefield.gov.uk domain.  Local councillors’ websites (for instance, the Kirkstall Councillors in Leeds) are usually viewed as political activity, and separated from the ‘official’ council website, so this is an unusual development, which potentially raises all sorts of questions about responsibilties for the comments posted and for the longer-term maintenance of the content.

YouTube doesn’t seem too popular at present, although I did track down a Leeds Initiative channel.  What I did find were plenty of YouTube videos posted by members of the public which were highly critical of the local councils.  Perhaps the councils themselves should consider raising their YouTube presence?

There were a few examples of council Flickr sites, although not as many as I was expecting to find.  One of the most extensive is Kirklees Council’s Economic Development Service’s photostream, although Leeds cultural services departments are also experimenting – but not much content yet – see http://www.flickr.com/groups/leedsmuseumsandgalleries/, http://www.flickr.com/photos/30193899@N04/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/leedslibraries/.  Aire Valley Homes again showed up their Web 2.0 credentials with http://www.flickr.com/photos/avhl. 

There are also a few dabblings with facebook groups – though you could hardly say that the official facebook groups have taken off in a big way.  Kirklees Council apparently has an overwhelming 24 fans (though, to be fair, I did find also find a posting which intimated it had not been properly advertised as yet), Calderdale Council just 9 fans!  As with YouTube, there were plenty of external groups in evidence with some kind of grudge to bear against the various councils.  There were a few examples of council staff facebook groups – Kirklees Council staff with 91 fans, or Pugneys Country Park in Wakefield, for ’staff new and old’.  Most of these staff groups seem to be unofficial.  Occasionally the messages they give out leave something to be desired, as with one (closed) council staff group profile which reads “you don’t need to be paranoid and leave the group if you think all facebookers can see it and what we are talking about.  The group can ONLY be viewed by us members.”  Hmm…

Electronic Local Government Records recognised as a “massive challenge” in 30 Year Rule Review

Finally got round to reading Lord Dacre’s recently released Review of the 30 Year Rule, the legal arrangements under which central government records are transferred and made available to the public in the UK.  This affects West Yorkshire Archive Service (and most other local authority record offices in the England and Wales) as an officially recognised Place of Deposit (or POD) for central government records created locally – from organisations like the National Health Service, the courts service and so forth.

Like Steve Bailey on records management futurewatch, I’m a bit surprised by the quiet reception the recommendations seem to have had in professional archival circles, but perhaps everybody’s just slow at getting round to reading the thing, like me!  Certainly the report’s recommendations, if implemented, will have some very serious implications for PODs in terms of paper-based records, processing capacity and storage space, but that’s a debate for another forum perhaps.

But in terms of local digital records, I was delighted to see the final recommendation (8.25) that:

the appropriate central government authority does more to monitor and prompt continuing work on the preservation of electronic records that are generated by local government.

…and this in a report reviewing a piece of legislation (the Public Records Act, 1958) which strictly doesn’t even apply to local government!  Its great too to see suggestions at last that local government records should be subject to the same system of access as central government ones (7.25). Furthermore, the report’s authors believe that digital recordkeeping in local government

deserves the highest possible priority, including regular consideration by senior decision-makers alongside normal business and financial planning.

In terms of digital preservation at a local level then, bring it on!!

Digital Lives Conference, British Library

All UK local archives hold collections of ‘personal papers’ – diaries, correspondence, working papers and notes scribbled by dignitaries and officials, local people ‘made good’, and even the average person-in-the-street can provide a rich seam of historical content for social history.  For many local authority archive services, personal digital archives – perhaps a few floppy disks or CDs in amongst a bigger deposit – will be the first kind of digital content they will encounter, the foundation of a future digital archives programme.

In 2007, the British Library in partnership with University College London and the University of Bristol launched the Digital Lives Project to study personal digital archives.  The project conference, held on 9-11 February, aimed to examine how libraries and archives can offer support and advice to individuals who wish to organise, preserve and transfer their personal digital archives.  

The highlights for me of the two days I attended included two presentations from Emory University.  Naomi Nelson described Emory’s born-digital personal records programme as “trying to work the problem at both ends: building the collection and developing new ways of providing access.”  This is a relatively unusual approach for the preservation community, which tends to think about preservation first, and access only second.  I was particularly interested in her ideas for facilitating social networking amongst researchers, capturing researcher annotations, or by using tags or GIS analysis.  The presentation struck a chord with me, as I’ve been looking at some similar ideas with the aim of promoting greater exploitation and use of catalogue records of our traditional collections at WYAS.  But, as Naomi pointed out, in the digital realm, it is possible to capture and share research access in ways previously not imaginable.

The second Emory presentation from Erika Farr concerned the processing of Salman Rushdie’s literary papers, which included an early Macintosh desktop, 3 laptops and an external hard drive.  I was particularly interested in the overlaps of content between successive generations of Rushdie’s computer hardware, and how the archivists at Emory had approached the resulting archival appraisal issues.  There are similarities here with the MLA Yorkshire archives we have accessioned at WYAS, where the last server operated by the organisation contained duplicate records inherited from previous systems and from former members of staff.  Also some useful ideas for providing basic access in the reading room via a network port disabled laptop.

Further case studies were presented by John Blythe, on digital ingest at the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, using a processor tool from Duke University - and their aspirations for more integrated workflow in the future.  And Gabriella Redwine from the Harry Ransom Center, on the processing, arrangement and description of the Michael Joyce papers.

I also enjoyed the panel discussion on the potential monetary value (or lack of it) of digital personal papers – do records survive because they are valued?  Or is value related to scarcity, in which case endlessly replicable digital materials might be largely value-less?  Annamaria Carusi’s philosophical paper on value in the digital economy drew out the relationship between value and trust.  She suggested that since all new technologies (for example, the printing press) are disruptive of our normal practice, we should look to learn lessons from the gradual acceptance of other new technologies into society.

The Digital Lives Project  research has revealed some insights into personal digital information management, with the hope of helping repositories guide future depositors into good information management practices.  However, like the Harry Ransom Center, we have found the response to pro-active guidance to be limited, and I felt some of the ‘educating users’ suggestions from members of the Digital Lives team to be somewhat unrealistic, at least for the kinds of local personalities likely to deposit their personal records with a local authority record office.  I am interested in the potential for technological ‘memory aids’, like the Self-Archiving Legacy Toolkit from Stanford University, and for forensic discovery of linked digital content, but suspect (hope?) on a local level, there is likely to be continuing need for retrospective detective work on description by archivists.