Archive Advent

A brief return to blog about the lovely advent calendars that lots of archives have put together this year.

• House of Fraser Advent Calendar from Glasgow University Archive Services
• RBS Advent Calendar from Royal Bank of Scotland Group Archives
• University of Nottingham Advent Calendar from Manuscripts and Special Collections Department
• University of Stirling Advent Calendar from University of Stirling Special Collections
• Wolverhampton Advent Calendar from Wolverhampton Archives and Local Studies
• University of Liverpool Advent Calendar from Special Collections & Archives
• Maritime Archives and Library Advent Calendar from Merseyside Maritime Museum

[Image from here]

Your paintings

Love this!  Not really archives but a great use of tagging and sharing of collections.

Your Paintings is a joint project between the Public Catalogue Foundation and  the BBC with participation from organisations across the UK.

The project is:

A website which aims to show the entire UK national collection of oil paintings, the stories behind the paintings, and where to see them for real. It is made up of paintings from thousands of museums and other public institutions around the country.

Ask Archivists Day 9th June

Ask Archivists day has kicked off.

You can see a snazzy visualisation of the questions being asked via this twitter fountain

Ask Archivists Day

This Thursday (9 June 2011) is Ask Archivists Day on Twitter!!

The aim of the day is that:

On that day everybody can ask questions to archivists in the world on Twitter. The main goal of the Twitter event #AskArchivists is to get more attention for archives and their collections and to know what archivists like about their profession. And ofcourse that archivists and people on Twitter can get directly into contact with eachother. Through Twitter, archivists inform their followers about events, new collections, publications and other things worth knowing. They also keep in touch with their colleagues about their profession. People on Twitter can ask questions, give tips and can retweet interesting archive tweets.

Its been organised by Ask Archivists who have a twitter account (naturally) and a blog where you can find out more.  There are also some great youtube videos and presentations on slideshare including this one:

Ideas on how to promote #AskArchivists

View more presentations from Arkivformidling

23 Things for Archivists

I discovered this blog thanks to a listserv email from Peter K and its great.  Put together by the SAA's Reference, Access and Outreach section (who incidentally have their own blog)

23 Things for Archivists is "an online program designed to help archivists learn about some of the most commonly used social media (or Web 2.0) tools."

There are 23 things aimed at beginners which include blogging, facebook apps, online timelines and creative commons. But there are also Things 24-46 for intermediate type things and a section for the future Things 47+.

This is a really great way for Archivists to take control of their own knowledge about these tools, keep up to date with advances in technology (I'm off to check out some of the online timeline tools) in a clear and organised way.  Each thing has a post which gives an overview, examples, resources and tasks to try yourself.

RCAHMS and Canmore

Beyond Text have interviewed Rebecca Bailey (Head of Education and Outreach, RCAHMS) and Michela Clari (Researcher, Edinburgh University) about the potential impact of social media on archives with a focus on Canmore which was opened up in 2009 to allow public contributions either as new images or comments on existing images.

Read more about it on RCAHMS.

One Day Diary event for Mass Observation Archive

Today (Thursday 12th May*) is the day that the Mass Observation Archive are asking for people across the UK to keep a diary of their day and donate it to the archive.  Read about it on their website here.

Thanks for Kathryn at Archives and Auteurs for the info about this and the tweets from MassObsArchive on twitter for reminding me about it and prompting this post.

Incidentally Faber has a series of Mass Observation books, including one on the May 12th 1937 diary day.

* Due to blogger breaking this post was delayed :(

UKAD Forum

Grea summary from Kathryn over at Archives and Auteurs on the UK Archives Discovery Network (UKAD) forum meeting held last week. Go read it here now, there's links to presentations and everything.

Public Records (Scotland) Bill

Live streaming now from Holyrood of the first panel session for the Public Records (Scotland) Bill. Today the panel is hearing from the Keeper of the Records of Scotland and members of the Public Records Bill Team who are giving evidence. View the session here.

Follow an archive day

Friday 12th November is follow an archive day on twitter so what to do about it?

As ever ArchivesNext has it all covered here along with some interesting information about how successful it was for libraries last year. Make sure if you are on twitter and you're going to tweet about archives to use the #followanarchive hashtag

Check out the followanarchive list for new archives to follow and take a look at the promo videos for the day on youtube.

