Tag Archives: archival records

Cultural lessons from the crowd in the cloud

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In the last couple of weeks I’ve encountered some great insight into and evidence of the potential effect of large public networks on the work of making cultural assets accessible. It has come from two separate sources – Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, but also the first ever public conversation between Wikimedia and the GLAM sector (galleries, libraries, archives and museums).

I haven’t finished the book yet, so my focus here is on what the GLAM sector might take away from the conference (although no doubt the book is infiltrating my thinking.) The following points are not neatly sewn-up instructional lessons, and of course, people will disagree, but I believe the following are important considerations for those of us working to make cultural assets accessible online.

1. A completely different process of authorisation

I heard a lot of talk about how Wikipedia lacks authority and I heard a lot of what seemed like fear that its perceived dodginess would infect cultural institutions and jeopardise their authority. Well, for me, an almost opposite view is far more compelling.

Cultural institutions hold in their collections assets that have authority because they are original sources. No question; nothing will jeopardise that. And academic research accrues authority through the process of peer review, or by being written by someone who has accrued authority in the course of their professional career.

Wikipedia has an entirely different relationship with authority. Its articles are by definition, necessarily and absolutely not original research. And yes, Wikipedia editing is amateur. But the amazing thing is that Wikipedia articles can achieve a form of authority by virtue of the fact that the community of editors (which includes anyone who wants to be in it) finds a neutral, consensus position, and the article settles into relatively stable content. That stability is a genuine, honourable form of authority. It is not invested through credentials but emerges – and continues to emerge – out of open dialogue. And because Wikipedia gives voice to the community rather than to an individual or institution, in my view, Wikipedian authority is of great value.

I’m not suggesting that Wikipedia is the only source we need. On the contrary, it is vital to check the original sources, to seek out other sources (including primary sources!), to read critically and to adopt your own position. But Wikipedia is an excellent starting point. How many of us would deny that we regularly use it?! And the fact that verifiability it cites and refers readers to reliable sources positions it very well as a potential partner for cultural institutions.

2. A horde of willing and able enthusiasts

The arresting image below resides in the German Federal Archive but now – along with almost 100,000 others – it also resides in the Wikimedia Commons.

A photograph from the German National Archives via Wikimedia, June 1942 – Deutsches Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archive), Bild 183-N0619-506

Jewish women with yellow star, Paris, June 1942 – from the German Federal Archive via Wikimedia – Deutsches Bundesarchiv, B 145 Bild-F000136-0009

It’s there because Mathias Schindler negotiated a deal with the Bundesarchiv, by which the archive would release 100,000 images into the public domain, and in return, Wikipedians would help by describing the photographs and matching person data (authority files – the A-word again!) in three places – German Wikipedia, National Archive and National Library.

As an employee of a federal archive, I am acutely conscious of the scale of the work involved in description and digitisation – core tasks usually prerequisite to making cultural assets accessible. Anything with the potential to distribute this load must be worth exploring. That way, more culture can be shared more widely which is, of course, the point.

The experience of the National Library of Australia in soliciting bulk text enhancement – via its wonderful Australian Newspapers project – provides further evidence that the public can be relied upon to do a mammoth amount of good work in enhancing OCR’d microfilm.

3. More accessible doesn’t seem to mean less profitable

And importantly, evidence is amassing at the Powerhouse Museum that increasing the accessible reach of your photographs, through the Flickr Commons, has a massive impact on how many people see and tag your images, but very little effect on image sales.

So…

In short, unlike Angelina, I came away from GLAM-wiki feeling fairly enthusiastic – like Gerard – about the possibilities for partnership.

Seeing the whole archive

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Yesterday I went to Dr Mitchell Whitelaw’s impressive presentation at the National Archives, about his Visible Archive project.

First, he gave a great introduction to why visualisations are important and how they can help you get a handle on a collection. In brief, search excels when you know which small piece you’re looking for. But if you want to explore the whole, you need another way in. Visualisations are great because by looking, we can find patterns and therefore intrinsic structures, which help us to make sense of and thereby navigate within large data sets.

Look at this beautiful visualisation of all the series in the Archives:

Every series – big square means

65k archival series – a big border => physically large; a big interior square => a lot of registered items

In the interactive version, you can click on any series and see the agencies that created or controlled it, and the other series to which it relates – eg an index to the series, or a successive series:

Series A432, which agencies created and controlled it, and its related series

Series A432, which agencies created and controlled it, and its related series

When you highlight one of the agencies, in this case CA5, the orange squares also indicate all the other series that that agency created.

Ah, the beauty of the series system! As Ross Gibbs, Director-General of the National Archives, said at the end of the presentation, Peter Scott would be elated.

But wait, there was more. Mitchell then showed us a deceptively simple visualisation of a single series, A1. It started with a tag cloud of the 150 most common words in the titles if items. ‘Naturalisation’ and ‘certificate’ were huge, and there were a lot of names, of places like Norfolk and Papua but also of people.

On hover you could see the spread of each term in items over time, and on click you could see a list of items. Then, if the item was digitised you could also have a look at each folio. Nice!

But the zing was yet to come. You can also combine two terms, or exclude one (eg, what is there in that series apart from all those naturalisation files? And in this way you could start to make discoveries, just by playing around with the tag cloud – for example, that there was a major cyclone in Darwin in 1937.

In so many ways, visualisation works as a way in to the records. We can’t predict all the ways that it works until we see them working. But sure as eggs there will be ways, not least because the national archives data has an in-built structure.

Thanks Mitchell ! for doing this great work and for making it look effortless. (I know it’s not!)

Va va Vrroom!

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Vrroom is the best educational resource on the web, in the world.

Ok, since I’m part of the Vrroom team, you shouldn’t take my word for it. But these words are not mine. They were spoken by a history teacher, last week, at the launch of the site. It was an unsolicited accolade – I’m just reporting. Really.

So yea, almost two years after it was conceived, the National Archives of Australia finally launched its virtual reading room for teachers and students. The forum was the conference of Victorian history teachers, and the speaker was the lovely Ms Megabyte. Thanks, Mega!

Ms Megabyte demonstrates Vrroom

We also ran two workshops on using Vrroom, and (!) for the duration of the conference, we hosted the Vrroom room, an internet cafe where you could get a personalised introduction to the site – or check your email.

Vrroom room internet cafe

Whew… Check it out.

Oral history archive

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At a history teachers conference this week, Michael Caulfield spoke about the making of the Australians at War Film Archive.

This archive exists because of the Australian fascination (read obsession!) with war and war history. But the result is not military history. It is a rich source of oral history.

The archive comprises 12,000 hours of film interviews with 2005 people. Well-trained interviewers worked in pairs to elicit amazingly intimate and frank stories of lives before, during and after the subject’s war experience.

Better still, every interview is transcribed and therefore fully searchable by keyword. It seems like whatever term you search for – I tried ‘Depression’, ‘pregnancy’ and ‘worms’ – yields pages and pages of results.