UKAD Forum 2015 - Speaker biographies and session synopses
Session
Session synopsis
Speaker(s)
Speaker biography
WELCOME AND Welcome
INTRODUCTION Introduction
Outline of the day and expectations for after
the event: attendees to participate in agreed
initiatives; contribute to the online
community; complete personal objectives on
postcards; and find at least one contact to
support achieving them
Jeff James
Geoff Browell
Jeff James (Chief Executive and Keeper, The National
Archives)
Geoff Browell is a senior archivist at King’s College London
and a member of the UKAD committee. He focuses on
technical projects, most recently a major digitisation
project on behalf of the Wellcome Library, and a number
of Linked Data initiatives. He is responsible for the day to
day management of AIM25, which publishes descriptions
of archives held in London institutions. This popular
service provides access to a wealth of archives – more
than 17,000 descriptions spanning some 500 years of
history gathered from around 140 organisations.
Interoperability forms an important part of his work which
entails close liaison with the Archives Hub and TNA, as
well as partnership with leading vendors such as Axiell, to
improve access to archive catalogues. His most recent,
AHRC-funded, project, Language of access, provides PhD
students and Early Career Researchers with an insight into
the impact of new technologies on the dissemination of
research and the need to adapt language and vocabularies
to reach new audiences.
KEYNOTE
PANEL
Jone Garmendia,
Caroline Pegden,
Anthea Seles, Emma
Bayne
Jone Garmendia (Head of Cataloguing)
Jone Garmendia moved to the United Kingdom in 1994,
after working at the Royal Chancery Archives in Spain on a
project funded by the Basque Government's Documentary
Building The National Archives’ Discovery:
born digital realities
Born Digital Realities
UKAD Forum - The National Archives, Thursday 19 March 2015
Heritage Centre. She became Amnesty International’s
Archivist at the London headquarters of the Human Rights
Organisation (1994-2000). She joined the then Public
Record Office at Kew in 2000 as a Senior
Archivist responsible for the Training and Communications
Programme for the new online catalogue. She worked as
Catalogue Manager from October 2007 and became Head
of Cataloguing in April 2010. She has contributed to a
variety of projects linked to the development of online
services, search interfaces and cataloguing policy. She is
comfortable working with Agile project management and
object oriented architecture methodologies. As Head of
Cataloguing Jone chairs the Cataloguing Panel and
contributes to numerous strategic and management
initiatives at The National Archives.
Caroline Pegden (Digital Transfer Programme Manager)
Caroline is leading the Digital Transfer Project at The
National Archives, aiming at developing a tried-andtested, scalable process to appraise and select, sensitivityreview, transfer, preserve and provide access to borndigital government records, open and closed, online or
onsite at The National Archives. She has a background in
strategic consulting and project management, having
previously worked for McKinsey and in the private sector
Anthea Seles (Digital Transfer Manager)
Emma Bayne (Head of Systems Development)
Born Digital Realities
UKAD Forum - The National Archives, Thursday 19 March 2015
TALKING
HEADS
ARCHIVIST AND DONOR: AN EXPERIMENT IN
TERROR
Dealing with depositors over the transfer of
born-digital archives can be a tricky
negotiation for both parties. Chris Hilton and
Simon Wilson will share their experiences
drawing heavily from their respective
institutions. They will focus on issues that are
specific to the digital age including effective
persuasion to over-turn a depositor’s anxiety;
the adoption of new practices and policies by
archives staff and the perceptions of
discoverability (the “WikiLeaks” effect). The
two speakers will offer practical advice and
tips whilst reflecting on the lessons they have
learnt so far.
Christopher Hilton,
Simon Wilson
Christopher Hilton is Senior Archivist (Digital Discovery
and Delivery) at the Wellcome Library, the UK’s leading
resource for the history of medicine and a part of the
Wellcome Trust. His role centres on metadata and system
interaction, looking at how best to serve descriptions and
content to the public: in recent years this has involved
much work on how digital records can be captured,
described and made available.
