"Save your digital stuff!"

A blog post from Jenny Mitcham our Digital Archivist - written for International Digital Preservation Day

Most of us have a computer of some description (sometimes more than one!). Working with digital has become very much a part of our everyday life, but what do we do with the stuff that we create on the computer? How do we make sure that the important bits (those bits that we want to keep) are looked after for future generations?

Memories in the form of physical photographs have been handed down to children and grandchildren since the advent of photography, but now we create digital photographs (often with no intention of ever printing them out), how do we ensure they last as long as their analogue counterparts?

It is my job as a digital archivist to think about these sorts of things...but that doesn’t mean that everyone else shouldn’t be thinking about them too. The fragility of digital information should matter to all of us if we care about our personal and collective histories and the digital legacy that we want to leave behind.

Today is International Digital Preservation Day, a day that aims to: “create greater awareness of digital preservation that will translate into a wider understanding which permeates all aspects of society”

I think it is fair to say that many of us are better at looking after our physical things than our digital files. A couple of years ago I blogged about a personal example of this, discussing the different levels of care that even I apply to a physical photo book over the digital originals. Ironic really given my job description!

So today I’d like to talk about Personal Digital Archiving - not what I do in my job but what you can do to look after your digital stuff. 

What is a personal digital archive?

A personal digital archive doesn’t have to be anything formal or special, it doesn’t necessarily need to be visible or accessible to anyone other than you as the owner. It is your own collection of digital files that you have decided that you want to keep hold of, perhaps just for your own purposes or perhaps with the intention of handing them down to your children or grandchildren in the future.

Just like we may have kept physical photographs, film or audio recordings and correspondence in the past, now we keep digital photographs, digital video and audio and email.

But digital is by its very nature fragile. While we have the ability to keep many copies of the same thing we also have to guard against problems such as:

• Hardware obsolescence (will there be a computer that can read this disk in ten years time?) 
• Software obsolescence (will there be a programme that can open this file in ten years time?) 
• Hard drive failure (my computer has died and I’ve lost everything!) 
• Accidental damage (I’ve overwritten or deleted my files by mistake!) 
• Malicious damage (a computer virus has corrupted all of my files!)

I found some of my old data from the 1990's in a bedside drawer. Does anyone else still have data stored on floppy disks?

We should all be taking some small steps to actively manage our digital stuff. If you care about it, don’t leave its survival to chance.

How to manage a personal digital archive?

The good news is, there are many things we can do as individuals to manage our own personal digital archives. All it takes is a little bit of time and thought and potentially some financial investment in a good backup or storage solution.

File and directory naming

Descriptive file naming and the use of logical directory structures will help ensure that you can locate your files when you need them. This doesn’t actually take a lot of time when it is done at the point of creation. Unfortunately it does take much longer when you have to go back and make sense of many years of accumulated digital ‘stuff’...or worse still if someone else has to sort through your digital legacy in the future.

Gone (thankfully!) are the days when we only had 8 characters with which to create our file names (and 3 additional characters with which to record the file extension). Back in the 1980’s and early 1990’s there was good reason why our filenames were cryptic, but today there is no excuse for not naming files in a descriptive and logical manner.

Happiness for me is knowing what a file is when I double click on it to open it up. This is such a basic thing but makes a real difference when you are trying to locate something. Having to open up lots of files in order to find the one you want is not only frustrating, but so easily avoidable.

Weeding and deleting

Storage is relatively inexpensive and this means it is all too easy to just keep things for the sake of it. If you keep everything you’ve ever created this will make it harder to find the really valuable things in the future. It is worth periodically checking over your digital files and weeding out those things that do not have longer term value and do not need to be kept. 

Storage and backing up

A reliable digital storage solution is key to managing your digital files. There are no hard and fast rules as to which type of storage is best but I have a few tips.

It is difficult to manage data that is scattered over numerous types of portable media. Portable media certainly has its fair share of problems. We were once told that CDs were indestructible but this is clearly not the case! USB sticks are handy to have but are also incredibly easy to lose. Other portable media types such as floppy disks are now obsolete - when did you last see a PC with a floppy disk drive? It is better to gather your digital files in one place where there is adequate space - your PC hard drive, a portable hard drive or a cloud service for example.

