Trust me, I'm an Archivist!

The current issue of Ariadne, the web magazine for information professionals, includes an article by three members of Wellcome Library staff. Trust me I’m an Archivist: experiences with digital donors describes some of our encounters with potential donors of digital archival material, both good and bad! Working with digital archives is an emerging field, so it is important for those of us involved to share our experiences with colleagues across the world.

The Wellcome Library is in the unusual position of being a collecting repository with no legal mandate to acquire archives. This means that we have to find other methods of persuading potential donors to give us their archives. So far, we have found it easier to persuade people to part with boxes of papers than their digital equivalents. Ironically, whilst there is no hurry to transfer paper based archives, which can often survive for hundreds of years with no intervention, it is vital that we acquire digital material as soon as possible. Degradation of digital data, rapid obsolescence of hardware and software, and the fragility of items such as memory sticks all contribute to the vulnerability of digital archives. The longer digital material remains outside the archive, the higher the cost of working with it, and the less chance of being able to access all the data.

More information about our work in this area can be found on the Library’s Digital Curation pages. We always welcome contact from others working in this field who wish to exchange ideas.

Archives and Manuscripts cataloguing - September 2010

The archives and manuscripts cataloguing highlights from September bring together a rich mix of brand-new cataloguing and expansions of old listings, of twentieth-century material and older, and - for the first time - of paper and born-digital material.

Professor Hans Grüneberg (1907-1982), geneticist: As was noted in earlier cataloguing bulletins, work has been proceeding behind the scenes on a radical expansion of the catalogue of the papers of the geneticist Hans Grüneberg (PP/GRU) which made available much more detailed information about his individual correspondents. This work is now released to the public: a cursory list comprising 18 items has expanded to 136 database records, with detailed listing of names of correspondents, and access status set out in detail where the Data Protection Act applies (where necessary, closed material has been segregated out from the main series so that one sensitive item does not result in the closure of an entire file). More details are available in this blog post. (PP/GRU)

Wellcome Witness Seminars: also subject to a major expansion was the catalogue of material documenting the Wellcome Witness Seminars held over the past twenty years: recent seminars were added to the catalogue - which includes original audio tapes of the seminars (in some cases, master plus copy), photographs of witnesses and other participants, correspondence, and programmes and lists of participants – completely recasting the arrangment of the catalogue and doubling its size. This new material was made visible in early October, but the cataloguing was completed in September and thus earns its place in this month’s roundup. (GC/253)

Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922), teacher of the deaf and inventor of the telephone: a letter by Bell in which he mentions giving a demonstration of his new invention to Queen Victoria was added to the database, having previously been filed in the old Autograph Letters collection and only described in a card-index. (MS.8748) It should be noted that Bell's priority as inventor of the telephone is disputed, and we already hold documentation in the database relating to his rival Antonio Meucci (MS.7323).

Sabine Baring-Gould (1834-1924), clergyman, writer and collector of folklore: two items of correspondence by the prolific writer Sabine Baring-Gould (author of, among many other works in poetry and prose, the hymn “Onward Christian Soldiers”) were added to the database, having previously been filed in the old Autograph Letters collection and only described in a card-index. (MS.8749)

Digital material: increasingly, the Library is receiving archives that are hybrid in their nature, mingling paper with born-digital material. This month has seen several digital components to hybrid accessions added to the catalogue. For the moment they are not accessible to readers, pending the construction of a delivery system for digital material, but the information about them can now be seen online:
'Understanding Health Variations and Policy Variations' survey, carried out 1998-2001: this survey, conducted under the Economic and Social Science Research Council (ESRC) Health Variations Programme, consists of in-depth interviews with key health service personnel to examine the policy process in three areas ('rural', 'urban', and 'mixed', ie suburban). In addition to paper interview transcripts, the catalogue now includes entries for three born-digital transcripts. (GC/280/2/12a, GC/280/27a and GC/280/45a)

Margaret Lowenfeld (1890-1973), child psychologist: some photographs of Thérèse Woodcock, who continued Margaret Lowenfeld’s work after the latter’s death. (PP/LOW/T/19)

Wellcome Foundation, oral history project: various former Foundation employees were interviewed for this project around the turn of the Millennium and one, Alan L A Boura (1927-), provided for the project some copies on disc of of chapters from his autobiography “A Golden Journey”. It covers his medical training, his joining the Wellcome Research Laboratories, development of an antihypertensive drug, discoveries of Bretylium, Bethanidine, Etorphine and Dipenorphine, collaboration with the Lederle Laboratorie, M-Compounds, non addictive analgeiscs, discovery of partial agonists or Antagnoist-Analgesics, Ian MacFarlane’s discovery of Bupronorphine, nervous transmission modulating mechanisms, and finally Boura’s emigration to Australia. (WF/M/AV/O/03/02a)

Walter Terry (1896-1923), First World War soldier: in 2007 the Library was presented with some 1915 copies of The Lead-Swinger: The Bivouac Journal of the 1/3 West Riding Field Ambulance by the grand-daughter of Walter Terry, who served with the unit and died in 1923 as a belated result of his wartime exposure to poison gas. A group photograph including Walter Terry is held in digital form and has now been catalogued. (MS.8095/1)

One & Other project: another hybrid archive to appear in the database this month concerns the Wellcome-Trust-funded One & Other project, in which participants in the recent Trafalgar Square “fourth plinth” project – when members of the public mounted the plinth to do precisely what they wanted or felt significant, for one hour – were interviewed about their feelings and motives. Paper records will appear in the archive in due course; already present are records that enable readers to link to nearly 2400 sound files held in the Library’s Moving Image and Sound Collections. (TP1) A future blog-post will expand on this project.

