The Power of Standards: their role in the integration and discovery of the British Library’s archive and manuscript collections

OpenCulture 2014: Bill Stockting, British Library

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Introduction

• Briefly describe collections

• The situation in 2007

• The 6 Step Programme detailing information standards used

• Conclude by noting how standards used are enabling us to provide greater online access to the collections

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Archive and Manuscript Collections

Papyri to the papers of living authors:

• Manuscripts: Asian, Literary, Music and Western including archives of creatives

• Records of East India Company and its successors, and related private papers

• Digital collections, e.g. Endangered Archive Programme

• Now also Visual Arts collections

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2007: The problemMission:

To deliver a powerful, flexible integrated cataloguing and resource discovery system that will unite and broaden access to the British Library’s archives and manuscript collection and will provide standards compliant data for external co-operative projects

100’s of separate catalogues

• Big and small

• Managed by many people across the Library

• Some online, some only available in reading rooms, some only for curatorial access

• Many different formats: databases, excel, WORD and HTML

• Various description standards and none

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Step 1: Procure a Standards Based Catalogue SystemAn in-house development – Integrated Archives and Manuscripts System or IAMS:

• Data model based on the ICA Standards for Archival Description especially:

– ISAD(G) – archival aggregations– ISAAR(CPF) – creating and subject

entities

• In-house content standards based on national and international practice but also external vocabulary standards to ensure data is interoperable, eg:

– Languages: ISO 639-2 etc– Scripts: ISO 15924

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Step 2. Migrate Legacy Data

• Since 2009, over 2 million legacy records migrated to the system

• In principle did as little manual work as possible

• Took opportunity though to programmatically amend data:

– To provide structure demanded by our descriptive standards

– To normalise key elements: languages, scripts, dates etc

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Step 3. Develop Persistent Identification

• Mass digitisation now happening, egs:

– Gulf History Portal– Europeana WW1

• IAMS integrated into the Library’s digital infrastructure

• Complex but key glue for this is Persistent Identification for catalogue records as well as content using ARK standard

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Step 4. Clarify Rights and Licensing

• Rights and licensing part of content publication process but also that for metadata

• Ascertained that we have the rights to the metadata

• Library makes BNB available as Linked Open Data as CC0 so IAMS data declared as such too

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Step 5. Share Metadata Promiscuously

• Finally we are in a position to share our metadata with anyone that wants it…

• Standards here for allowing access:

– Web services – RESTful API– OAI-PMH Repository

• XML data in many formats:– EAD, EAC-CPF – TEI, VRA Core– MARCXML, Dublin Core– MODS wrapped in METS– RDF...

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Step 6. Get Involved in Standards Development

• Library now involved in standards development, promotion and use for archives:

• UK:– Descriptive Standards

Roundtable– UK Archives Discovery

Network

• International:– Society of American

Archivists’ - EAD– ICA’s EGAD – Conceptual

Model for Archives

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Any Questions?