Progress Report No.5

Chris Turner & Anna Sexton
2 May - 24 November 2003

1. Technical Development – toolkit and demonstrator application

The development work on the LEADERS toolkit and demonstrator application has been completed. The resulting system was used for the users/archivists testing sessions described below. The system performed successfully with multiple users and only one or two minor errors occurred which did not impair the operation of the testing sessions.

There is now some ‘tidying up’ work to do on the application and finalising of the encoding following on from the user testing. Specifically the remaining work on the toolkit/application is as follows:

The final architecture of the system has evolved beyond the original concept of reusability for Archives. It is now clear that the toolkit has the potential to provide index and search functions across multiple repositories or data sources, and to index any collections of XML documents which have been encoded according to a common Schema or DTD.

2. User Focus Groups

In order to gain feedback on the demonstrator we needed to engage with both archive users and professional archivists. Gaining an evaluation from these two groups has given us an overview of the validity of what we have developed from the point of view of potential end-users and developers of applications built using our tools.

Testing of the demonstrator by archive users

The LEADERS user survey (first phase 7 October 2002-6 December 2002; second phase 13 January 2003-14 March 2003) gave us a broad understanding of who is currently using archives. When looking for users to test the demonstrator we sought to engage a sample that collectively reflected the results of the survey in order to ensure that the testers were representative of the archive user community as a whole. The process of recruiting users initially involved:

* Advertising for volunteers in various archive repositories across London

* Asking the archivists involved in the LEADERS user survey to ask their regular users to participate

* Advertising in the London Archive Users Forum newsletter

In recognition of the users’ participation in the testing we were offering them:

* Lunch and refreshments

* Reimbursement of travel expenses

Initially we had a disappointing response rate and we decided that there were two major problems with our recruitment strategy:

* We were not offering the users enough of an incentive to participate

* We were not being direct enough in our recruitment approach

This led us to offer each participant a fixed fee of £80 for their participation and prompted us to spend an afternoon in the Society of Genealogist’s common room where we asked individuals directly to come and participate in the testing sessions. These two measures were successful and we were able to run two sessions at UCL with 9 users in each on 22nd October 2003 and 29th October 2003. An outline of the structure of the two sessions is given below:

Testing of the demonstrator by archivists

In order to test the demonstrator with a group of professional archivists we asked various individuals to participate in a testing session on 6 November 2003. When recruiting the participants we were looking to get a balance between archivists with advanced IT skills and experience of developing online archive applications and archivists without these specialised skills. Seven individuals agreed to participate:

Unfortunately Brenda Weedon, Lesley Hall and Louise Craven were unable to attend on the day. The session outline is given below:

3. Dissemination

Presentations and meetings

Since the last meeting, members of the team have participated in the following conferences/meetings:

Publications

The Team’s paper delivered at DRH 2002 finally appeared in print at the DRH 2003 Conference. In view of the long lead times it was decided not to pursue publication of this year’s paper. A paper entitled ‘Understanding users: a prerequisite for developing new technologies’ and primarily authored by Anna Sexton has been submitted for review and should appear in the Spring 2004 edition.

Future Plans

Publications

A second article for the Journal of the Society of Archivists is planned, based on the results of the user testing. An article describing the LEADERS System Architecture is planned which will aim for publication in D-Lib Magazine. A write up of the project’s final encoding and schema work is planned which will aim for publication in Literary and Linguistic Computing. A general overview article to bring together all aspects of the project’s achievements is also planned.

Launch of application

Subject to minor revision it is planned to announce the demonstrator application and toolkit on various discussion lists making the url publicly available as a link from the Project Web site.

It is also planned to have a launch event before an invited audience towards the end of February 2004, to mark the completion of the project.

4. Project Proposals

The team have assisted in the preparation of two proposals for projects which will in different ways build on the work of LEADERS.

Proposal to ESRC, entitled Encoding Tools for Archival Sources. This project will research and develop an electronic environment for the creation of finding aids, transcriptions and digital images of historical source materials. The project will be based in SLAIS and will work very closely with The National Archive who are providing the source materials and undertaking the digitisation work. The proposal was submitted in July and a response is expected from ESRC during December.

Proposal to AHRB by UCL Library to digitise and publish on the web, selected documents from the R. W. Seton-Watson collection held in the Library of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies. The team have worked to advise the library staff in the preparation of the submission which proposes to use the LEADERS toolkit. The proposal will be submitted by the end of November.

5. XML Encoding for Archives

This project, related to LEADERS and funded by the British Academy, was carried out in September and October with Heidi Ortmann as the research assistant. The study had two aspects. The first was to assess the nature of computing knowledge, technical support and experience of putting material on the internet within the archival community. Through interviews with six archivists, plus a questionnaire to all new archives and records management students at SLAIS, it was established that the archival community has, in general, a good basic knowledge of computing and that many organisations are already involved in placing material on the internet, although individuals did not always have personal experience of doing this. The second aspect was to evaluate relatively low cost XML editors in terms of usability and capability to cope with the LEADERS schema. It was found that the must useful and cost effective tool for archivists to use to create XML documents is Altova’s XMLSPY Home Edition as it has both the functionality and navigability essential for novice users and the technical requirements to successfully utilise the LEADERS schema file. A report on the project findings has been prepared.