National Archives User Advisory Group feedback
Meeting 18 March 2014
Hi. My name is Jacqui Kirk and together with Rosemary Morgan I represent Independent Researchers on the National Archives User Advisory Group. I attended my first meeting on 18 March.I am still getting to grips with how the Group works in relation to the User Forum and the Online User Community Forum but as I see it the UAG should be the general picture and overview body as we only meet quarterly and day to day problems would take far too long to resolve via this.
Any thoughts or feedback on any aspects of the working of the National Archives and its policies will be gratefully received.
Accessibility Audit
I am intending to raise general Accessibility issues as an agenda item for the next meeting in June - not so much full blown disability issues but the little niggles such as not knowing which lockers are at ground level or high up when booking a table and the table booking plan not having the desk letters on it. The fact that whereas upstairs in the Map Room you are offered a trolley for heavy items you are just left high and dry in the first floor reading room and some of the boxes there are rather heavy. The lack of signposting and general help notices. The new website design and its colour backgrounds to text. I could go on like this for ever but would like your particular beefs please. The whole will form a sort of Acessibility Audit document which I'll need to submit by mid to late May.The notes of the last meeting are given below amalgamated into broad headings and with integral links for clarity. Let me have feedback on these too.
Meeting summary
This is my recollection of the main issues raised in the meeting. The full minutes will be published at in due course. I have amalgamated some of the issues raised in matters arising etc into the main headings below to make it easier to assimilate.Finding Archives workshop
This was run by Emma Bayne the Head of Systems Development and Jonathan Cates the Collections Information and Systems Manager. The Discovery catalogue is still under development with the aim of the incorporation of the A2A, the ARCHON and the NRA databases into it. A beta version had been set up with limited information and it was planned that various groups of users and of staff would be testing it with workshops set up for that day.The User Advisory Group members were split into pairs each with a member of the systems development staff in order to look at various aspects of the new catalogue and to give feedback. Pink post it notes would be created for each aspect which the users felt needed to be changed and green ones for those which the users felt to be useful or satisfactory.
I felt that the exercise proved useful as the group members identified a great deal of areas of the catalogue which they felt needed change. (These seemed not merely confined to the new aspects of the catalogue.) In general there seemed to be many more pink post-its than green ones.
The results of the different workshops would be amalgamated and assessed and changes made as a result.
First World War update
Sarah Leggitt reported back on the National Archives' stand at Who Do You Think You Are Live which was the first for a few years and had been very successful. Based upstairs in the Military section next to the Imperial War Museum's stand it was to launch the War Diaries Project. The first section of these Unit War Diaries covering France and Flanders (WO 95) had been released on 14 January and within the first 6 weeks 200 diaries had been tagged with names, places and activities. This would ordinarily have taken 4 man years to complete. The results are currently being checked and the database is being fine-tuned.The Middlesex Military Tribunal records (MH47) have also been digitised and released in conjunction with Findmypast and the Federation of Family History Societies.
Various events are planned for the rest of this year and the WW1 portal is likely to change significantly in the next few months. The National Archives' first conference will commence on 28 June the anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
User Advisory Group representation
Because the group started in 2011 there is potentially a problem should all the representatives need to step down at the end of their 4 year term. It was proposed to manage this by planning that a quarter of the representatives should retire every year to ensure continuity. The representatives have now changed slightly due to recent resignations and one-off exchanges but the main recruitment period will still be once a year in September. There is a vacancy for an External Archives representative which will not now be filled until September.Fees increase
Details of the new price changes - Digital downloads have come down from £3.36 per item to £3.30 and self-service copies remain at 25p per page.Cataloguing update
We were given a list of updates I requested that in future we are given a list of future projects as well as completed ones.Digitisation update
The full documentOne of the issues raised was that of the recent release via The Genealogist of the Tithe Apportionment records which are not searchable except by personal name due to the way the database had been set up. Searching by location is not possible and severely limits their use. However the microfilm copies of IR29 will remain accessible in the Map Room until the digitised records are browsable.
In view of this and other accessibility issues we queried whether it was possible to place restrictions as to how records belonging to the National Archives should be used by organisations who offer them online. However as the records are public records this is not feasible even when the organisations are doing this in partnership with the National Archives (my translation - basically in case potential licensees are scared off by this).
Forthcoming digitisation projects:
Household Cavalry records
1915 Merchant Navy crew lists (of which the National Archives holds all of them)
The problem of differing qualities of scanning resolution was also raised. The records which were first digitised by the NA eg the PCC wills were digitised at a much lower resolution than is now used. This causes some problems with certain record sets. This may still occur but not with new digitisation projects such as the Royal Navy records which will be scanned to different standards as it will be a digital accession. This issue will be discussed and explained further in a future meeting.
Another problem was raised with the request that the PROB 6 and PROB 8 record sets be digitised. This has been looked at a number of times but the quality of the microfilms for these record sets is too poor for this. There is no money available to digitise them from the original records but an online index to them has been suggested.
In addition the problem of documents missing from the digitised records was raised together with that of quality control. This has been tightened up but ultimately has to be done by computer (my translation - because of cost issues).
Online documents
Currently they are grayscale whereas the original document is colour in some cases. We queried whether it will be possible to either be able to obtain colour self-service copies or for the online documents to be downloaded onsite to a laptop or tablet. There are no plans for colour printers but it will be possible to download online records in future to laptops or tablets subject to a fair usage limit which is currently being discussed.Misc datasets/information
Ships logs which have been digitised and indexed by crowdsourcing for weather data can also be used to pinpoint a ship’s whereabouts.The Open University material connected to Jeremy Paxman’s WW1 TV series
both of these will have links from the National Archives website.