You should implement regular backups. It is very risky to have only one copy of the files that are important to you as they could easily get damaged, corrupted or stolen. You should ensure that files are backed up and stored elsewhere. Think about what would happen to your data if there was a fire, flood or break in at your home or office (note I had to think about just this a couple of years ago).

Make sure that you have other copies of your data elsewhere that you can access if you need to. You could use a cloud service provider for example or store a portable hard drive containing a copy of your files in a different location.

Whatever you choose to do, try not to make it too complex and if you can make use of an automated backup service, this can often be more robust and reliable than remembering to do it yourself!

Where do I find out more?

This post has only really touched on the very basics of managing your personal digital archives but there are so many great resources available on this topic if you want to explore this in more depth.

Firstly we have some good practice guidance on the Borthwick website for those people and organisations who are creating digital files - Managing your digital material: some good practice guidelines for donors and depositors. It was originally aimed at those who are intending on donating or depositing their material to an archive but the advice is applicable to anyone working with digital files.

Preserving your digital memories by The Library of Congress is a really helpful and easy to follow brochure. It gives tips on how to preserve some of the most common elements of a personal digital archive: Digital Photographs, Digital Audio, Digital Video, Electronic Mail, Personal Digital Records and Websites. It is really quick and easy to read with one side of key tips and pointers for each of these media types. Well worth a look.

Guidelines for creators of personal archives from the Paradigm project is a useful resource if you want to know more about file naming, documentation, file formats and backing up. From the same project, 11 top tips for preserving your personal data is a great quick reference guide to what you can do to manage your files and when you should do it.

Perspectives on Personal Digital Archiving is an fascinating and eclectic selection of blog posts from the Library of Congress relating to personal digital archiving, brought together into one publication. It includes ‘Four easy tips for preserving your digital photographs’ and an interesting piece called ‘Remember when we had photographs?’. In a call to action entitled ‘Forestalling personal digital doom’ the author states “Like organizing a closet, or rearranging a kitchen cabinet, personal digital archiving is easy to put off, easy to forget and easy to make excuses for avoiding.” Hopefully after browsing this selection of short essays you will be encouraged to tackle it head on!

Born Digital: Guidance for Donors, Dealers, and Archival Repositories by the Council on Library and Information Resources is well worth a read if you are planning to offer your digital files to an archival institution or repository. It is aimed at both donors and repository staff and perhaps of particular interest in this context is appendix D which is a checklist of recommendations for donors and dealers.

Feeling inspired?

If this post has inspired you to do something to protect your digital legacy today, we’d love to hear about it! Add a comment to this post or Tweet to @UoYBorthwick with the #IDPD17 hashtag to tell us what you’ve done.

Testing the online catalogue: results of user testing

Back in the Spring of this year, we carried out two phases of user testing on our online catalogue, Borthcat.   The key results of the first phase of testing are described over on our Digital Archivist, Jen Mitcham's, blog, as well as some of the actions we were able to take prior to the public launch of Borthcat in April 2016. While the basic phase of testing allowed us to make some really practical and in some cases speedy changes to the catalogue interface, the second phase of testing really gave us insight into individual user interactions with the catalogue  to examine how users search for and retrieve information from our holdings. Whilst results of similar testing have been carried out with Access to Memory (AtoM: our web-based, open-source archival description software) in one or two other institutions in North America, at the time of testing the Borthwick was the first UK AtoM user to carry out such detailed work. The findings of both the first and second phase of testing formed the backbone of my Masters dissertation in Archives and Records Management and, as I'm graduating from the University of Dundee next week (!), it seemed like the perfect time to give you a report into the results from the more detailed tests we carried out.

The Borthcat homepage

Why did we do it?

Across the archives sector, online access to information is now pretty much routine and users often expect digital versions of finding aids and, ideally, digitised version of the documents that they can search and examine. In developing our own online interface, Borthcat, we wanted to make sure that not only was information available to users but (more crucially, in my opinion) that users were able to successfully find that information using the tools we had provided. Looking at our own user base from the statistics we capture, between March and April 2016 - just prior to the launch of Borthcat - there were over double the amount of remote enquiries (1614) to physical visits (731) to the searchroom. In the same period there were over 13,300 unique hits our online digital document repositories: Find My Past, the Cause Papers and the Archbishops' Registers. We wanted to make our catalogue as informative and accessible as possible, not least because a large proportion of both our current and future users are researchers who may never be able to physically visit us at all.

