HubbuB: August 2011

We are out and About in August. Jane and Joy will be going to the Society of American Archivists’ Conference this year, speaking as part of a panel session. We will be talking about Discovery, the Archives Hub and Linked Data. We’re also very excited to be visiting the OCLC offices in Dublin Ohio.  Lisa and Bethan will be at the Archives and Records Association conference in Edinburgh, so go and say hello if you are there. Lisa is also speaking at the conference.

Our Monthly Feature is all levitating women and mustacheod men, as we take a trip into Magic and Illusion at the Fairground Archive: http://archiveshub.ac.uk/features/magic/. Some great images, and a lovely photograph of Cyril Critchlow, a wizard in his 80’s, performing as ‘Wizardo, Harry Potter’s grandfather’!

We’ve recently created a page of Top Tips for Cataloguing: http://archiveshub.ac.uk/cataloguingtips/. These are some of the key areas that we believe are important for good online catalogues. We do still find that archivists don’t always think about the global online environment, so it’s worth setting out some of the most important points to bear in mind. It’s partly about thinking of the audience, browsing the Web, using Google, scanning pages for relevant content, and it’s partly about descriptions – ensuring that the title is as clear and self-explanatory as possible, thinking about how best to describe the archive in a way that is user-friendly.

We’ve been talking about ways to help get descriptions onto the Hub when they are created in Microsoft Word or Excel. We’re just exploring possibilities at the moment, but we are interested in anyone who uses, or knows anyone who uses, Microsoft Word to catalogue. Maybe smaller offices, or maybe you ask volunteers to do some of this?

We know people do use Microsoft Excel as well. We are thinking about ‘Tips for using Excel’. Would this be useful? We don’t necessarily want to give the impression that Excel is the most appropriate choice for cataloguing – its a spreadsheet software, not really for complex hierarchical archives. But we do realise that for some people, the choice of what to use is limited, and we want to do our best to accommodate the realities that people are faced with.

We’ve had some interest in the idea of researchers being able to request digital copies of archives through the Hub. That is, a researcher comes across an archive they would like to see, and they would like digital copies, so they indicate this in some way. Not yet fully thought out, but again, we’d need to know if there is a need for this. How many officers are starting to digitise on demand?

Finally, we’re covering music, dance, plants, medicine and the Middle East with our latest contributors. Check out who is recently on board on our contributors’ page:
http://archiveshub.ac.uk/contributors/