Simon Wilson is Acting University Archivist at the
University of Hull, based at the Hull History Centre. In
2010 Simon was seconded to the role of Digital Archivist
on the AIMS Project (a collaboration between the
Universities of Hull, Stanford, Virginia and Yale) which
sought to identify commonality in processing born-digital
archives. The combined experience from the project led to
the AIMS White Paper
(http://www.digitalcurationservices.org/aims/whitepaper/ ) published in 2012 advocating good practice with
regard to born-digital material. Since then Simon has
spoken widely on practical digital preservation and in
particular seeking to encourage individuals and
organisations to take their first steps in digital
preservation.
Simon is currently Chair of the Archives and Records
Association Section for Archives & Technology.
Born Digital Realities
UKAD Forum - The National Archives, Thursday 19 March 2015
ARCHIVIST AND USER
Fran Baker
Discovering Archival Email - from description Caroline Martin
to visualisation
The University of Manchester Library recently
undertook a project to rescue and preserve
the email of poetry publishers Carcanet Press.
This first digital accrual to the huge Carcanet
Press Archive extended to 215,000 individual
email messages. While issues of data
protection and confidentiality mean that the
email is currently embargoed to researchers,
future discovery and access requirements
influenced our approach from the outset. We
carried out a small-scale study of our
‘designated community’, in the shape of nine
researchers working in a range of different
disciplines, asking them about how they might
envisage discovering, accessing and using
email archives in their work. Our presentation
summarises the findings of this survey, and
explores how researchers might access email
archives like this in the future – drawing on the
exciting opportunities that digital
correspondence offers for text mining,
semantic analysis and data visualisation.
Born Digital Realities
UKAD Forum - The National Archives, Thursday 19 March 2015
Fran Baker is an archivist at The University of Manchester
Library, where she curates the literary and social and
political history archives; she also has responsibility for
born-digital archives.
Caroline Martin comes from an IT support background but
is currently the Digital Preservation Co-ordinator at The
University of Manchester Library, working to embed
digital preservation within the Library’s activities.
POSTERS
Born digital research data: Managing and
Anne Etheridge
presenting metadata
The UK Data Service Discover catalogue
contains information on over 6,000 data
collections covering a wide range of social and
economic data, spanning many disciplines and
themes and including census data. It also has:
over 100 case studies of how these data
collections have been used; over 150
support/how to guides describing how to use
the data collections; and over 13,000
publications and outputs from the ESRC of
relevance to the data collections.
The catalogue uses DDI metadata for these
research data collections and links these
collections to the relevant case studies, guides
and publications. Discover uses a faceted
search for users to drill down through the
metadata to find the data and either download
them or explore them online.
This poster shows how Discover can help you
to find and cite the research data you need.
Anne Etheridge is Discovery Metadata Manager at the UK
Data Archive with responsibility for the Archive's resource
discovery tools including searching, metadata, citation and
display. Anne joined the Archive in 2000 and has over the
years worked on a number of projects including the
HASSET and ELSST thesauri. HASSET is used for indexing
our research data collections and allows retrieval of data
and related documentation accurately by helping selection
of the most relevant search terms for an area of interest.
Anne is the Archive’s representative on the DDI Controlled
Vocabularies Group.
Is ISAD(G) working?
As part of the Wellcome Library’s mental
Emma Hancox is Assistant Archivist in Digital Discovery
and Delivery at the Wellcome Library. As part of her role
Emma Hancox
Born Digital Realities
UKAD Forum - The National Archives, Thursday 19 March 2015
The UK Data Archive is curator of the largest collection of
digital data in the social sciences and humanities in the
United Kingdom. With several thousand datasets relating
to society, both historical and contemporary, our Archive
is a vital resource for researchers, teachers and learners.
The Archive manages the UK Data Service which is the
UK's flagship portal for research resources, where we host
key national and international survey data collections,
international databanks, census data and qualitative data.