Behind the scenes, work continues on various projects, of course: we will mention only two in this posting. In new cataloguing, work continues on the papers of the psychiatrist Henry Dicks, which include material on Nazi war criminals and sex therapy, surely the dream combination to generate hits via Google. In retroconversion of old catalogues, we grow ever closer to the end of the project, with the papers of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy perhaps scheduled to be completed last of all (SA/CSP). We hope to bring more news of both of these shortly.

Images:
1/ Conceptual artwork by Oliver Burston illustrating memory retrieval (Digital artwork/Computer graphic 2007): from Wellcome Images, image B0006861.
2/ Sabine Baring-Gould, from Wikimedia Commons.

Future migration of JPEG 2000 blog post

We announced the creation of our JPEG 2000 blog last month, and since then we have posted on several aspects of our experiences implementing the format, including setting up a Working Group around JPEG 2000 use in the library, museum and archive world. The blog has been well received so far, with several thought-provoking comments and over 800 visitors in its first month.

In a recent post, Digital Curator Dave Thompson discusses issues around the long-term management of JPEG 2000. Our current approach demonstrates that, while we have chosen a lossy format for our master image files, we are not ignoring the future implications of our actions:

"Obsolescence is not something totally beyond our control. We are free to decide when obsolescence actually occurs, when it becomes a problem we need to deal with, and, with proper long term management strategies how we plan to migrate from obsolete formats to current ones. The choice of JPEG2000 as a master format supports this broader approach to data management." Read more...

As a library, long-term preservation of information is a key service that we provide: not only for our physical collections, but for our digital holdings as well.

Behind the Scenes: Digital Services

This is the first in a series of posts aimed at revealing the cogs and wheels that make up the Wellcome Library. These are the departments and teams that provide the services our readers are so familiar with.

Now, we find ourselves on the first floor of the Wellcome Collection building with Digital Services. This department brings together several roles and resources in the Library centred around the technical delivery of websites, catalogues, digitisation projects, digital imaging services, an open access repository for research outputs, and digital curation.

The Imaging Department will be the focus of a future blog post. Here, we concentrate on the rest of Digital Services. There are 9 members of staff (outside Photography) who work in the following areas:

Systems support services (LSS). This team works to keep the Library catalogues and website in top condition to serve the high expectations of the Library users. As well as leading a programme of projects to upgrade and streamline services, the team helps manage access to electronic resources, including databases, electronic journals and digital collections. In addition LSS provide first line support for all IT systems and services used throughout the Library both by Library users and staff.

Open Access: Digital Services is also responsible for taking forward the Trust's open access policy. Specifically, this takes the form of managing the contract to run UK PubMed Central (the UK's largest free online life sciences resource), working with publishers to help them develop policies that comply with the Trust's OA mandate, and planning the ongoing development of the UKPMC service. With regard to this latter activity, plans are afoot to expand this resource into a single, Europe-wide, open access repository for lifesciences research.

Digitisation Projects: The Digitisation Project Manager oversees the Library's Digitisation Program, working with two Content and Metadata Officers to aid the Library in the development of digitisation projects, digital storage and delivery of digital content. The department is currently involved in developing a large scale digitisation program that will see the digitisation of much larger collections of material around a series of strategic themes. The first of these is "Modern Genetics and its Foundations;" under this theme half a million page images of archival collections will be digitised over the next 2 years.

Digital Curation: The Wellcome Library accepts born digital archival material as part of its collecting strategy. Digital Curation is the long term management of all the Library's digital assets, ensuring that they remain viable, authentic and available to users of the Library. Responsibility for managing the Library's Digital Asset Management system is divided between the Library Systems Administrator and the Digital Curator.

The biggest challenge for the department is determining how to deliver on The Library's ambition to provide online access to a large number of digitised collections, including books, archival material, artworks and audio visual materials.

Understanding the components of a digital library system that can bring together both the physical collections and the digitised content in a flexible, engaging, and powerful way is no small feat. A Feasibility Study is underway to model this system, and create a proof-of-concept to test ideas around how catalogues, page-turners, storage layers and full-text indexing - for example - will interoperate.

The Future is Now!

We are living in a digital age, where almost all business and communication is conducted electronically. However, very few people give any thought to how they will access this digital data in the long term. Electronic information is surprisingly fragile! Compare MS.5755/1 a fragment of papyrus created in the 3rd century BC, and still readable, with the difficulties accessing the information gathered for the BBC’s 1986 Domesday Project.

If The Wellcome Library is to continue to be “outstanding as an historical, evidential and cultural resource of national and international importance in the field of the history of medicine” (MLA, 2005), we must tackle the problem of curating digital material now.

The following presentation, given at the Cambridge Libraries Conference on the 8th January 2010, provides an overview of the work undertaken by the Wellcome Library in this area so far. Click on fullscreen to scroll through the slides.

Digital Curation at the Wellcome Library