Ignite Talk on the Exploring British Design Project given at the Europeana AGM 2015, Amsterdam, 4th November 2015.
http://pro.europeana.eu/event/europeana-annual-general-meeting-2015
2. Exploring British Design
Exploring British Design
CC BY-SA
• AHRC: “Digital Transformations
aims to exploit the potential of
digital technologies to transform
research in the arts and
humanities”
• Archives Hub: aggregator of
archive descriptions
• Brighton Design Archives, the
University of Brighton
• Archives Hub data -> Archives
Portal Europe -> Europeana
7. ADRIAN STEVENSON
Senior Technical Coordinator, Jisc Manchester, UK
adrian.stevenson@jisc.ac.uk
http://twitter.com/adrianstevenson
http://exploredesign.archiveshub.ac.uk
France, Public Domain
1921, National Library of France
Agence de presse Meurisse
Colombes : championnats de France d’Athlétisme :
rivière, le speaker
Editor's Notes
Hello, my name is Adrian Stevenson and I’m a Senior Technical Coordinator working for Jisc in the UK.
Today I want to briefly outline a one year project we’ve recently completed called ‘Exploring British Design’ which was funded by AHRC.
A key collaborator on the project was the Archives Hub based in the UK that I work on. The Hub aggregates archival descriptions from about 280 institutions in the UK, from the very large such as the British Library to the very small such as the Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, making these archives available to be searched through our website, APIs and findable on Google.
For ‘Exploring British Design’ we collaborated with one of our enthusiastic contributors, the Brighton Design Archive based at the University of Brighton. We took the ‘Britain Can Make It’ Exhibition from 1946 as the focus as this event.
So what’s the connection with Europeana? The Archives Hub is contributing data to the Archives Portal Europe. The plan is that APE data will be available through Europeana at some point in the future.
So lets have a look. This is the home page of the website. You can see that we take people, i.e. the designers and architects, their organisations, and the events they were involved with such as the exhibition as the starting points, i.e. not the archive records as such.
What’s unique about this project is that we’re going beyond the record as being about about one person, one organisation and having one focus. The reality is that archives are about the connections between all sorts of people, places, events such as the exhibition, and much of this information is effectively ‘locked in’ the archival records. This is what we’re trying to draw these out.
The idea is that anything can be a primary focus whether they are archival materials, people, organisations, places, events. Some of you may recognise this as an idea relating to linked data, and indeed this is loosely the approach we took for the under the hood implementation. We also looked an archival name authority standard called EAC-CPF to help with this.
You see here how we’ve tried to emphasise the relationship types, such as ‘friend of’, ‘collaborates with, ‘colleague of’ and so on. Researchers most interested in people, events, etc. not in archives per se.
This is a view the exhibition page, focussing in on it as an event in its own right with a location, related people. This sort of information hasn’t historically been captured all that usefully in archival descriptions.
Jane Drew (screenshot): We included visualisations, but these actually fall far short of the complexity of the relationships. It’s quite hard to get these to work effectively, but they give a sense of the relations between architect Jane Drew and Le Corbusier, or even Croydon High School for Girls.
So hopefully you can get a sense of how we’ve tried to present researchers with more flexible routes through the connections we created, helping to surface relationships between people, organisations and events that were effectively hidden in our traditional document-based way of presenting information.