The Citizen Archivist Dashboard is NARA’s new crowdsourcing tool for tagging, transcription, digitization of records, and more. Meredith Stewart demonstrates the various collaboration tools in the dashboard and discusses how the dashboard fits into the National Archives’ online strategy as part of Social Media Week DC.

• Direct Link (In case video doesn’t embed)

Feeling inspired? Why not check out the Citizen Archivist Dashboard and start exploring.

Post from: Archives Outside@State Records NSW

Harnessing the power of public participation

QueryPic Exploring digitised newspapers from Australia & New Zealand

Check out the coolest new digital history tool from @wragge.

QueryPic provides a new way of seeing, searching and understanding the digitised newspapers made available by Trove and Papers Past.

Follow changes over time. Map trends and patterns. Follow a hunch. Frame a question. Explore…

To start using QueryPic visit the Home page.

To learn more about QueryPic visit the Help page.

For inspiration and possibilities check out the Explore page.

Guides to the Gallows

The archives in the Harvard Law School Library include broadsides that accompanied executions in England. The collection of broadsides at Harvard began in 1932, complementing the extensive collection of 18th and 19th century British and American trial documents.

On Nov. 30, 1824, a London banker named Henry Fauntleroy was hanged in public outside Newgate Prison, one month after being sentenced to death for embezzlement. There were 100,000 onlookers.

Many of those watching paid a penny each for a broadside printed just that morning. The single sheet describes Fauntleroy’s reaction when his appeal was denied….

…During England’s Bloody Code period, the number of crimes punishable by death escalated from 50 in 1688 to 220 by 1800. By then, a man, woman, or child could be sentenced to death for “uttering” (passing along fake documents), forgery (Fauntleroy’s crime), poaching, prostitution, insanity, petty theft, or fortune telling.

Read more at the Harvard Gazette

Bilateral Digitization at Digital Frontiers 2012

A transcript of a talk given by one of our favourite crowdsourcing bloggers Ben W. Brumfield.

……. In 2012, the democratization of digitization technology may favor informal collections over institutional ones, privileging online access over quality, completeness, preservation and professionalism.

Will the “cult of the amateur” destroy scholarly and archival standards? Will crowdsourcing unlock a vast, previously invisible archive of material scattered among the public for analysis by scholars? How can we influence the headlong rush to digitize through education and software design? This presentation will discuss the possibilities and challenges of mass digitization for amateurs, traditional scholars, libraries and archives, with a focus on handwritten documents.

View the full talk and slides at Collaborative Manuscript Transcription

Govt Wages War on paper

The decades-old pipedream of the paperless office will be within reach in three years – because taxpayers can no longer afford to put it off.

National Archives of Australia director-general David Fricker says federal government agencies are now spending about $220 million a year storing their paper records.

“And that amount is only going to grow, as more information is created,” Mr Fricker said. “Two-hundred-and-twenty-million dollars is not sustainable; it’s wasteful.”

The director-general and Arts Minister Simon Crean, who oversees the archives, toured the agency’s Mitchell repository today, where some of the government’s most important historical documents are conserved.

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Mr Crean warned public servants they had until 2015 to shift to a digital archiving system, as the government would not allow paper files to be produced after that date.

Read the full article at The Sydney Morning Herald

Library seeks help to digitise collection

THE NATIONAL Library is seeking a partner to digitise its collection of genealogical and other material in a move that may mean the state institution puts its collections behind an online paywall.

The library has sought expressions of interest from potential commercial partners as well as the not-for-profit sector. A link-up with a commercial entity would almost certainly involve charging for online access to records, particularly genealogical records.

“We are open-minded as to who we partner with. It could be a philanthropic donor, an academic institution or a commercial business; it could be Irish or international. The core issue for us is that the partner must have the resources, funding and people and we bring the collection,” said Fiona Ross, director of the library.

Learn More at The Irish Times.

“Thank you very, very much J. Edgar Hoover”

On May 10, 1966 J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, wrote Alex Rosen, head of the Bureau’s General Investigation Division, thanking him for a gift certificate to a Washington, D.C. nursery.  The gift was in honor of Hoover’s anniversary as director.  “I shall derive much enjoyment in selecting what I want for my yard and home,” Hoover wrote.

For almost fifty years Hoover received such gifts from Bureau personnel as well as friends and admirers.  Copies of various congratulatory communications to Hoover, many enclosing gifts, and his responses are contained in over thirty boxes found in Record Group 65, Records of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (Congratulatory Letters to J. Edgar Hoover, 1924-1971, Director’s Office Records and Memorabilia).

Learn more about J. Edgar Hoover and his gifts

Web Sites With a Historical Bent Join a Place to an Image

A number of photo-sharing sites are being transformed from places to look at pictures into tools to connect historical documents and give more people a sense of history.

Most sites do not yet take advantage of location-based data as a means to search, as historypin.com does. But the other collections are going to take you back in time.

Historypin.com is clearly one of the most ambitious of these sites. It is aggressively courting local historical societies to encourage them to upload their archives to the site. Already, several hundred institutions have used the site’s bulk uploading tools to add thousands of photographs.

