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Posts tagged 'website'

27
Wed Feb
2013
6

Fancy a chat?

Posted by Jenni Orme in Behind the scenes, Records and research
Looking back over our blogs from the past year, there are many examples of how we are working hard at The National Archives to make our records as accessible as possible, whether it be through cataloguing, digitisation, outreach or research. This includes our advice service – you could have the most fantastic documents in the world, but they’re not much good if you can’t find them!
Live Chat is accessible through our website

Live Chat is accessible through our website

Thanks largely to digitisation projects, our audience is now global and ever-expanding. In order to keep up with this, approximately a year ago we began trialling a new Live Chat service. This service is now part of our daily advice service from 11:00-15:00 GMT, allowing users anywhere in the world with access to the internet to connect with our advisers instantly.

As one of the ‘chatters’, Live Chat is one of the varied public duties I undertake each week. It is a great combination of the immediacy of a phonecall and the useful links that can be sent over email. It allows us to instantly point users to relevant parts of our website and know they are looking at the right page – a far cry from explaining step by step over the phone, or even by letter. Continue reading »

3
Wed Oct
2012

One Year On: leading the archives sector

Posted by Melinda Haunton in Behind the scenes

 

Image of design for Big Ben clock face, incomplete

WORK 29/3284 Time passes: for the clock face of 'Big Ben' as for the rest of us!

It’s a year today since The National Archives formally took over the sector leadership responsibilities of the former Museums, Libraries and Archives Council. It seems like a good moment to reflect on what has changed and how far we have come.

What’s happened since then? Quite a bit!

  • We’ve refreshed the action plan to accompany the government policy Archives for the 21st Century, taking account of changes to the sector and renewing the deliverables to take us up to 2015.
  • We’ve launched a new section of The National Archives website, to support our work with the archives sector.
  • We are developing our work with partners, including building key relationships with Arts Council England, the Archives and Records Association and the Local Government Association. In these challenging times, working in partnership is more important than ever if we’re to deliver our remit.
  • We’ve continued to create and deliver key initiatives. We are now well into piloting the new archive service accreditation programme after an extensive co-creation exercise with the UK archives sector.
  • We’re developing our engagement approach for the public archives sector while continuing our longstanding role in support of private archives.
  • We’re delivering the Record of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, bringing core organisational records to The National Archives and supporting collection of records in local areas to document this memorable experience. Continue reading »
9
Thu Aug
2012

Designs on The Record

Posted by Steve Mannion in Behind the scenes, Technology and innovation

Many of you reading will have seen our Olympic Record, previously blogged by Melinda and Sarah. I’m one of the in-house Web designers who helped to develop this resource and since its launch we’ve all been delighted by its popularity, including recent coverage on BBC’s Click (the slanted camera angles and zooms really amplified the site’s dynamic transitions and effects, bringing it to life).

The Olympic Record banner

How did we get here? A look at the design process behind The Olympic Record

To assist in the process of helping people get quicker, closer access to the records here has been very satisfying and I’ve wanted to shed some light on the design and development process behind The Olympic Record since its unveiling.

Around a year ago the Web team began discussing the project with the Collections Knowledge team, led by Cathy Williams and Fleur Soper. Together we recognised the potential for a new online resource to provide access to documents within the Archives concerning people, places and incidents that could be connected to any of the 30 previous modern Games. It would provide a historical resource, whilst engaging creators of new records and archivists – to actively collect 2012 records for the future. Continue reading »

16
Wed May
2012
4

Guest blog: … ask me one on Sport!

Posted by Melinda Haunton in Behind the scenes, Technology and innovation

I’ve turned over my blog spot this week to my colleague Cathy Williams, who brings news of an exciting launch.

The Olympic Record siteCathy writes: As much as I want you to read my first ever blogpost – and believe me, it’s been a painful process so I really would like you to – I would much rather you were off exploring our new site for The Olympic Record. It celebrates the history of the UK’s involvement with the Games and is launched today as part of The National Archives’ The Record, a four-year initiative to ensure a memory of the Olympics, the Paralympics and the Cultural Olympiad.

Continue reading »
11
Fri May
2012
25

Introducing Discovery, our new catalogue

Posted by Ruth Ford (admin) in Technology and innovation

The next phase of Discovery, our new catalogue, has launched with the addition of a delivery service for digitised documents. David Thomas, Director of Technology at The National Archives, explains why we’ve built a new catalogue and how it will help us provide more access to our records than ever before.

Continue reading »

2
Mon Apr
2012

Something green, something blue

Posted by Melinda Haunton in Behind the scenes, Managing information

Sharp-eyed visitors to The National Archives website will have spotted some big changes last week. For the first time since the website was launched in this form, we have added a new headline section. The bright green Archives Sector section now joins About Us, Records, Information Management and Shop Online.

Screenshot of Archives Sector site

Archives Sector website on launch day

This is a really important change for us, a key step on the path we are taking as we develop our role as archive sector leaders for England. The new section is designed to support archive services and their funders to develop and improve provision across the entire sector. That means more sustainable services, excellent preservation for the future, and increasing the options and quality of access to archives for all users.

Continue reading »
26
Mon Mar
2012

A light bulb moment – and a lost government ‘first’ is found

Posted by Linda Stewart in Technology and innovation

The previous blog from the UK Government Web Archive, brought to you by my colleague Claire Newing, took you back to the nostalgic 1990s. I’ll be mostly continuing Claire’s story, but, apart from a slight digression to 1858, looking at a more recent era of government technology.

In the early days of websites some folk were never wholly convinced of the value of archiving publications that could be obtained from elsewhere. Archivists like to deal in stable, certain things called records; you know where you are with a nicely labelled and dated government file, or even a fragment of medieval parchment, unchanged for centuries. Hence a whole debate went on around whether or not a website was a record; maybe it was a medium for documents that were records – or maybe it wasn’t. Happily The National Archives didn’t wait for the outcome; we went ahead and captured government websites anyway. Meanwhile, as the record debate raged, a further complication appeared: the web became an interactive medium with technologies bundled together as Web 2.0: blogs, wikis, crowd sourcing – web users could interact with the content, adding their own thoughts to pristine web pages. In the event, Web 2.0 brought with it a demonstration of the long term value of archiving website material, although it didn’t seem like it at the time.

If a website was a government record, well, here were people, members of the public from anywhere on the planet, actually changing that record. And anyway, how could something as informal as a blog be a record?

Nonetheless, in a small way at first, government began to blog. It seems commonplace now, but it was only five or six years back that the first Ministerial blog was posted by David Miliband as Minister of Communities and Local Government at the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister.

It was long thought that the ODPM blog was lost to posterity, as David Miliband was shortly afterwards posted to Defra, taking his blog with him. But researching in the UK Government Web Archive for today’s post, I found that a Defra crawl has picked up the links back to ODPM, and by clicking on the ‘posts by category ’ tabs it looks as if all, or nearly all, of the lost first ministerial blog is there.

Continue reading »