News and Developments

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Archives Hub Labs

Labs is our umbrella for innovations work. We are currently undertaking a Labs project - Images and Machine Learning. This involves exploratory work around a digital content store, displaying digital content using IIIF, and trying out machine learning tools on data and images to aid discoverability. Read more on our Labs page.

Transforming Collections: Reimagining Art, Nation and Heritage

The Archives Hub is a project partner in a new AHRC-funded project, 'Transforming Collections: Reimagining Art, Nation and Heritage'. This is one of 5 discovery projects funded as part of a major new five-year iresearch programme, ''Towards a National Collection'.  This programme aims to underpin the creation of a unified virtual ‘national collection’, dissolving barriers between the different collections of the UK’s museums, archives, libraries and galleries.

We will be giving updates about the project on our blog and in our contributor and user bulletins.

Persistent Identifiers

Jane Stevenson gave an interview about PIDs and the Archives Hub: Aggregating archive data with and without PIDs (Feb 2021)

Names Project

Read our series of blog posts about the first phase of our ambitious Names Project (June '20 - March 2021)

Exploring British Design project: reflections

Find out more about our cutting-edge project to find ways to connect archive descriptions to a whole range of data sources and how it influenced the Hub.

How EBD informed the development of the Archives Hub

Micro Sites available for HE contributors

We can now provide repository interfaces, based upon the Archives Hub site. These are freely available to Higher Education (ac.uk) contributors, as part of the Jisc offer. Please see https://archiveshub.jisc,ac.uk/microsites

Online Resources

We now include descriptions of 'Online Resources', which are web resources that give access to digital content and may also describe physical content. They are typically resources created as the result of a digitisation project. Take a look at our online resource descriptions, or read more about how to create online resources.

Archives Portal Europe

The Archives Hub provides descriptions directly to the Archives Portal Europe (APE). We have set up harvesting, so all descriptions go through to APE automatically.

Read a blog post on APE, with a video introducing the service.

Web Interface

We have made a number of enhancements over the past few years:

  • Citation facilitation - all descriptions have a citation box that provides useful information about academic citations
  • Browse - we have a browse tab for subjects, creators and repositories. This can be used to create very detailed searches.
  • Map of repositories - we have a map showing the location of all repositories across the UK with links to their holdings and contact details
  • Search - we have a default 'core' search that includes the major fields, and an 'all' search that includes fields such as source and provenance
  • Images - we have a viewer for images, which allows for several images to be displayed at any one level of description

Data

  • We have export templates for archival management systems, such as Calm and AdLib
  • We can harvest from AtoM and potentially other systems if they have an endpoint that provides EAD
  • We are working on ingest of lists created in Excel or as CSV files
  • We are bringing the creation of repository information in-house to allow for more flexibilty and options in creating and using these useful descriptions