UKSG 2018 Breakout - Moving Mass Observation online: keeping context and curation in digital collections - Courage and Fogg
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The Mass Observation Archive is held at The Keep at the University of Sussex. The Keep has had thousands of visitors through the door, working with archivists and special collections librarians to curate and streamline their research. When Mass Observation was digitised in partnership with Adam Matthew Digital, how did MO maintain the curatorial expertise and context of the documents in the now online archive? This session looks at how The Keep and Adam Matthew Digital worked together to replicate the archival research experience online without losing the context and curation of the physical material and increased accessibility to more researchers than ever before. Fiona Courage Mass Observation Archive, University of Sussex Martha Fogg Adam Matthew Digital
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UKSG 2018 Breakout - Moving Mass Observation online: keeping context and curation in digital collections - Courage and Fogg
- 1. Moving Mass Observation Online Keeping context and curation in digital collections
- 2. What we’ll cover… • Hello and housekeeping from chair – Alex Butler, Product Specialist, Adam Matthew Digital • An introduction to Mass Observation – Fiona Courage, Head of Special Collections and Curator of Mass Observation, University of Sussex • Putting Mass Observation online – Martha Fogg, Development Director, Adam Matthew Digital • Effects of going digital (from an archive’s perspective) – Fiona Courage • Q&A and closing remarks from Chair
- 3. Fiona Courage, Head of Special Collections and Curator of Mass Observation, University of Sussex An introduction to Mass Observation
- 6. Topic Collection Housing: SxMOA1/1/10/A
- 9. Martha Fogg Publishing Director Putting Mass Observation Online
- 10. Mass Observation Online – Usage 197 institutional users worldwide Digital usage at Sussex – yearly average growth 49% 1.44m pages downloaded since 2015
- 12. Searching
- 13. Browsing
- 14. Cross- searching
- 17. What’s next… Mass Observation Project (1981+) goes online
- 18. Mass Observation – impact on the archive
- 19. Questions and Answers Fiona Courage - f.p.courage@sussex.ac.uk Martha Fogg – martha@amdigital.co.uk
Editor's Notes
- I’ve got about ten minutes but in that time I want to give you a whistle-stop tour of some of the benefits and challenges of converting a paper archive into an online resource. I will discuss how the presentation of the online Mass Observation Archive differs from the ‘physical’ archive experience, and how this informs MO research and affects the ways users interact with and interpret the sources. I will conclude by looking at what’s coming up next for Mass Observation Online in the future. Mass Observation is a subject particularly close to my heart, since developing the online edition of Mass Observation was my first project when I joined Adam Matthew in 2005 – and quite a daunting one it was too! Putting the entire archive online took over seven years to complete, with publication of the 750,000 images of content taking place in five phases.
- Mass Observation Online is one of Adam Matthew’s most successful and critically well-received resources. It has been purchased by educational institutions and universities worldwide and is our most popular online resource in terms of the number of unique visitors it receives every month. It is tremendously popular with UK higher education, as one might expect, but also in the US, Canada and Australia.
- I want to briefly explore just a few ways in which the presentation of the digital MO archive differs from that of the physical MO archive, and what effect this has on the experience of using the material. With all our projects at Adam Matthew Digital we try to preserve a sense of the experience of ‘real’ archive work for our users, and tailor the design each of our digital resources specifically to echo the physical organisation of the original archive as far as we can. Certainly it is a curiosity of my own professional life that I really treasure my visits to archives, experiencing the tactile materiality of historic documents and harnessing the expertise and enthusiasm of archival staff. So I like to think of digital resources as a stepping stone to encourage students and scholars to engage with and seek out these hidden treasures in person. However, there are some advantages to the digital version which users of the physical archive just don’t get to enjoy. Some of the functionality we have built into the website really allows users to explore the content in new ways which just aren’t possible – or are extremely time-consuming – in the archive environment. I do think it’s interesting, though, to consider the impact of some of even the most basic technology on the user experience, and question how this might affect the use of the material.
- So, for example – searching. One of the biggest ways that the digital environment has transformed the experience of using MO is the ability to search the material. Currently, you can full-text search the File Reports and Publications, and search keyword indexing for the other material types. This makes it much quicker for users to find material related to their subject of interest, and is particularly useful for students looking to use Mass Observation sources when writing on specific themes. However useful searching may be, though, I think it does pose a danger of discouraging users from browsing the manuscript materials and coming across hidden gems, which is one of the real delights of the collection. Personally, I think one of the most important and unique aspects of the Mass Observation Archive is the ability for the researcher to build up a very personal relationship with the individual Mass Observation participants through browsing their writings, as you can watch their life unfold and change as they send in their monthly instalments. But the only way to do this, really, is to encourage users to browse the diaries or directives of an individual, rather than to simply default to keyword searching. And actually, the digital archive has made this process easier too.
- In the physical archive, diary and directive entries are organised by year and month, with the monthly entries from all the different MO panellists being filed together – as they would have been sent in to the original MO project. In the digital project, these can be quickly arranged by respondent, so that you can see all the diaries or directives written by one panellist together simultaneously. This has a strikingly different effect on the way that we read the diaries, with the effect being of a single person’s streamlined narrative over a number of months or years, as opposed to the impression of reading a ‘group’ that you get when you go through the diaries in the archive context (although it is possible to recreate the month-by-month ‘group’ reading experience in the digital project by using a date search).
