Discovery

Archives Discovery Forum

Guy Grannum

21 March 2012

What is Discovery?

Why?

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c11 million records

c9 million records

c200K records

c10 million records

TNA records

ChallengesVolume of Catalogue and digitised data Increasing

• 11 Million Catalogue Entries = 500,000,000 “facts” (about 45 facts per entry)• Another 9 Million documents in Documents Online (digitised content)• Plus other sources• Ever increasing digitisation of our collection

Increasing prevalence of born-digital records

• Currently hold 1TB of born digital records; estimate total will be13.5TB by 2016• Specific large collections like Olympics 2012, estimate at 20TB on it's own Volume and location of Users

• Hard to count users online• For every physical ‘record’ produced here in TNA in 2009-10 (c 600,000) over 220 digital ‘records’ were downloaded• Users online from all around the world

Goal• Simple - focus on the users and on the Record

o Help the users to find relevant recordso Help the users to understand the recordso Help the users obtain records

• Principleso Be comprehensive – one stop shopo Coherent and Consistent – Structure that brings economy of scale and

flexibilityo Describe collection in ways that users understand – Different users (or

groups of users) have different ways of thinking about our collection and we need to support them all

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What have we done? – Beta on Labs March 2011

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Simple search

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Search results

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Taxonomy

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Simple view

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Advanced search options

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Browse

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Details page

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User tags …

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All tags page

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Registration and sign-in

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... and an API

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No big bang!

Discovery is still being developed

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User feedback

User testing

Staff feedback

E-mail

Testing and trialling

What’s next …?

Discovery isn’t finished – we do regular updates and plan to keep iteratively adding new features.

• Planning for the closure of DocumentsOnline and the Catalogue• E-commerce system to buy copies• More advance search features• Refinements to the user interface• Refinements to user account page• Improvements to browse• Review other datasets and registration systems to add to

Discovery• Digital Records Infrastructure

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