We are engaged in a number of data management and
preservation initiatives, supported by the ESRC, MRC, Jisc
and the EU and provide data curation for other
organisations. We follow the OAIS model of archiving and
we are ISO272001 security management certified.
health digitisation project, Emma has
aggregated catalogue data from a range of UK
archives all employing ISAD(G) in different
ways. Using her experience in this context her
poster questions ISAD(G)’s usefulness as a
standard.
she works on cataloguing the archive of Mind the mental
health charity, and also on the Wellcome Library’s mental
health archives digitisation project which aims to bring
together 800,000 pages of mental health archives online.
Cataloguing Digital Records on a shoestring:
the Bexley case
Fabiana has just finished a six months contract
as the Archivist at Bexley Local Studies and
Archives. She created guidelines to extract
metadata from legacy digital carriers to aid
appraisal and cataloguing hybrid archives. This
exercise assisted the team to get a practical
understanding of skills, knowledge and the
equipment necessary to develop their
approach to digital curation. Her methods are
based on (or inspired by) those of AIMS
Project, LSE, OCLC, Wellcome Collections,
Parliamentary Archives and Gloucestershire
Archives and tailored for a local authority’s
archive reality, where digital legacy is on a
small scale, multi-tasking is required and
resources are limited
Fabiana Barticioti
Fabiana Barticioti started working with digital records and
forensic methods on a work experience with the LSE
Digital Archivist in 2012. Since then, she has presented
talks at UCL for MA students on extracting metadata and
given a talk Dance Documentation and Digital Preservation
at Digital Echoes Symposium at Coventry University. She
would like to share her experiences in a bid to gather peer
feedback about her practice so far. She hopes to
contribute to the sector discussion at large and inspire
other sole archivists to get into digital curation.
1,000 years of history: Discovery needs you!
Discovery holds more than 32 million
descriptions of records held by The National
Sam Meunier
Sam Meunier is Collections Knowledge Manager (Systems)
at The National Archives with responsibility for the ongoing management of online resources describing records
Born Digital Realities
UKAD Forum - The National Archives, Thursday 19 March 2015
Archives and more than 2,500 archives across
the country. Content from the National
Register of Archives (NRA), Directory of
Archives (ARCHON), Access to Archives (A2A)
and the Manorial Documents Register is now
available via Discovery. Although Discovery
provides a single point of online access to
catalogue and organisational data from across
the archive sector, it needs to be developed to
become more comprehensive and to ensure
that content remains up to date.
Over the next two years, we will create tools
to enable archive services to create, edit and
upload multi-level catalogue information in
Discovery. We are asking archives about their
cataloguing process, systems and IT support
and will use this intelligence to inform the
ways we engage archives in this work. We are
working with a small number of archives now
to test the flow of data in and out of Discovery
and will open this up to wider group as
development continues.
This poster describes our intentions and is a
call to action for any archives that would like
to work with us.
held by other archives. Sam has worked within the
Archives Sector Development team at The National
Archives since 2008, managing legacy resources including
the National Register of Archives and Access to Archives
and supporting the delivery of the Finding Archives
Project. Since returning from maternity leave in 2014, Sam
now works part time. Her current role focuses on activities
including the enhancement of legacy data and the
communications around Discovery and the Finding
Archives project.
Jonathan Cates
Born Digital Realities
UKAD Forum - The National Archives, Thursday 19 March 2015
Jonathan Cates I have worked at The National Archives
since 2009 in a variety of roles largely centred around the
development of our online catalogues and resources. Prior
to working here I studied for degrees in History and
subsequently the History of Art. I am currently pursuing a
masters degree in Archives and Records Management. For
the two years I have worked in the 'Archives Sector
Development' department, which leads The National
Archives' relationship with the wider archives sector. My
role, as Collections Knowledge Manager (Finding
Archives), is to lead on our contribution to the 'Finding
Archives' project, which has resulted in several legacy
systems (including the NRA and A2A) being migrated to
Discovery, a new platform designed to host the variety of
content describing collections held by archives across the
United Kingdom.
WORKSHOPS
1 Born digital deposit agreements:
1 Simon Wilson
The art of effective persuasion
The transfer of born-digital material is a more
complex and more intimate process than most
of our depositors will be familiar and even
comfortable with. As we intrude into an
organisation's or individuals social media
identity, we suddenly find ourselves asking
about their computing history, their filenaming
habits, about potentially sensitive content and
their passwords. With such diverse issues is it
practical for a single deposit agreement to
work across the likely range of depositors and
scenarios. In this session we shall start
exploring how to draft a deposit agreement
that covers born-digital material.
