Hub and Spokes Development June07
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The Archives Hub is a union catalogue that holds over 20,000 archival finding aids from 150 institutions. It provides a search interface for academics and students to discover archival collections throughout the UK. The service is funded by JISC but free to access by all. Responsibility for creating descriptions lies with the contributing institutions, who structure their data according to archival XML standards. The development of a software called Spokes now allows institutions to host descriptions locally while still being part of the distributed Archives Hub service.
Hub and Spokes Development June07
- 1. The Archives Hub The service, the users, and the development of the distributed Archives Hub Jane Stevenson MIMAS University of Manchester
- 2. Archives Hub A union catalogue for archives held in universities, colleges and other organisations throughout the UK Funded by the JISC Now holds c.20,000 finding aids from 150 institutions Funded for academics and students (JISC), but free to access for all One of a range of national services provided by MIMAS at the University of Manchester
- 3. Methodology Responsibility for creating descriptions has always been with the institutions Raw materials are text files structured according to the international archival XML standard EAD Hub online template
- 4. Data quality Data Editor Data creation guidelines 'For Archivists' Contributors' training Indexing standards Subject finder
- 5. Hub users
- 7. Search terms, August 2006 Tolkein papers london transport bangor cathedral ethnomethodology grave-robbing bee beetle middleeastcrises Teddy Boys Harry Potter ninja How many people were killed during Ida Amin's power
- 8. Beyond finding aids… September 2001: Collection of the Month July 2003: 'Guided Tour' January 2004: 'For Archivists' section February 2006: Archives Hub Blog
- 9. We want the Archives Hub to be : Sustainable Owned by the community Comprehensive Ubiquitous
- 10. The distributed Hub Originally all data held at Manchester Distributing the data was part of the plan from the early stages of the service
- 11. Frustrated Happy Graph inspired by Jessica Hagy http://indexed.blogspot.com/
- 13. Cheshire Development Team, University of Liverpool Archives Hub service team, Manchester and early adopters at universities in Scotland and England Direct from testers and more formally through Spokes Users and Developers group and Contributors’ Forum Testing Feedback Development Cheshire for Archives 3.2
- 15. Spoke home page
- 16. Customisation of home page
- 17. Results display
- 19. Full multi-level finding aid
- 24. Technical details Runs on a Linux (Red Hat or Fedora) server Cheshire3 information retrieval software Cheshire for Archives EAD-specific software All open source
- 25. Installation Takes around one hour to install … but not always trouble free Free to download (http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/arch/spokes.shtml) Documentation and support from Archives Hub website and Spokes mailing list
- 26. Cheshire for Archives Provides Web, Z39.50 and SRU interfaces to archival descriptions Highly customisable: XHTML display controlled by XSLT and CSS Search options make full use of EAD’s descriptive markup
- 27. Issues Time: software development is a time-consuming business Evolving standards: Z39.50 being succeeded by SRU has entailed additional work Requirements: institutions’ needs and preferences vary considerably - important to build flexibility into the software Communication: importance of keeping a wide user community up to date with developments and any problems
- 28. Benefits for Archives Hub community Software gives control of data back to the repositories Makes it more likely that they will add new descriptions and expand upon existing ones Built-in interoperability means that data can be accessed by a wide range of services, from search engines to metasearch applications Including the Archives Hub!
- 29. Sun Mill Company
- 31. The Archives Hub becomes… More sustainable Community-owned Increasingly comprehensive Available to users wherever they are