 

Read the full story at the New York Times

Post from: Archives Outside@State Records NSW

September 2012 – Link Roundup

Supporting archival biodiversity – welcome to the world of private archives

‘Institutional archives form a vital component of an organisation’s corporate memory – and identity. Good record-keeping supports good governance, and knowing our past helps us to avoid making the same mistakes or duplicating the same effort at a time when resources are scarce for us all. In the case of voluntary sector archives, there is also a particular value in supporting what I call “inter-generational accountability”: looking back to understand, and take responsibility for, the actions of predecessors. For example, the role of voluntary societies in supporting child emigration to the Commonwealth has been addressed in recent years.

• Read the full interview with  Philip Gale, Senior Adviser – Private Archives (Private and Institutional Owners) at The National Archives blog.

Crowdsourcing at IMLS WebWise 2012

 I’d like to talk about some of the lessons that have come out of my collaborations with small crowdsourcing projects. We hear a lot about these large projects like GalaxyZoo, like Transcribe Bentham. What can small institutions and small projects do, and do the rules that seem to apply to large projects also apply to them?

• A thought provoking piece by Ben W. Brumfield at Collaborative Manuscript Transcription.

Participatory Archives:Moving Beyond Description (via @An_Old_Hand)

However, as Trevor Owens pointed out in a recent blog post, the tangible products gained from crowdsourcing transcription or tagging should not be considered the ultimate end goal. The true goal of participatory archives projects should instead be to improve user engagement with, and understanding of, the institution and its collections.the tangible products gained from crowdsourcing transcription or tagging should not be considered the ultimate end goal. The true goal of participatory archives projects should instead be to improve user engagement with, and understanding of, the institution and its collections.”

• View the full post from Emily Reynolds

GOVHACK2012 – An eye opening experience for the Archives

GovHack 2012 was probably the best way for the National Archives of Australia to kick off our new Labs Blog. GovHack 2012 embodies what the new Archives’ labs environment will be all about, finding creative solutions to encourage greater use and access of Government data.

We think @dfflanders said it best, ‘the coolest thing to do with your data will be thought of by someone else’ and there were definitely some cool solutions created.

• Learn more at the new labs environment blog from NAA

Bach cantata manuscript sells for £337,250 at Christie’s in London

A manuscript of one of Bach’s late cantatas has sold for a season-record price of £337,250 at Christie’s in London.

The manuscript, which sold to a private collector in the US, is the Taille (tenor oboe) part for Ich liebe den Höchsten von ganzem Gemüte, BWV 174, and is the first example of Bach’s musical hand to appear on the open market for 16 years.

• Find out all the details at Grammophone.

Preservation at the National Archives

In preparation for the bicentennial of the War of 1812, the official parchment act of war between the United States and Great Britain, signed June 18, 1812, underwent conservation treatment

• See the before and after pics of this document.

Family History through the Alphabet D is not for history or toes

21st Century Genealogists know that digitisation is not about caring for your digits.

Digitisation projects by various non-profit, government and commercial organisations have given family historians access to a plethora of records that were previously very difficult to access or obtain. We can now access rich and diverse materials from a range of institutions across the globe without leaving the confines of our homes.

• Read more about digitisation from @geniaus

Good Recordkeeping Saves the Day

Accurate books and records of business transactions are among the most indispensable keys to success for my design business. Keeping on top of the details helps me determine the amount of tax I must pay to the myriad of taxing and licensing authorities – and complete records always result in a lower tax bill. Plus, they help me plan for large business expenses and slow times, and project how much income is expected to (hopefully) be profitable.

• Learn more about  this cautionary tale for small business at Fullbleed.

It’s all digital across ‘the ditch’

DigitalNZ has a nifty new collecting function. You can now group your favourite things from over 25 million items, and more than120 content partners, together into one useful place…share your own selections of historically significant New Zealand content with anyone.

• Find out more at Digital NZ

17 ways we made our exhibition patricipatory

After a year of tinkering, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History is now showing an exhibition, All You Need is Love, that embodies our new direction as an institution. It is multi-disciplinary, incorporates diverse voices from our community, and provides interactive and participatory opportunities for visitor involvement…This post focuses on one aspect of the exhibition: its participatory and interactive elements. We experimented with many different forms of visitor participation throughout the building, trying to balance social and individual, text-based and artistic, cerebral and silly. With one exception, no single activity cost more than $30 to produce/maintain. We developed and prototyped everything in-house with staff and interns.

• Read the post on the Museum 2.0 blog 

Post from: Archives Outside@State Records NSW

June 2012 – Link Roundup

New blog from The National Archives UK

Launched in February the team plan to blog 3-5 times a week “about anything and everything archives-related. ”

There’s a wide range of activity that we’re involved in, and I hope this blog will really convey this to everyone we work with.  From the incredible variety of our collections, to the challenges of collecting digital records;  from the rigour and attention to detail in the legislation we publish to the painstaking work of our collection care department, this is the place to get more of a flavour of what we do.

Go to the blog »

The British Library – Georeferencing historical maps

…crowdsourcing location data on Britain’s historic landscape to make a selection of maps fully searchable and viewable using popular online geotechnologies.

