1. IAMS - Integrated Archives and Manuscript
System
Bill Stockting, British Library
UCL, 10th November 2011

2. Introduction
I will look at:
 Background to the IAMS project
 The catalogue data model – the entities we are describing
 The standards we use to describe these entities and share our data
 A look at the developing Search our Catalogue Archives and Manuscripts
(SOCAM) public system

3. Archives and Manuscript Collections
Extensive collections of unique
archives and manuscripts
managed in separate collection
areas:
 Manuscripts: Western, Oriental,
Literary and Music
 Records of East India Company
and its successors, and related
private papers and manuscripts
 Digitised collections from the
Endangered Archives
Programme (EAP)
 British Library Corporate Archive

4. Fragmentation
Collections managed separately from the Library’s other collections in
thematic Studies Areas:
 No single inventory and differing cataloguing traditions, practices and
standards
 Some Catalogues in electronic form but in a number of online systems:
 Molcat (Western and music manuscripts) on Library website
 Endangered Archives Programme as web pages on Library website –
not cross searchable
 East India Company archive and related private papers on A2A
managed by the National Archives!
 Others only available to users in the reading rooms

5. Fragmentation
This means that:
 Preservation and security cannot be managed to modern standards
 Intellectual content can not be managed in developing legal environment
 Material cannot be effectively exploited in the digital age as users cannot
find what they want and when they do they cannot easily access digital
manifestations of digitized and born-digital archives and manuscripts
 Workflow and systems do not always meet funders’ demands

6. IAMS Mission: Integration
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
collections and will provide standards compliant data for
external co-operative projects

7. IAMS: Bringing it all together
 New cataloguing now done in one system to one set of standards
 Legacy catalogues being migrated to the same system
 Having our catalogue data in one place and in one format will make it
easier to share data with:
 Internal resource discovery project to provide integrated access to all
the Library’s holdings
 External projects, gateways and portals of all sorts, nationally and
internationally
 Service developers and communities of users – open data
 IAMS can be used as a cataloguing and access tool for material not held
in the Library as part of partnership projects
 Richness of Library’s archive and manuscript collections will then be
brought to the attention of new audiences, especially when catalogue
records linked to digitized or born-digital archives and manuscripts

8. IAMS Timetable
Modular system development:
 July 2009: Cataloguing
 October 2010: Resource Discovery – first cut of SOCAM
 Autumn 2011 Legacy Data Migration
 2011? Standardised Data Exchange
 2011? Digital Asset Management
 2011? Automated Requesting

9. IAMS Development Process
 Develop an understanding of business needs: statement of requirements
 Assessment of these against functionality provided by:
 Library’s book catalogue (MARC and AACR2 based)
 Proprietary systems – CALM and ADLIB
 Open Source systems – US Archivists’ Toolkit and Archon
 Library developed ‘system’ – Themed Collections
 Latter finally chosen as perceived to be the best fit to requirements and
value for money

10. IAMS System and Data Model
Internal development has allowed us to design a system and data model
that:
 Cater for our business needs:
 Not flat Library Management System or ISAD(G) based archival system
 Deals with material of all dates, calendars and eras
 Allows quotation of material in any language or script
 Take what is best from traditional practice: archives and manuscripts!
 Make best use of our legacy data
 Take account of others experience of developing and introducing archival
cataloguing and collection management systems
 Reflect latest developments in modelling and description standards
 Enable users to navigate the catalogue as well as search it

11. Descriptive Entities and Relationships: Model
Archives &
Manuscripts

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What are Archives and Manuscripts?
Archives:
the documents organically created, accumulated and/or used by a person or
organisation in the course of the conduct of affairs and preserved
because of their continuing value*
archives have, therefore, certain attributes:
 by-products, not collected
 uniqueness
 format independent (documentary, audio visual, electronic)
 evidential value
*Describing Archives: A Content Standard, pxi, Society of American Archivists, 2004

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What are Archives and Manuscripts?
Manuscripts:
 hand-written documents (but so are many archives)
 collected by a library or similar institution and may have lost archival
attributes as loss of provenance
 Items may also have attributes of an artefact so need to describe more
fully physical make-up and illumination etc
 Items may also have bibliographic attributes especially creative works
such as literary and music manuscripts

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Principles
Moral defence of evidential value in archives by application of the principles
of:
 Provenance:
 archives of a particular creator should be kept together as a whole or
 respect des fonds
 Original order
 archives within a fonds should be kept in the creator’s original order
 no rearrangement into other useful orders such as subject or
chronological
So when cataloguing archives then we describe items in context with each
other and also in the contexts of their creation

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Description in context: Hierarchy
Archival descriptions following arrangement in original order are multi-level.
There are 3 parts of the archival hierarchy:
 Contextual (or ‘collection’): Fonds (and its subs)
 Groups of records (‘classification’) Series (and its subs)
 Physical documents: File and Item

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Description in context: rules of multi-level description
The nature of multi-level description provides a number of rules or
guidelines:
 Description from the general to the specific
 Information relevant to the level of description
 Non-repetition of information
 Descriptions should ‘know their place’!

