The National Archives
description
Transcript of The National Archives
The National Archives
• Lead and transform information management
• Guarantee the survival of today’s information for tomorrow
• Bring history to life for everyone
Our vision
• A gigantic online transformation• Selection
• Access
• Advice
• Preservation
• Awareness
• Aims of the organisation
• Business practices
• Organisational culture
What’s happened to TNA
April 1997
“The Chancery Lane List Improvement Project has been completed after five years of strenuous effort by 33 staff and 34 specialist editors, producing 85 linear metres of new lists…
Over the next few years, working as rapidly as resources allow, our aim is to provide an on-line service to users all over the world, starting with finding aids, progressing to services and ordering systems and eventually to digitised images of the records themselves.”
1996-7 Annual Report
April 2007
What we have done
• From 1997: transcribed many of our paper catalogues
• Automated document ordering and copying
• Several generations of websites
• Scanned about 7m priority documents ourselves
• Awarded licences to private sector partners to digitise censuses, passenger lists, WW1 service records etc.
• Introduced search and wiki technology
• Paused for breath
Customer focus
• Tradition of formal consultation with readers
• Extended to online and cataloguing panels
• Focus groups, card-sorting etc.
• Input from front-line staff
• Suggestions and complaints all individually handled
• Increasingly an online archive
• Digitise popular records series, often funded by private sector (census etc.) or academic bodies (Cabinet papers)
• Remote advice/ordering of digital copies
• Make our catalogues and databases properly searchable
• Influence the creation and usage of information by government
• Open to risk
• Listen hard to what customers want
TNA’s digital strategy
• Broadband
• Information as a right, not a privilege
• Family history
• 1901 census launch
• Licensing to private sector
Decisive factors
What most
people want
What people mostly
get
New expectations
Where some would like us
to be
TIME
EASE OF ACCESS
We are here
Expectation
Reality
Inconvenient realities
…but easier for customers
• Visitors to Kew are UP
• Satisfaction at Kew is UP
• Access to public records is WAY UP
• The future is BETTER!
What we offer now
What we aim for
Useful metadata
about 10m+ documents
Search box
1. Results list
2. Results list
3. Results list
Document download
Information about how
to get document
Visit to Kew or another archive to
read document
Digital copy of document
Advice
Advice
Our catalogue
Other catalogues
Documents
• Ratio of online visits to onsite visits:
• Ratio of downloads to physical document deliveries:
• Percentage of documents usefully catalogued:
2007-8 Annual Report
>100:1
100:1
1%?
What we’ll do next
• Continue helter-skelter with private sector digitisation
• Tidy up our online catalogue to make it searchable
• Improve the way we present information to enable more self-help
• For 99.999% that will never be digitised commercially, find better ways of digitising on demand
• Get deep links to search engines
• Try and help the archive sector follow suit
Lessons
• Don’t launch censuses all in one day!
• Commitment to a long-term programme
• Consult everyone, and build what they want
• People will pay for something they value
• Importance of explaining what you are doing
• Try things out; if it doesn’t work, drop it!
• Awareness of the changing web context
• Prioritise
Things that will be different in future
• Search, search, search
• Knowing how to find, not what there is to find
• User/social contribution and interaction
• Volunteering
• Personalisation
• Storage and preservation
The hardest part
• Being online as a way of life, not an add-on
• Following where the web leads – 2.0 etc.
• UGC – customers as experts, not us
• Metadata and the archival profession
• Marketing and Kew
• Kew and our future
• Taking the traditional audience with us
Thank youThank you