TNA has launched The National Collections Strategy with a draft document for consultation, available from TNA website. The aim behind this initiative is to locate areas of weak representation in archival collections and collecting institutions in England and Wales, and make them stronger. Potentially, this is big news. But before offering too much praise, here are my negative points: I’m sceptical of these types of all-encompassing endeavours that aim to achieve broad overviews and wide reaching changes/improvements. My first questions would be: where is the money coming from? Who will pay the staff to carry out the research, and how much? How long will these posts be funded for? Once gaps are identified, who will pay for the community engagement, transfer, storage, processing, cataloguing, access-related-costs, etc of all the new material? My concerns are mostly economic, but human too. Will staff in local record offices, libraries and charities be given even greater backlogs plus added responsibility for public and internal outreach? Will support be given to libraries or record offices threatened with closure or funding cuts?
These concerns aside, I'm in favour of a national collections strategy. Active engagement with potential donors and sources of deposit-able material is important work. Likewise, cooperation and coordination of collecting activities is important. And I believe it’s crucial that gaps in collections and collecting missions are identified and addressed. This is particularly true, obviously, because a lot of material will be electronic. Fuller histories and better understanding come from fuller archives.
September 10, 2008
September 09, 2008
Archives the raw material of history
An article from the Daily Yomiuri Online reports on the need in Japan for greater control over National Government records.
The Japanese government has set up a panel to explore the situation. The panel's interim report recommends a more integrated and authoritative approach to the identification, appraisal and transfer or disposal of government records. It calls for better awareness of public (versus private) ownership of government records and better control over their fate to avoid deliberate, accidental or unintentional loss. The journalist, Yuko Mukai, notes that extra government funding directed towards understanding and improving the “administration of official documents and important records” will only be worthwhile if Japanese bureaucrats are educated about their importance and status as public records, and hence the property of the Japanese government and its people. Trust in the government is highlighted as a major issue. The article points to records on people who contracted HIV/AIDS as a result of state-sanctioned medical treatment, denied by the health ministry but located after an enquiry was ordered.
The article gives some alarming figures: the Japanese National Archives employs only 42 people, compared to the 300 employed at the South Korean National Archives. Can this be true? Such as small number. The article also notes the smallish size of the building of the Japanese National Archives (which I took a photo of and posted earlier this year). If this is their main storage building, then it is indeed small for a national repository.
I found this article interesting because of my recent visit to Japan and also because of the ongoing controversy re how, and what, history is taught in Japan. The keeping of government records is not only important for democracy, as the Japanese Prime Minister is quoted as saying, but also for education and those things that are supposed to flow from it such as understanding and tolerance. It is perhaps unfair to single out the Japanese for its censorship of educational textbooks. Other countries have been guilty of editing history to present a favoured view of the past. This is why it’s important that the archives, the raw material of future textbooks, be kept and made available so that histories can be written based on the original documentary evidence, and so that these histories can be questioned and re-written by future historians.
Apart from comparisons with South Korea, the article compares the size and staff of the Japanese National Archives with the United States’ NARA. I hope the panel also take note of the current lawsuit against Dick Cheney and his refusal to treat the records of his vice-presidency as part of the public record when trying to convince government officials that the records they create as part of their jobs are not their own private property.
The Japanese government has set up a panel to explore the situation. The panel's interim report recommends a more integrated and authoritative approach to the identification, appraisal and transfer or disposal of government records. It calls for better awareness of public (versus private) ownership of government records and better control over their fate to avoid deliberate, accidental or unintentional loss. The journalist, Yuko Mukai, notes that extra government funding directed towards understanding and improving the “administration of official documents and important records” will only be worthwhile if Japanese bureaucrats are educated about their importance and status as public records, and hence the property of the Japanese government and its people. Trust in the government is highlighted as a major issue. The article points to records on people who contracted HIV/AIDS as a result of state-sanctioned medical treatment, denied by the health ministry but located after an enquiry was ordered.
The article gives some alarming figures: the Japanese National Archives employs only 42 people, compared to the 300 employed at the South Korean National Archives. Can this be true? Such as small number. The article also notes the smallish size of the building of the Japanese National Archives (which I took a photo of and posted earlier this year). If this is their main storage building, then it is indeed small for a national repository.
I found this article interesting because of my recent visit to Japan and also because of the ongoing controversy re how, and what, history is taught in Japan. The keeping of government records is not only important for democracy, as the Japanese Prime Minister is quoted as saying, but also for education and those things that are supposed to flow from it such as understanding and tolerance. It is perhaps unfair to single out the Japanese for its censorship of educational textbooks. Other countries have been guilty of editing history to present a favoured view of the past. This is why it’s important that the archives, the raw material of future textbooks, be kept and made available so that histories can be written based on the original documentary evidence, and so that these histories can be questioned and re-written by future historians.
Apart from comparisons with South Korea, the article compares the size and staff of the Japanese National Archives with the United States’ NARA. I hope the panel also take note of the current lawsuit against Dick Cheney and his refusal to treat the records of his vice-presidency as part of the public record when trying to convince government officials that the records they create as part of their jobs are not their own private property.