1 Simon Wilson (Hull History Centre)
2 Born Free? Combining information
2 Tim Callister
governance and archival strategies to identify
and protect digital information for the longterm.
This workshop will consider the purpose of
information governance and the benefits it can
bring in supporting the aims and processes of
selecting digital information for long-term
preservation. Focusing on the disciplines
involved in information governance and
2 Tim Callister is a recognised expert on electronic records
management. He spent 8 years as an Information
Management Consultant at The National Archives (UK)
where he led the development of principles and standards
within UK government to establish a baseline for
information governance for all government departments
to work towards, and be assessed against. In his current
role at PwC in their Forensics Technology Services practice
providing strategic consultancy on the adoption of
information governance and use of new and emerging
Born Digital Realities
UKAD Forum - The National Archives, Thursday 19 March 2015
considering emerging technologies we will
discuss how they can benefit archives now and
how they may alter some aspects of archival
management in the future.
technology to help identify information of value.
3 Synchronising born digital metadata
Chris Fryer and Chris Hilton will report on their
repositories’ experience of cataloguing borndigital material, and on the practicalities of
applying techniques and systems designed for
paper material to this new medium. The
second half of the session will give attendees
the chance to raise their own issues,
comparing their experiences with the
speakers’ to establish whether there are
shared problems for the profession to
address.”
3 Christopher
Hilton, Christopher
Fryer
3 Christopher Hilton (Wellcome Library), Christopher
Fryer is Senior Digital Archivist at the Houses of
Parliament. He manages the Parliamentary Archives digital
preservation function as a business-as-usual activity, as
well as leading the final phase of the Digital Preservation
project to its conclusion in March 2015. He also has
operational responsibility for Parliament’s digital
repository, and advises both Houses on all aspects of
digital preservation.
4 Spotlight on the digital – exploring
discoverability for online digital collections
Whether born-digital, or through analogue
migration, the online life and effectiveness of
an asset can vary considerably depending on
the workflows and policies adopted
throughout the lifecycle of that asset. What
can institutions do to improve the longevity
and visibility of their assets on the web, and
4 Karen Colbron
4 Karen Colbron Digital content manager at Jisc, has an
advanced degree in Library Science. She works within the
digital resources directorate with responsibility for
managing projects in the areas of resource discovery,
digital preservation and curation. She is responsible for
implementing the recommendations from the Spotlight on
the Digital project that aims to improve resource discovery
and impact of digital collections within teaching and
learning. Karen has been involved in preservation and
Born Digital Realities
UKAD Forum - The National Archives, Thursday 19 March 2015
facilitate easy reuse and citation by students,
teachers and learners? This session will outline
the results of the Spotlight on the Digital
investigation into the challenges to discovery
of digital resources on the web, and the
practical steps that can be implemented to
tackle these issues.
WORKSHOP
FEEDBACK AND
WHAT NEXT?
Workshop Feedback
How delegates can follow up the event:
attendees to participate in agreed initiatives;
contribute to the online community; complete
personal objectives on postcards; and find at
least one contact to support achieving them
online access workflows for both born-digital analogue-todigital audio-visual materials for over 25 years, and has
been twice Emmy award-nominated for her work in
archival research.
Jenny Bunn
Geoff Browell
Jenny Bunn is a Lecturer on the Archives and Records
Management programme at University College London.
She has worked in a variety of archival institutions,
including The National Archives and The Royal Bank of
Scotland, and completed a PhD in Archive Studies in 2011.
She is a member of the committee of the Archives and
Records Association’s Section for Archives and
Technology, joint editor of Archives and Records, and a
founder member of the Cardigan Continuum London
reading group.
Geoff Browell (Senior Archives Services Manager, Kings
College London)
Born Digital Realities
UKAD Forum - The National Archives, Thursday 19 March 2015