- Another relatively minor, but I think really useful, feature that has helped join the dots between the physical materials, is the ability to cross-search between diarist and directive responses. So you can see here that there is an option on this diary page to view ‘Further Material by this Contributor’. Basically, it allows you to instantly move between a MO respondent’s different submissions – for example from a diary to a directive. This is something it is really difficult to do in the physical environment, both because the material is stored separately, but also because the numerical codes assigned to each individual are different for diaries, directives and day surveys, so it would impossible to find these related entries without this little piece of functionality. I think it demonstrates perfectly how a small feature can really make life easier for researchers. We didn’t actually include this in the first release of the website but added it later. Such small shifts that broaden the range of browsing and searching options to users, can really impact the reading experience and were one of the most satisfying aspects of the design process.
- Another aspect of the digital experience is the additional features that can aid scholarship and help guide users of different levels to get the most out of the material. Again, in many ways the additional features of the site are intended to recreate the assistance of having experienced archival staff to help guide you through your research – invaluable for anybody, from an undergraduate looking at primary sources for the first time, to a seasoned researcher. In the digital context, we can’t guide individual users through the material in the same way, so a crucial part of designing the website was making sure that information was easily accessible to those who needed it, while not being intrusive to those who didn’t. So with Mass Observation Online we tried to give different ‘pathways’ to users to meet their different research needs. The Introduction pages offer a comprehensive history of MO and a guide to using the material. Likewise, the Contents page has tooltips giving useful information about each type of material to assist users who are less familiar with the archive. Another way that we try to aid teaching and research is through our Additional Resources. For example, our chronology is intended to accompany use of the diaries, allowing users to cross-check events – wartime, cultural or political – that are mentioned in the diaries. This is especially useful because, unsurprisingly, the diarists often refer in passing to current affairs without giving any explanation; the chronology helps users to figure out these references and place them in a broader social context. And our interactive map offers a really nice visual pathway into what can be quite a daunting amount of data, by plotting the locations of all diarists that feature in Mass Observation Online. To explore a particular theme within the map, users can additionally select a ‘Curated Collection’ from the carousel at the top of the map, such as ‘Women in Wartime’ or ‘London during the Blitz’. Finally, we offer free access to customers of Mass Observation Online – offline or via an API – to the full data set of Mass Observation to facilitate data mining projects.
- One of the nice things about working in a digital environment is the ability to keep updating and changing the technology. We’ve already given MOO a facelift in 2015, but we’ll keep adding and improving to it. A major upcoming improvement will be the transformation of the searchability of the online archive through the addition of our HTR technology which we introduced to certain of our products last year. This uses AI to ‘read’ handwritten text and produce incredibly accurate full text search results. Applied to MO, this will allow for instant searching of any word within its vast range of manuscript content - making the diaries, directives, topic collections and day surveys fully searchable for the first time. At the same time as implementing this technology, we’ll also roll out comprehensive OCR of all the typescript content too – something we’ve avoided doing so far as it would have skewed search results unfairly towards printed content. Thus, all of MO will be completely full text searchable, an incredible boon for any user.
- It’s long been our ambition to complete the online archive by making digitally available the incredible Mass Observation Project, which revived the tradition of Mass Ob writing in 1981 and continues to the present day. This is a much-used part of the collection as interest in the history of the 1980s explodes, and there is an incredible vibrancy of scholarship taking place around this treasure trove of content. It will be so exciting to put this online. We also plan to include an open access component to this, encompassing both the new modern content and some of the original MOA content, to aid community engagement and ensure that Mass Observation is accessible online to a wider audience. This is an unofficial announcement so please don’t tweet for now until we’ve made a more formal announcement.
- Balanced approach.
- AB – what have you learnt from the first stage of the project in order to improve the development of the second? AB – more and more we’re seeing teaching frameworks with outcomes related to students’ abilities to conduct independent research or unique research as part of a group. Digital archives are here to hopefully overcome the roadblocks that many undergraduates face …those being lack of access to the physical material AND potentially lacking the preparation and archival literacy skills needed to maximise one’s time in the archive. Digital archives are low-risk for undergraduate researchers/ AB – talking about access and “time” with the material – is it the responsibility of special collections/archives and/or publishers to teach information literacy or archival literacy? Do you think undergraduates are equipped to handle a digital copy of the archive or do they need enhanced features of a digital platform in order to fully get to grips with this material. My question, therefore, is should contextual information, exhibitions, interactive tools sit on top of the search/browse functions of the digital archive in order to provide context, interactive elements as a default? Should the digital archive bring context, enticing UI and interactive features for all users or should they sit on the sidelines as peripheral tools for users who need them? AB – should digital archives actively develop the platform to give context and interactive features or is it the responsibility of researchers/educators/students to equip themselves to be archivally literate. Should the digital archive provide a different purpose to that of the physical archive? Do you think digitised archival collections are more useful for teaching humanities research skills or less useful? AB – what are the plans for open access?