How did we do it?

Jen's blog explores the results of the first phase of testing that we carried out - recruiting our users through a mixture of social media channels and onsite advertising in the searchroom and asking them to complete a brief online questionnaire.

The second stage of testing asked participants to work through a series of set exercises using Borthcat while being observed. During these sessions, participants' screens were recorded using Screencastify to capture their mouse movements and the number of clicks they made.

We wanted to capture some qualitative data on user interactions to enrich the statistical information we'd obtained in the first round of testing. We used the Archival Metrics Toolkit (a fantastic resource!) to help design the exercises and tried to ameliorate the effects of such a controlled environment. Of course, we couldn't hope to fully replicate a researcher's independent enquiry but the results we obtained were interesting and gave us an insight into our users that we hadn't had before.

What did we find out?

Here are just a few of the main findings from the testing.

Limited use of hierarchical menu

Users heavily relied on using the free text search bar at the top of the Borthcat homepage to identify records. Only one participant in the second phase of testing used the hierarchical information available on the left-hand side of the screen, and another used free text searching as their sole retrieval technique throughout the test period. This could be for a mixture of reasons. The majority of our entries in Borthcat are at collection level, and so there are fewer hierarchical descriptions available currently (although the test exercises focused on those archives with full catalogues). Further, and as reflected in the basic phase of testing, many users have become familiar with a free-text search when using search engines like Google.

Overwhelming 'wall of text'

Users found the level of information available on each entry, and the amount of results returned for some searches, to be overwhelming in some cases. There was an overall idea, again in common with the basic testing, that users wanted Borthcat to be able to tailor information more specifically to their queries. I think that this is where the presence of an archivist or the staff in the searchroom who understand our holdings are the most valuable asset we can have; this situation would be more easily resolved for a researcher who was onsite and able to consult a staff member for advice. Where the researcher is remote and is searching for unfamiliar (or unknown!) material then it is vital that the catalogue presents information clear enough for them to make an informed choice.  Some users in the observed tests used keyboard techniques like CTRL+F to narrow down occurrences of specific terms within an archival description, although the majority didn't.

Typeahead search suggestions 

Understanding icons

A further usability issue to come out of the detailed testing was that the icons used in Borthcat's 'Typeahead' search - where potential results are generated as you type - are not defined in our customised iteration of AtoM. In an exercise designed to look at how users interacted with our subject-term listings, participants were asked to find out how many of our holdings contain diaries - a subject terms that has been linked across several separate archives. The majority of users did this by searching for the term ‘diaries’ in the free-text search box. When they did so they were confronted by several entries, all called 'Diaries', at item, file and sub-series level, all from separate archives, as well as a subject term entry for diaries in general. The archival entries are all marked with a 'description' icon and the subject entry is marked with an icon showing a label. For those of us working with Borthcat on a daily basis, it was simple to select the relevant entry and to continue our work but most participants in the study repeated the search several times in order to work through all the options before finding the entry they required. This allowed us to identify a way to improve the usability of Borthcat as well as giving us food for thought in how we construct the titles of our records. The linking of records through the use of different subject terms is one of the most interesting capabilities of AtoM - it allows connections to be made across archives in a way that would be very difficult to do using paper finding aids and can draw out unexpected links. Being able to see how users interact with this capability over the longer term will be very important in understanding how researchers can make the most of the information we hold.

A personal connection

It really came across during the testing that users value a personal connection to their research, either through searching for personal names or through bringing their own research contexts and knowledge to the way they search for information. Several users commented that they would really appreciate a feature that would allow them to collect all the records they found interesting in order to look at them again or to send them through to the searchroom for retrieval. This wasn't something I had expected, but is something that other archives do. A great example is the pinboard feature at the Marks and Spencer archive, Marks in Time.

Carrying out this exercise has been really helpful in understanding that what our users want from our records and what we think they want isn’t always the same thing. Involving our users directly in the development of Borthcat was also a fantastic opportunity to engage more with our audience on a project that will be of practical benefit. I must thank all of the participants who took part in each phase of testing; without their invaluable contribution of time in completing both the survey and the observed exercises, we would not have been able to gain the insights we have done into how our users retrieve information, and how they'd like to be able to retrieve information in the future. It is of vital importance for us and for other archive repositories to keep our users’ needs at the heart of their considerations when making archival information accessible online.