This slideshow is a great guide for getting started on twitter ahead of the day:

Followanarchive

I'm definitely more of a listener than a tweeter on twitter but it is very useful for finding out about what different archives are doing and keeping up to date with things. My top 5 recommendations are:

1. @OrkneyLibrary
2. @UKNatArchives
3. @archivesnext
4. @archivesireland
5. @postalheritage

Round up

I've been a bit busy planning a wedding to post here at all really, but this week I spotted lots of good stuff so thought a quick round up would be appropriate.

A report from NARA on the federal use of Web 2.0.

A global study into online behaviour from Digital Life.

Lots of new UK archive blogs

• DNA & Social Responsibility Project at King's College London
• Enid Blyton Collection at Seven Stories
• NUI Galway Theatre Archive
• Old Weather project
• Archiving a blog

The 2010 state of the blogosphere report is due out on the 3 November here so keep your eyes peeled for that.

Some crowdsourcing from old weather which is a JISC project that is asking members of the public to help transcribe information from Royal Navy logbooks. This will make information about past climate and historical events widely accessible.

Analysis of user contributions to archives.

Do we need index names terms? A discussion from archiveshub.

Behind the scenes at the University of Glasgow

The University of Glasgow Archive Services have put together this great video about their collections. It includes information about their collections and shows lots of footage of their 3 miles of shelving and storage facilities.

SOA conference

The SOA conference has been happening all this week, I really wanted to go and hear Paul Sillitoe talk about his work with technical records but couldn't make it.

If you also couldn't make it then you can check the programme here to see what you missed and keep track on twitter via the #soa tag for what's happening.

Sarah Wickham has also been blogging about it here.

Guest post

Another guest post for the UKLON Digital Curation blog, this time on how to make time to do web 2.0 in your working day.

Read it here.

Guest post

I'm guest posting today over at the UKLON Cultural Heritage blog about the benefits of using web 2.0 in your archive.

Read it here.

Old skool storage

Not really web 2.0 but there are some great pictures on the Guardian today of the storage facilities at DeepStore in a former salt mine in Winsford.

The site is a 200 million cubic metre underground salt mine which holds 30km worth of records for the National Archives. You can read a short case study about their work with TNA here.

(Thanks to Gary Collins for the link to this on the listserve.)

Personal archiving

The Library of Congress has produced a series of guidance on preserving personal collections of digital material like photographs, videos, emails, documents and websites.

The guidance comes in a pdf version which can also be viewed as individual web pages for each topic with some of them having podcasts as well as part of the 'conversations about digital preservation' series.

Winners of 2010 Best Archives on the Web

ArchivesNext has announced the winners of the 2010 best archives on the web awards here. The three categories were:

• Best re-purposing of descriptive data
• Best use of crowdsourcing for description
• Most innovative archives on the Web

Go check it out to see who won what?

UK legislation online

New from the Ministry of Justice and the TNA a website that "brings together every single piece of UK legislation from the magna carta to the present day".

The site is called legislation.gov.uk and its a great resource, very easy to navigate around and identify what changes have been made to legislation. Because it goes back to the 13th century it also makes if very easy to view historical Acts of Parliament, for example the Act of Union in 1707, the Libraries Offences Act 1898 and the Public Records (Scotland) Act 1809

According to the press release the site now contains 6.5 million pdf documents and will be updated every day at 2.30 pm with the latest changes to legislation. And you can hear Lord McNally (Minister of State for the MofJ) talking about it on the BBC here.

London Lives

Is a project that has been funded by the ESRC, and implemented by the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Sheffield and the Higher Education Digitisation Service at the University of Hertfordshire.

The London Lives website has brought together 240,000 manuscripts from 14 archives giving access to 3.35 million names. It provides access to documents from parish registers, criminal records, coroners' records and hospital records. There are also plans for a wiki to be launched in the future.

If you register with the site it allows you to save documents in your own personal workspace. The site has a lives page that contains information about individuals, some with some brilliant names like Repentance Hedges and Quilt Arnold.

There was a good write up about it in the guardian if you want to know more.