Managing information | The National Archives blog

Posts under the 'Managing information' category

Thu Jan

2013

National Cataloguing Grants Programme for Archives – 2012 awards

Posted by James Travers in Behind the scenes, Managing information

Access to 13 archive collections is set to be transformed by a series of grants announced today. The National Cataloguing Grants Programme 2012 has awarded £407,950 to archives across the UK to help make these vitally important collections fully accessible for the first time.

Large group of workers outside factory with flags

Warwickshire Record Office's successful project - 'Boaters & Bright Sparks' will catalogue the archive of Willans Works, Rugby

Managed by The National Archives, the grants programme helps archives to catalogue previously inaccessible collections. Cataloguing past collections has uncovered treasures, which have provided unique insight into our nation’s history.

The programme is funded by a collective of charitable trusts and foundations including the Pilgrim Trust, the Foyle Foundation and the Wolfson Foundation – we are very grateful for their renewed support.

Wed Jan

2013

Surveying the surveyed: what happened next?

Posted by Melinda Haunton in Behind the scenes, Managing information

Some responses are not too hard to interpret: Do you keep an accessions register?

I posted back in November about our annual survey, Accessions to Repositories, which maps new material taken in by archive services across the UK. I also mentioned that we were asking the services who participate in Accessions to Repositories to tell us how they find the experience, and what we can do to help them. We now have the results, and they make interesting reading.

Overview

I’m glad to say that over 100 archive services took the time to respond – that’s over a third of the total who participate in the Accessions to Repositories exercise – and that there was a good mix of types of archive: local and specialist, national and higher education archives were all represented. We’d like to thank all who responded.

Fri Jan

2013

Getting your five a day – it takes a lot of information to make a garden grow

Posted by Julie Zielstra in Managing information

Information isn’t like apples and oranges, or even vegetables, but after my first year gardening on an allotment I realised how much information management I used to grow a simple salad.

Dig for plenty, by Le Bon (catalogue reference INF 3/98)

Those uniform bags of leaves sitting in the supermarket cooler had me lulled into a false sense of the ease and simplicity of the mechanics of planning, growing, protecting, distributing and finally storing the crop until it was time to eat.

If you haven’t gardened on an allotment before, it’s a community spirit geared towards the frugal application of resources, sharing and recycling, to create an abundance of crops. We’re seeing this attitude in the management of information as well – less is more, collaboration is necessary. When I started writing this blog post, I wanted to explain how an allotment is like a community cloud – I could use my own garden, but I choose to share a place that I pay for and can walk away from – hopefully with plenty of delicious food! But the Cloud is hogging the show lately – information management is needed whether it’s a cloud or your own servers and infrastructure.

Mon Dec

2012

Archiving the arts – why and how?

Posted by Melinda Haunton in Behind the scenes, Managing information

Photograph of a theatrical mask on an archive box with the National Register of Archives web page behind

Archiving the arts

We’re embarking on an exciting new collection strategy this month, called Archiving the Arts. Our work on collection strategies generally is about identifying those areas of our society which need support to ensure that their archives survive and are accessible into the future. Those archives won’t usually come to The National Archives – very often they will be collected and held by a big range of archive services across the UK, keeping collections with relevant communities.

There can be many reasons why a collection strategy becomes essential – in the case of Archiving the Arts, it is a direct response to the needs of the arts community, who are increasingly interested in exploring a ‘second life’ for their archives and collections. They want to reuse and respond to evidence of their own artistic heritage. The arts is a complex area to archive, because arts organisations’ and artists’ heritage is more than their documents and records: to capture the essence of an art form for posterity, a variety of audio and visual media are often needed, and objects can be a crucial part of the heritage too. Though many arts archives already exist and can be very rich and exciting in content, there is a real danger that other aspects of the arts will not be accessible in the future. Continue reading »

Fri Nov

2012

The drive less shared

Posted by Tim Callister in Managing information

Despite over a decade in helping users understand information management and getting them to accept that shaping information in the way you need to use it can actually make them happier… it doesn’t matter. The only time I’ve ever seen users not default to a shared drive is if they are less than ten feet from a printer.

Applications have become richer in their functionality and what they can interoperate with to deliver ever more developed workflows and case management. There are tools which provide an entire platform that can let you do just about anything with information, from web publishing to day-to-day processing.

Still it doesn’t matter; shared drives trump everything, all the time, everywhere in the world. This blog post isn’t big enough to explore all the reasons why users do this (and there are many). But what I do have space for is this; two challenges – one for us and one for developers.

Challenge 1 – Us

Turning off the shared drive! ¹ I mean the complete shut down of the NTFS – no corporate drive and no user drives… nothing. Could it be done without risking information management and digital continuity? Would users spontaneously combust?