17. Descriptive Entities and Relationships: Model
Archive
Institutions
held by
Persons,
Families,
Corporate
Bodies
producing
Functions,
Activities,
etc
do things
created by
Archives &
Manuscripts
Places,
Concepts,
Things,
Events
have subjects

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Which standards?
The standards we are concerned with today form the basis of the data model
found in IAMS:
 Structure, e.g. ISAD(G)
 Content, e.g. NCA Rules
 Communication, e.g. EAD

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Why standards?
Standards are tools that have benefits for us:
 enable integration of disparate catalogues across Library
 a single system will be easier and cheaper to manage
 recruitment easier and gains in productivity
 ensure that IAMS is a tool for the support of externally funded projects
 future proofed metadata
 benchmark provided for comparison with other institutions

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Why standards?
Standards are tools that have benefits for the public:
 access to some catalogues for the first time via ‘IAMS Online’
 increased access points as data sharing possible within and outside
library
 easier for users to understand and use as similar to other online archive
catalogues

21. Descriptive Entities and Relationships: Model
Archive
Institutions
held by
Persons,
Families,
Corporate
Bodies
producing
Functions,
Activities,
etc
do things
created by
Archives &
Manuscripts
Places,
Concepts,
Things,
Events
have subjects

22. Descriptive Entities and Relationships: Structure Standards
ISDIAH
held by
ISAAR
(CPF)
producing
ISDF
do things
created by
ISAD(G)
Place
name/
Subject
term
have subjects

23. IAMS Structure Standards: Archives and Manuscripts
 ISAD(G) provides data elements and rules for multi-level description for
core archival description
 Integration of archival description and manuscript (works) description: TEI
v. ISAD(G):
 Using ISAD(G) as aim is general resource discovery and mindful of
resource implications
 But have added Uniform Title element and are looking at integration of
more granular manuscript descriptions where really necessary

24. IAMS Structure Standards: Contextual Entities
 ISAAR(CPF) provides the data model for authority controlled records of
people, families and organisations
 No full ISDF records, but function term and description can be captured
as part of the ISAAR(CPF) descriptions
 No full ISDIAH records but a superstructure allowing capture of names
and brief descriptions of repositories, collection areas, overarching
collections and projects
 For non exclusively archival entities – places, concepts, things and events
 Collecting term and a note of the authority for it
 Places noting place names and relationships as suggested by the NCA
Rules

25. Descriptive Entities and Relationships: Content Standards
none
held by
NCA Rules
producing
UK: IPSV
etc?
Aus:
AGIFT
do things
created by
Archives:
none
Mss:
AMREMM
NCA Rules
and UKAT
have subjects

26. IAMS Content Standards
The following content/format standards are specified in IAMS:
 Archives/manuscripts: no national content standard as such, so
developed IAMS Cataloguing Guidelines taking into account institutional,
national and international practice
 NCA Rules specified for the format of person, family, corporate body and
place names
 UKAT thesaurus as the default for concepts, things and events; other
vocabularies used where necessary for specialised material
 Library of Congress for uniform titles

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Content Standards: References
AGIFT: Australian Governments' Interactive Functions Thesaurus,
http://www.naa.gov.au/records-management/create-capture-
describe/describe/AGIFT/AGIFT-zip.aspx
AMREMM: Pass, Gregory A, Descriptive Cataloguing of Ancient, Medieval,
Renaissance, and Early Modern Manuscripts, Association of College and
Research Libraries (Chicago, 2003)
IPSV: Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary,
http://www.esd.org.uk/standards/ipsv/
NCA Rules: Rules for the Construction of Personal, Place and Corporate
Names, National Council on Archives (1997):
http://www.ncaonline.org.uk/materials/namingrules.pdf
UKAT: United Kingdom Archival Thesaurus, http://www.ukat.org.uk/

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Descriptive Entities and Relationships: Communication
Standards
EAD /
TEI (Mss)
EAG
held by
EAC-CPF
producing
EAC-F?
do things
created by

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Communication Standards: References
Encoded Archival Context (EAC-CPF): Official website at
http://eac.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/
Encoded Archival Description (EAD): Official website at
http://www.loc.gov/ead/
Encoded Archival Guide (EAG): see Desantes, Blanca, The Encoded Archival
Guide DTD and the Censo-Guía de los Archivos de España e Iberoamérica
Project: An electronic Guide to Spanish and Iberian American Archives, in Bill
Stockting and Fabienne Queyroux ed, Encoding Across Frontiers, Haworth
Press (2005)
TEI (Mss): See the Manuscript Description module of the Text Encoding
Initiative at http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/MS.html

30. Standards and Resource Discovery
http://searcharchives.bl.uk

31. Contact
Bill Stockting
S&C Cataloguing Systems and Processing Manager
william.stockting@bl.uk