September 05, 2008
Free text versus chance
Last night I attended the monthly Archives for London seminar. It was entitled “Serendipity in the Archives”. Advertised as an “indulgent evening”, it promised to amuse or even shock. I’m happy to say it was an evening of fun presentations and accomplished all it set out to do.
The idea for the seminar grew from the experience we’ve all had of finding weird or unexpected things in the archives. Usually this is a pleasant experience, made more so when the items found can be shared with others. The speakers gave a lot of thought to the meaning of the term “serendipity”. Several ideas emerged.
One speaker looked at what serendipity means to cataloguing practices and theory. Does free text searching remove the possibility of ‘chance finds’? Does free text searching render hierarchy and sequential referencing obsolete? I think the answer to both these questions is ‘no’.
Free text searches are usually carried out on the catalogues, not the records themselves, whereas items found by chance are usually found in the records, not the catalogue description. Words within an electronic or hard copy catalogue are findable, free text searching just makes this easier. If you’re able to do a free text search of the actual records (isn’t OCR great?), then you will only retrieve the words you look for. If this provides you with something unexpected, then isn’t that ‘chance’?
Perhaps the speaker didn’t take her argument far enough. From a cataloguer’s point of view, does free text searching negate the need for indexing? Does it limit the importance of the title / scope and content division? Indexing archival material is notoriously difficult. A good description will include terms likely to be used as search terms, which arguably makes (subject) indexing obsolete. Many archivists ascribe to this.
What about hierarchy and sequential referencing? Free text searching can liberate researchers from the need to navigate manual findings aids. But, the hierarchy will be more or less important depending on what type of research you’re doing. It’s also important from the perspective of our professional respect for original order. I don’t think we want to get away from hierarchies, although it’s interesting to re-evaluate multi-level descriptions in an electronic environment and to ask questions such as ‘how many levels are too many?’.
Sequential referencing may appear to be made obsolete by free text searching. But its value as a management tool can’t be overlooked. Electronic systems like unique identifiers, which are usually sequential. As human beings, we tend to also like codes that we can make sense of and sequential systems fit the bill.
The idea for the seminar grew from the experience we’ve all had of finding weird or unexpected things in the archives. Usually this is a pleasant experience, made more so when the items found can be shared with others. The speakers gave a lot of thought to the meaning of the term “serendipity”. Several ideas emerged.
One speaker looked at what serendipity means to cataloguing practices and theory. Does free text searching remove the possibility of ‘chance finds’? Does free text searching render hierarchy and sequential referencing obsolete? I think the answer to both these questions is ‘no’.
Free text searches are usually carried out on the catalogues, not the records themselves, whereas items found by chance are usually found in the records, not the catalogue description. Words within an electronic or hard copy catalogue are findable, free text searching just makes this easier. If you’re able to do a free text search of the actual records (isn’t OCR great?), then you will only retrieve the words you look for. If this provides you with something unexpected, then isn’t that ‘chance’?
Perhaps the speaker didn’t take her argument far enough. From a cataloguer’s point of view, does free text searching negate the need for indexing? Does it limit the importance of the title / scope and content division? Indexing archival material is notoriously difficult. A good description will include terms likely to be used as search terms, which arguably makes (subject) indexing obsolete. Many archivists ascribe to this.
What about hierarchy and sequential referencing? Free text searching can liberate researchers from the need to navigate manual findings aids. But, the hierarchy will be more or less important depending on what type of research you’re doing. It’s also important from the perspective of our professional respect for original order. I don’t think we want to get away from hierarchies, although it’s interesting to re-evaluate multi-level descriptions in an electronic environment and to ask questions such as ‘how many levels are too many?’.
Sequential referencing may appear to be made obsolete by free text searching. But its value as a management tool can’t be overlooked. Electronic systems like unique identifiers, which are usually sequential. As human beings, we tend to also like codes that we can make sense of and sequential systems fit the bill.
September 02, 2008
reCAPTCHA helps libraries and archives take over the world
The most exciting news I read all last week had to do with the use of reCAPTCHA internet security software in transcribing tricky, hard to read words in on-line copies of newspapers and old books. CAPTCHA is responsible for the squiggly security codes humans are asked to transcribe on websites, authenticating themselves as humans and not machines. Now this idea is being put to a new use, helping out where OCR fails. Those words OCR can’t read, because they’re smudged, weird, cramped, strangely-fonted, badly-spelled, whatever, can be forwarded to reCAPTCHA and it will be transcribed. Here’s their website: http://recaptcha.net/learnmore.html
August 13, 2008
New ISDF
As I write, the printer next to me is printing out a copy of the new International Standard for Describing Functions (ISDF). This document has been eagerly awaited by me. I think descriptions incorporating this new standard will provide a powerful new access point, and maybe even cause researchers to ponder new ways of approaching and thinking about their research strategies, their use/interpretation of material and their interaction with life in general. Or maybe none of these things will happen.
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