From the Brits
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.