Teresa Doherty- UKAD 2016 forum
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Archival data from the Royal College of Nursing Library and Archive Service was inadvertently integrated into the library's resource discovery system. The library aims to provide access to 17 datasets through its website to support research on the history of nursing. Users can now search the archival records alongside the library collection through a single search interface on the library's website.
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Teresa Doherty- UKAD 2016 forum
- 1. BREAKING NEWS: ARCHIVAL DATA INFILTRATES LIBRARY RESOURCE DISCOVERY SYSTEM
- 2. WHO’S IT FOR? © Royal College of Nursing
- 3. WHY NOW? • User Needs and Expectation • Opportunity – new website • Sector Developments
- 5. 17 Datasets
- 6. ROYAL COLLEGE OF NURSING LIBRARY AND ARCHIVE SERVICE To be or not to be -= including the archive
- 7. ROYAL COLLEGE OF NURSING LIBRARY AND ARCHIVE SERVICE To be or not to be -= including the archive
- 12. HAS IT BEEN WORTH IT? https://www.flickr.com/photos/benjreay/14713228051
- 13. www.rcn.org.uk/library Teresa.Doherty@rcn.org,uk @Dohertyta and @RCNLibraries www.rcn.org.uk/centenary #RCN100 #HistNursing CONTACT
Editor's Notes
- Hello, I’m Teresa Doherty, Royal College of Nursing Library & Archive Services, Joint Manager. This winter Royal College of Nursing launched a new website and at the same time we introduced a Resource Discovery package - a one stop search for 17 datasets including our library and our archive catalogues. Our recently reorganised team harbours dreams of an integrated team, an integrated service and integrated data for our users; but although Resource Discovery packages are now common across university libraries they very rarely include archival data. This talk is about a walk in the unknown. Find out how we’ve managed to make sense of our data for our users, and how to manage our librarians and archivists expectations! Spoiler alert – Welsh language and authority records may be mentioned. www.rcn.org.uk/library
- Our audience is primarily our members – 430,000 across the UK, although only a proportion actively use the library and archive. They are nurses and health care assistants, who are busy with their day jobs. They range in academic status from those with limited education attainment to Professor Dames (awarded for contribution to nursing knowledge). At certain points they use us – such as wanting to change career, for revalidation, for answering specific questions on practise, as they develop as specialist nurses, and indeed ‘just for fun’ as retired members. Often they are dipping in and out of our service over their lifetime, and are unfamiliar with changing resources and search techniques. As most of our members use us online: they may not have a visual sense of what we hold in the library, let alone the archives We need to make our systems quick and easy, encouraging users to find stuff they are interested in so they will come back time and again to explore more. Re Archives - though most of our users are looking for contemporary support, most also appreciate, or need to know more about their history. Some topics and challenges, such as cleanliness, infection control and human behaviour have not changed that much in the last 100 years. Something that is coming to the fore during this our centenary year.
- Why Now? User needs and expectation Providing subject specialist library and archive services across the UK The majority need to search 17 datasets easily For archives we wanted to raise the visibility of our collections within immediate member need (balanced approach), to integrate it in our offer We need to increase our self service take-up of e-resources by our users Expectation - increasingly our graduate nursing students join the RCN are used to using Discovery in university libraries – they were missing that tool Timeliness – internal driven opportunities The wider RCN announced the delivery of a new website, we put Resource Discovery on our shopping list The design principals for the new website focus on user need and Discovery was seen to be highly desirable – after all we host 17 datasets for users to negotiate For the archives – it’s our Centenary so there is a heightened organisational awareness of integrating historical and contemporary knowledge Sector Developments We’ve been looking at the increased takeup of resource discovery across the sector and like many in the sector thought ooo we’d like that We needed something scaleable – TNA’s Discovery is very wizzy but we’re not the TNA We have limited in-house IT development so needed something off the shelf that didn’t cost too much and didn’t require our IT team to develop And the sector has shifted, so there were options we could realistically look into. From the outset we wanted archive data included in this. However, finding working examples for one of the off the shelf Discovery packages proved difficult, at the time there was only one working example – hence sharing our experience today Our IT team really liked the idea and were very supportive – they willingly paid for it as part of the web project. So we got cracking and got a beta version in place for last December.
