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Progress Report 4

April 2000 - May 2000

Contents:

General Summary

Modules

  • Archives
  • Printed Sources
  • Awareness
  • IT

Action Points

General Summary of Activity

Definitions have been the focus of this month's activity. Some more contributions to the discussion will be circulated for comments following this report. The British Sociological Association has been approached for permission to print their guidelines. We are pleased to announce the appointment of Roiyah Saltus-Blackwood as Project Researcher for CASBAH. Roiyah will take up her post on the 8th May. SC visited Warwick University at the end of the month, meeting up with William Pine-Coffin at the Library, Anne Shaw at the Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations and Christine Woodland at the Modern Records Centre. Thanks are due for their time and particularly to William for co-ordinating the visit. It was a very successful day and further visits will be arranged, as required, with other partners.

Modules

Archives

Preliminary survey arrangements have been made with London Metropolitan Archives and the Modern Records Centre, Warwick. With regard to the use of thesauri Louise Craven of the PRO has been contacted for advice regarding the use of UNESCO but after discussions with Christine Woodland at MRC it appears that the use of LCSH by archivists is much more wide-spread than we had believed and merits consideration. Bedfordshire Archives and Record Office have agreed to allow us to use their survey. In view of this, and the data to be supplied from Lambeth's project, we are considering the inclusion of item-level references where it would enhance collection level references on the database. The project's aim is to develop collection descriptions but the incorporation of item-level descriptions would enable users to consult a more detailed catalogue, if required, and provide quantitative context to these descriptions. Collaboration with other projects is also a focal point: discussions are underway with AIM25 to co-ordinate surveys in the London area. COSMOS in West Yorkshire are planning another exhibition following an Open Day at Leeds Archives in April. This is to go up in Jamaica House on the 26th May. JE received a visit from Christine Wise, Librarian at the Fawcett Library, to discuss mapping methodologies. The Fawcett is leading a 2nd round bid to the RSLP for a gender studies cataloguing and mapping project.

Printed Sources and Audio-Visual

Discussions about survey methods for printed source collections are continuing. JE visited Susan Jephcott of the Mapping Asia team to discuss surveying and questionnaire methods. SC has arranged to meet Dr Andrew Tatham, Royal Geographical Society Keeper and joint leader with LASER of the NOF bid for printed sources and immigration. After discussing methods for collection description with WPC and AS at Warwick, it seems as though subject grouping may be one means of doing this. The benefits are that collections can be identified either through shelf location or catalogue entry, both of which are accessible to the researcher and less labour intensive for cataloguing. Mapping methods to identify relevant libraries outside of the partner institutions are also continuing.

Awareness

April began with a very welcome conference 'Strangers and Citizens' organised by the Huguenot Society in conjunction with the PRO's one-day workshop 'Immigrants and Aliens'. The publication of the same name contains some references to Colonial immigration and a section on tracing Immigrant Communities, which includes the Black community. Exhibition boards prepared for the conference are available for display. If partners are interested in receiving this exhibition, a CASBAH board could be added to the display. Please contact me if you are interested. SC met Dr Chris Lewis, lecturer in the Archives and History module for the Liverpool University Archives Qualification, to discuss compiling a guide 'Sources for Ethnic Groups' for use on the Liverpool course and hopefully to circulate to the other courses too. A presentation to the students about the work of the project was also discussed. SC has written a short article for the Society of Archivist's newsletter stating the aims of the project. This has been accepted by the Filler's editor and should make May's publication. Other publicity includes mention of the project in the HMC Newsletter and in the Glossary of Current Acronyms in April's edition of the Society of Archivist's Newsletter. Another has been written for FOCUS, the newsletter of the International Group of the Library Association. This will appear in the Summer issue.

IT

Database: Frances Blomeley, ULCC gave JE and SC a demonstration of the MySQL database, as prepared for AIM25. The search options - freetext, within field or by access point (subject, name, place etc) were very impressive. We discussed several different methods of transferring information and have agreed to provide a web template to enable archivists and librarians to input small amounts of data where desirable. Data collected from the survey and compilation work will be stored on the Access database and then transferred to MySQL at ULCC. Web-pages: After realising the problems that Netscape Navigator users were experiencing on accessing the pages, and finding out that this is the principle web-browser for Universities, SC experimented with a new template using tables. This should make the web-site much more accessible. The previous pages used layers which can only be utilised by Internet Explorer 3 users and above. Unfortunately this has delayed the public launch of the new pages but has enabled more development and some errors to be corrected. The pages will be accessible by the public this month.

Action Points

  • Induct and train the Project Researcher
  • Write plan of tasks for next 3mths: aims and activities
  • Begin building the grid/map of institutions to be included and surveyed across UK
  • Define survey and mapping methodology
  • Consider use of subject divisions and keywords
  • Begin pilot archive surveys at the LMA ~collate and assess results
  • Review strategy for next site
  • Identify gaps and contact relevant institutions
  • Clarify strategy for printed/AV sources collection descriptions
  • Begin collection and refinement of collection-level descriptions of printed/AV collections from partner institutions
  • Write more articles
  • Pursue exhibition plans
  • Develop contact with archive and library schools
  • Launch new web-pages to public view.
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