Lydia Dean

Archivist

The results of this user testing have been discussed in more detail in my MLitt dissertation ‘Access to Memory: Understanding how users of the Borthwick Institute search for online archival information’ through the University of Dundee. You can find out more about our work with AtoM through our blog and Jen's blog 'Digital Archiving at the Borthwick' .

Rehabilitating John Summerland

It really is a privilege to start blogging for the York Retreat Archive digitisation project. The Retreat captured my imagination as a History undergraduate but I never had the opportunity for in-depth research, for want of an original hypothesis. It seemed like it had all been done before. But somehow an idea came to me, I followed it up and here I am writing a PhD on the Retreat nearly a decade later. The more time I spend with this material, the more I realise there is still a great deal to say about the Retreat. Making these archives available online will enable a new generation of research. So I had better get writing quickly lest someone steals my thunder!

Like so many undergraduates, the first time I came across the Retreat was in Michael Foucault’s Madnessand Civilisation. One moment of the Retreat’s early history particularly resonated with me, and has stuck in my mind ever since;

Tuke

‘Samuel Tuke tells how he received at the Retreat a maniac, young and prodigiously strong, whose paroxysms caused panic in those around him and even among his guards. When he entered the Retreat he was loaded with chains; he wore handcuffs; his clothes were attached by ropes. He had no sooner arrived than all his shackles were removed, and he was permitted to dine with the keepers; his agitation immediately ceased; "his attention appeared to be arrested by his new situation." He was taken to his room; the keeper explained that the entire house was organized in terms of the greatest liberty and the greatest comfort for all, and that he would not be subject to any constraint so long as he did nothing against the rules of the house or the general principles of human morality. For his part, the keeper declared he had no desire to use the means of coercion at his disposal. The maniac was sensible of the kindness of his treatment. He promised to restrain himself.’ (pp233-234, Routledge Classics, 2001)

Naturally, having been let loose myself as it were in the asylum archives, I wanted to know more about this incredibly powerful and important moment.

Whilst we may question Foucault’s analysis and style, he cannot be accused of hyperbole in this instance; the passage paraphrases Samuel Tuke’s account of the incident in his 1813 Descriptionof the Retreat, save for the fact that Tuke probably didn’t witness the incident himself and made no claim to have done so;

‘Some years ago, a man, about thirty-four years of age, of almost Herculean size and figure, was brought to the house. He had been afflicted several times before; and so constantly, during the present attack, had he been kept chained, that his clothes were contrived to be taken off and put on by means of strings, without removing his manacles….’

Tuke added that ‘the patient was frequently very vociferous, and threatened his attendants, who in their defence were very desirous of restraining him by the (straight) jacket.’ (Description pp.93-94)

However, the patient’s case notes (RET 6/5/1A p.77) and correspondence from the family (RET 1/5/1/7) give a different angle to these events. We assume from how Foucault and Tuke use this incident that the ‘maniac’ (whose name was John Summerland) had been under restraint in another institutions for some time before admission to the Retreat. The moment of Summerland’s release is often used to illustrate a liberating shift in psychiatric methods as patients were brought out of the darkness of Bedlam dungeons and into the light of ‘moral treatment.’ Yet the reality is less straightforward. Summerland’s case notes reveal he had indeed been restrained, ‘fastened with chains’ and ‘repeatedly bled with cathartic medicines’ whilst under confinement in Philadelphia. But he then returned to England on a voyage which would have taken weeks, and would not have been possible under restraint. Upon his return to England he lived with his parents in Staffordshire for over two months and again there is no mention of him being under restraint here or on his journey to the Retreat. Summerland’s case notes add further information which seems to contradict Tuke’s version ‘he frequently converses rationally, tho in a high strain… It does not appear that he has ever attempted to injure himself or others.’ And whilst Summerland was indeed ‘a large man of great muscular strength and power’ he was ‘much reduced in flesh on his admission.’

Letters from his family to the Retreat show that Summerland, despite his vague diagnosis of ‘derangement’ managed to attend Quaker Meetings for Worship before his admission. This involved sitting in silence for a considerable amount of time. Again, hardly the place for a raving maniac.

