Interoperability Without Effort

Interoperability without effort: the development of the distributed Archives Hub Amanda Hill University of Manchester, UK too much

What do we want from a union catalogue of finding aids?

Sustainable Owned by the community Comprehensive Ubiquitous

Archives Hub
Developing since 1999: a union catalogue for archives held in universities, colleges and other organisations throughout the UK
Funded by the JISC
Now holds c.20,000 finding aids from 150 institutions
Distributing the data was part of the plan from the early stages of the service

Frustrated Happy Graph inspired by Jessica Hagy http://indexed.blogspot.com/

Testing Feedback Development

Cheshire Development Team, University of Liverpool Archives Hub service team, Manchester and early adopters at universities in Scotland and England Direct from testers and more formally through Spokes Users and Developers group and Contributors’ Forum Testing Feedback Development Cheshire for Archives 3.2

Quick guided tour

Spoke home page

Results display

Collection-level record

Full multi-level finding aid

Search term ‘photograph’

Administration interface

Managing EAD files

Overview of activity

Technical details
Runs on a Linux (Red Hat or Fedora) server
Cheshire3 information retrieval software
Cheshire for Archives EAD-specific software
All open source

Installation
Takes around one hour to install
Free to download (http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk/arch/spokes.shtml)
Documentation and support from Archives Hub website and Spokes mailing list

Cheshire for Archives
Provides Web, Z39.50 and SRU interfaces to archival descriptions
Highly customisable: XHTML display controlled by XSLT and CSS
Search options make full use of EAD’s descriptive markup

Issues
Time: software development is a time-consuming business
Evolving standards: Z39.50 being succeeded by SRU has entailed additional work
Requirements: institutions’ needs and preferences vary considerably - important to build flexibility into the software
Communication: importance of keeping a wide user community up to date with developments and any problems

Benefits for Archives Hub community
Software gives control of data back to the repositories
Makes it more likely that they will add new descriptions and expand upon existing ones
Built-in interoperability means that data can be accessed by a wide range of services, from search engines to metasearch applications
Including the Archives Hub!

Sun Mill Company

John Rylands’ Spoke

The Archives Hub becomes…
More sustainable
Community-owned
Increasingly comprehensive
Available to users wherever they are

Interoperability Without Effort

by Amanda Hill on Jun 06, 2007

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Interoperability Without Effort — Presentation Transcript