Notes:

1. This is a hypothetical challenge. Please don’t go to your ICT department demanding the shared drive be shut off this afternoon! ^

Thu Nov

2012

New Standard Licence developed

Posted by Judy Nokes in Managing information

Today, we’ve published the beta version of a new standard licence which has been developed for use by public sector bodies which have reason to charge for the re-use of the information they produce or hold. The licence will form part of the UK Government Licensing Framework.

This new licence - under the working title of ‘Charged Licence’ - along with the Open Government Licence and the Non-Commercial Government Licence, will form a suite of ‘specified licences’ provided for in amendments to the Freedom of Information Act by the Protection of Freedoms Act 2012.

The publication of the new licence links in with the Cabinet Office’s consultation on a new Code of Practice under section 45 of the Freedom of Information Act, which was launched today, 22 November 2012. The Code of Practice provides guidance to public bodies in meeting their new obligations to make available certain datasets under a specified licence.

At the same time as the Cabinet Office consultation we are seeking views on the new licence, and in particular we would welcome your views on the following:

Do these simplified terms and conditions meet your needs either as a licensor or a re-user?
The working title for the licence is the ‘Charged Licence’. Is there an alternative title you would like us to consider that better describes its purpose?

Wed Nov

2012

Dastardly Digital Dilemmas: 4) Perfect circle(s)

Posted by Mark Merifield in Managing information, Technology and innovation

We have the answer.

The answer to how to effectively manage your digital information.

And the answer is in the questions.

Three questions.

It’s that easy.

Seriously.

OK, bear with me a moment. At its most basic level, managing digital information is about making the appropriate decisions as to what level of time, resource and cost you’re going to spend to ensure you have the right technology supporting the right information in delivering the right business requirements. Once you know what that is, you can apply the people you need to work together using the tools they need to deliver the outcomes you need. See? Easy. And that’s the message at the heart of our rather excellent Digital Continuity training course.

Mon Nov

2012

In autumn, the cycle begins again…

Posted by Melinda Haunton in Behind the scenes, Managing information

Image of the life cycle of a frog, from spawn to adult

All the best things go in cycles - thanks to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History for the inspirational diagram

One of my very first posts on this blog was about our annual survey of collecting, known as ‘accessions to repositories’. It’s a crucial way we keep in touch with hundreds of archive services across the UK, finding out what they are collecting and how the archival map is evolving. Archive services’ collections grow constantly: they add items to document more recent history, and also when new collections become available, whether because new relationships have been built, or because of a major event, as when a company has closed or an owner has died and the records need a safe new home.

Wed Oct

2012

To keep or not to keep? Records appraisal and moving house

Posted by Rob Johnson in Managing information

So, last weekend I moved house. The word ‘stressful’ just doesn’t do it enough justice…

Anyone who has moved house will understand that when it comes to the logistics, size really does matter. Because my new home is smaller than the last, I had to ‘appraise’ my belongings to determine their value, and dispose of items accordingly.

As I sat there on a dusty floor with a bin bag, I realised that my home and working lives had suddenly collided…

The process of knowing what you have and how valuable it may be is fundamental to Information Management. Records ‘appraisal’ is a core part keeping an organisation running efficiently – without knowing what value your records hold, useless stuff will clog up your cupboards and servers, whilst useful information remains inaccessible and unexploited.

How did I know what to keep ahead of the big move? Today’s blog is about the types of value Government records and my ‘stuff’ at home may have in common:

Wed Oct

2012

What’s in the box?

Posted by Melinda Haunton in Behind the scenes, Managing information

The new Hull History Centre building exterior

The new Hull History Centre: an example of a transformational new archive building

It’s been a good few weeks for news of new developments for archive services across the UK. With the invaluable help of the Heritage Lottery Fund there has been a series of announcements of substantial support for some key projects which will ensure safe storage and high quality access for important collections. Among the recent good news stories are Manchester Archives+ , the project to transform the historic Central Library; West Yorkshire Archives Service’s Wakefield development and the funding for the Battersea Arts Centre. Experience from across the sector shows how new archive buildings can also reinvigorate services: acting as beacons to highlight the potential of the collections they hold, freeing up staff time from managing an inconvenient former home and offering scope for new activities where once the premises were too cramped to contemplate such work.

Designing a new or converted archive building is exciting, but also challenging. What goes into an archive building? The simple answer is: space for researchers, space for staff and space for collections. But exactly what that comprises depends on the space available, the collections to be housed and the activities it will host. The building needs to be well specified, to cover all the functions it will deliver, but not over specified, full of specialist spaces that are underused.

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