- So here’s our new front page – If you have a mobile device you can play along. www.rcn.org.uk/library Responsive and simplified design suits our users; we’ve seen a huge increase in the past 3 years in access via mobile devices Our new web pages indicate a continued increase in access to and use of our online resources. And there’s Resource Discovery a simple search box, embedded up front and obvious on the Library & Archive home page described by one of our team as ‘better than Google’
- Sadly not the title of a hit song. 17 datasets is a lot of information. The golden arrow points at the Archive catalogue (CALM). Let’s repeat – it’s one of 17 datasets. It’s really important to remember Resource Discovery doesn’t replicate catalogues or resources, it’s a signpost that picks up the headlines and directs users at the right resource. So it’s an introduction to what’s in all the datasets, allowing users to identify what they’d like to look at in more detail After a recent reorganisation our 6 LAS teams have been actively looking for joint projects and ways to integrate the teams. History is increasingly valued as a way of reaching out to our members and publicising our specialist collections and services. Celebrating our Centenary this year has also helped So we included archive catalogue data in the brief from the beginning The main suppliers confirmed that yes they could include EAD-XML data. They also made claims about including EAC-xml data which I’ll touch on later. However when we looked at examples of this being put into practice we found the cupboard a little bare. Most of the off the shelf packages have not yet been used to incorporate archival data. We could only find 2 examples – both of which resulted in clunky looking archival data. However we had hope! IT gave us the money and we fixed on a supplier. One tipping point was that the packages come with the ability to search in different languages – one had Welsh and the other didn’t. As a UK wide organisation that includes a ‘4 country’ section in its business cases this was a small but significant offer! And yes, there are welsh language items in our collection
- Typical search result Searching for ‘mental health nursing’ – results weighted by the number of hits it reflects predominantly published materials – e/Books e/Journals Newspaper / Magazine Article You have the ability to filter by date or by format or by discipline It’s been relatively straightforward to implement – Most of the datasets shared core ‘library’ data elements as you can see – title, author, date, and link. Each of the datasets had their own peculiar issues, so a long list of fixes for our esystems librarians to work through. Most of the resources were plugged during the autumn ready for the website launch in December. Despite teething problems – some of which are still being chased up it’s a huge improvement on what we had
- Partial Screenshot to show detail of a typical search Summary entries are in the central ‘column’ and depending which item you hover on, additional information appears in the right column. The data display is unsurprisingly based on MARC / Dublin Core. And yes I’ll get to archive data in a moment. But remember we’re feeding into a LIBRARY resource discovery system. Irrespective of the format or dataset, the key fields showing in the central column remain the same – Title Author Source (Journal title) Date. Links are in grey at the bottom, signposting to catalogues or to online publications, or to the databases. The expanded information on the right hand side contains typical library data elements, and again these remain very similar across the majority of our 17 datasets - indeed for all but two of our datasets (our archive and our digitised historical journals).
- Partial Screenshot to show detail of our first attempt with archive data. Not bad: it works! The Central Column gives summary data with the right hand column giving more detail. The link takes you out to CALMView. Summon can’t see the data in CALMView, instead it takes the data from an EAD-xml file which we export from CALM and upload. It’s quick and easy to export a hitlist in CALM in EAD-xml for the whole collection or for individual items. The first and most contentious question we had was : how much information do our users need? As you’ve seen the majority of our collection and its use focuses on contemporary ‘lending’ stock; rather than our archive and library permanent collections. Our objective is to make appropriate archive catalogue descriptions available to users, but not to confuse them. We want to lead them into the catalogue The Resource Discovery options do not enable multilevel hierarchical display and are unlikely to do so. In this context including series, file and item descriptions, was going to be confusing. Many of our catalogue entries are quite skinny, reliant on understanding a full catalogue So we decided to include only export Collection / Fonds level descriptions. Containing key information, this creates a taster, increases visibility and provides something ‘now’ for our team without taking too much time for them to deliver. So what do we want to improve? Well we’re in the middle of adding an image to represent our archives. Obviously we’re missing the RefNo – we’ve managed to map across most of the fields we need in the central panel: Title/ Creator / Dates / and links. The Description shows in full on the right hand side when you hover on the record. We’ve agreed that we’ll try having RefNo in square brackets at the end of the Title.
- So our Shopping List. In the longer term we’d like to push the Archives up the left hand column, The settings are currently set to display according to the number of hits – and the Archives is always going to be towards the bottom – especially if we only include Collection level descriptions. Our suppliers are looking into this for us, but it will be a longer term issue. Also in the longer term we’re considering including individual records that stand alone – for example our oral history collection, or for our small objects (photographs / badges). We’d also like to have an automated export. And remember I said there were two datasets we had difficulty including? One being the archive catalogue, the other being our digitised historical journals. Well, resource discovery tools work well with structured digital repositories. So the longer term solution to our digitised materials is to build a digital repository and plug that into our resource discovery.
- I’ve also been asking Summon about authority records. As the focus is on drawing together simplified Dublin Core data it will be a challenge to ‘map’ authority data across in a meaningful way – especially when the consistency of the rest of the data is considered. And there’s an existing bit of Summon that could be developed in a more meaningful way. Certain searches pull up explanations on the right hand side, pointing at Wikipedia (or possibly other resources . So an example Diabetes is explained here. Now we all have reservations about Wikipedia, but in this context where it adds some basic info alongside searching it is useful.
- Similarly a search for Florence Nightingale pull up the first para from Wikipedia. Summon currently manage their own list of terms, names organisations and of people. So we’re asking them how we can get our organisation names / terms / people included. Or whether we should create a resource they can point at. However it develops in the future, my inclination at the moment is that that authority record data works better in the right hand explanation (prompted by the search term) rather than being in the central body which contains the very long list of individual records.
- Yes it’s been a quick way for the team to incorporate archival data and enable our librarians to trip over interesting archive content in their day to day work (as well as our users) It’s been reasonably quick and painless. Most of the heavy technical development has been carried out by our library colleagues in the wider sector, so we’ve blatantly hung on to others coat tails. We have made compromises in doing so. It’s given our archive and esystems team an opportunity to work together and get to understand each other’s professional methods / cataloguing and differences better by having quite hard in depth conversations about catalogue data. It’s improved our relationship with IT, and informal feedback from wider staff and members has been really positive – and showing that we are a unified Library and Archive service has been integralto the messages we give our wider colleagues and users.
- Hi And has it been worth it – have a look and let me know – here’s my contact details and I’m happy to answer questions Also do take a few minutes to explore the amazing work our team (especially our archive team) have been working on for our centenary. There’s online exhibitions, timelines, a short animated film, a photography competition, various activities such as 100 best books, and of course shopping opportunities. Join the party.