See more about the project »

New Standard helps Protect Cultural Collections and the Environment

The National Archives has worked with leading experts in the fields of environmental management, cultural heritage and conservation to produce ‘PAS 198:2012 – Specification for managing environmental conditions for cultural collections’, the first standard on environmental conditions for the cultural industry (and not archives alone).

The standard answers the national museum directors’ call for cultural heritage institutions to reduce reliance on fossil fuels while meeting their responsibility to preserve collections, and is greatly welcomed both in the UK and internationally.

Learn more.

Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing Cultural Heritage: The Objectives Are Upside Down (Trevor Owens)

I’ve come to believe that conversations about the objective of this work, as broadly discussed, are exactly upside down. Transcripts and other data are great, but when done right, crowdsourcing projects are the best way of accomplishing the entire point of putting collections online.

Read the blog post by Trevor Owens »

Civil War Diaries and Letters Transcription Project (The University of Iowa Libraries’ Special Collections)

Thanks to the development of “crowdsourcing” or collaborative transcription of manuscript materials, libraries are now able to use the knowledge and interest of the general public to meet goals that they would never have the time, financial, and staff resources to achieve on their own. Please help us improve access by transcribing the hand-written pages in this collection.

Check out the transcription process »

Quality Control for Crowdsourced Transcription (Ben W. Brumfield)

Whenever I talk about crowd-sourced transcription–actually whenever I talk about crowdsourced anything–the first question people ask is about accuracy. Nobody trusts the public add to an institution’s data/meta-data, nor especially to correct it. However, quality control over data entry is a well-explored problem, and while I’m not familiar with the literature from industry regarding commercial approaches, I’d like to offer the systems I’ve seen implemented in the kinds of volunteer transcription projects I follow

Learn more at the blog Collaborative Manuscript Transcription »

Our very own Digital Archive Project profiled on IT News

In an article dated 21 March 2012 IT News interviewed Digital Archive Project Manager Cassie Findlay.

NSW State Records has promised to open source any digital preservation software it writes for an archive of “born-digital” records that will sit in a new Western Sydney data centre.

The digital archives project is the State Government’s first attempt to permanently and centrally store a portion of digital files that are beyond “immediate business use”.

Read the full article here »

Top 7 Moments you should think, “Is my data OK?”

From our sister blog Future Proof:

In even the most general scenarios, managing your digital business information so that it is accurate, accessible and accountable is a challenge. But seeking to manage it successfully through any of the following seven scenarios raises its own specific challenges.

Read the post »

Post from: Archives Outside@State Records NSW

March 2012 – Link Roundup

We’re trying a crowdsourcing  experiment, tell your friends!

The idea of this new Flickr group is to help make the State’s archives more accessible. Our aim is to make your Flickr images (of our archives) available through our new, experimental catalogue search tool. So when you search for a record series or item using the search tool then a relevant image from Flickr will be visible.

Example from the catalogue

Here is an example showing the front and back of a railway history card (see the Flickr images at the bottom of the screenshot)

Example from the Flickr group

Here are some items that Fiona and I have added to the Flickr group as examples. Notice there are a couple of photos in included that aren’t yet available in Photo Investigator – these are worthy candidates for the Flickr group.

Sound interesting?

In order to make this connection between Flickr and our search tool, we first need to find the relevant series or item in our catalogue to which the image belongs (more than likely you will have all this information on your retrieval slip).

Upload to the new Flickr group – Archives2Share – it’s not as complicated as it sounds

If you upload an image to this group, please add these special machine tags (add machine tags in the same way as ‘normal’ tags):

1. srnsw:series=[series number]

example: srnsw:series=12345
- this number is on your retrieval slip

and/or

2. srnsw:item=[item number]

example: srnsw:item=479518
- this number is obtained from the catalogue search result and not the retrieval slip. It is the number at the end of the item’s URL e.g. api.records.nsw.gov.au/items/479518

Tag your images

Please add other relevant tags as you see fit and we will also add these to our catalogue. For example, keywords like “probate”, “shipping list”, “map”, or the names of people and places will help make these images more accessible to others. If you are feeling brave, you might try adding extra machine tags (www.flickr.com/help/tags) e.g. to specify geographical coordinates or to link to a person in Trove.

We are also using a special “archives2share” tag to keep track of our progress.

But I don’t have a Flickr account and I really want to share…

Not a problem. Flickr accounts are free and you can join in a matter of minutes. Then simply upload your images to your account, tag them and add them to the Flickr group.

If you don’t wish to get a Flickr account, you can upload your images via our contact form here on the blog (note: you can only add one image at a time).

Acceptable items to add

There is a general 30 year closure period for all records. Due to the sensitive information contained in some series of records the closure period is longer. Basically, if you view the archive in the reading room (without needing a letter of permission granting you special access) then you can add it to the group.

Feedback

This is a new area for us and we hope to share our progress with you in the Discussions area of the Flickr group. We also look forward to your suggestions and feedback.

Post from: Archives Outside@State Records NSW

Have you got photos of our archives that you’d like to share?