Samuel Tuke had access to all the Retreat case notes and used them to statistically demonstrate the Retreat’s success in Description of the Retreat. It seems that Tuke exaggerated Summerland’s symptoms to promote the Retreat’s therapeutic methods. This well-intentioned exaggeration has gone largely unquestioned by history, leaving poor John Summerland with a bad reputation. Happily he was discharged after only four months and suffered no relapse. Yet it was hardly the miracle cure that Samuel Tuke claimed, ten years later in Description of the Retreat; as he was sent on his way to the Retreat, John Summerland’s brother William wrote to William Tuke that John ‘seems much better and I make no doubt with your regular treatment and attention he will soon be well.’ 

This is one of a series of blog posts published as material from the Retreat archive is digitised and made available online. More information about the Wellcome Library funded project to digitise the Retreat archive can be found on the project pages of our website. Digital surrogates from the Retreat archive project so far are available via the Wellcome Library. 

This blog post was written by Jon Mitchell who is a doctoral student in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Leeds. His thesis relates to eighteenth century Quaker attitudes to mental illness, and is funded by The White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities. He can be contacted at prjm@leeds.ac.uk.  

Continuity and change at the Retreat

Arranging a tour of the grounds of the Retreat for a morning in January was a bit of a risk. We were truly at the mercy of the elements! We were fortunate however to have picked a day when there was no snow or ice on the ground and nothing falling from the sky. Saying that, this was one of the coldest weeks for a while and the temperatures only just peaked at a chilly 1 degree celsius as we were shown around the extensive grounds of the hospital.

We have been lucky enough to receive funding from the Wellcome Library to digitise the archive of the Retreat (a psychiatric hospital that is situated right next to the University of York where the Borthwick is based). We are several months into this project now and are in the process of delivering the 3rd of 10 batches of digital images to Wellcome for ingest and processing before inclusion in their library catalogue.

Last week our in-house resident expert on the Retreat archive, Kath Webb took the project team around the grounds of the hospital and gave us a talk on its buildings, history and on some of the key figures involved with shaping the institution since it was opened in 1796.

It really is a fascinating place and has a key position not only in the history of mental health care, but in Quaker history and the history of York. It was great to see the full extents of the grounds, and hear how the land and its buildings have evolved and developed over time. Lots has changed but there was also a surprising level of continuity. Landscape features and plantings that are visible on early plans and images of the Retreat and are now being re-established. Some of the ‘newer’ additions to the archive held at the Borthwick Institute are a set of large 20th century plans of the Retreat grounds, showing planting and marking positions of trees, and allied to these there are some Retreat ‘tree books’ noting trees and plantings - a rich source of information for the modern gardeners.

A cricket match in progress in the Retreat grounds in the early 20th century (reference RET 1/8/4/16/2)

 We were taken to the sports fields at the back of the Retreat and later in the day were shown old black and white photographs of the staff cricket and hockey teams that played there. We went into the burial ground where local Quakers and Retreat residents had been buried. Very simple headstones stood in rows, but recognisable names from the archives were all around us.

The project team are used to the cold (working as they do in an archive where we try and maintain temperatures that will cause the least stress to the documents within our care) however by the end of the tour we were starting to lose feeling in our fingers and toes and were glad to get back to the office and get the kettle on. It was great to have some time out to understand and appreciate the character of the Retreat and put the work we are all doing on this project into context.

The Wellcome Library will be releasing the digital surrogates that we create on a rolling schedule as we deliver them. We are excited to be able to announce that the first small batch is already available via the Wellcome Library Catalogue.

 

The women’s staff hockey team in 1902 in the grounds of the Retreat (reference RET 1/8/4/15/1)

We are working through the Retreat archive in the order it appears within our catalogue so the first small test batch falls within the general administrative section and consists primarily of minute books from directors meetings from 1792 to 1928.

See for example the first item within the catalogue (archival reference RET 1/1/1/1), a minute book from 28 June 1792 to 24 June 1841. On the Wellcome Library catalogue we can see both the catalogue description of the item and the digital surrogates produced by our digitisation team and displayed within a viewer that allows you to move to the page of interest, zoom into the text and pan around the document.

This is just a taster of what is to come. We hope to highlight other interesting items from the archive as the project progresses so watch this space.


Jenny Mitcham, Digital Archivist, Borthwick Institute

New website reveals the story of the lost Aero Girls (and boys)

Nearly a year after the search for the real life Rowntree Aero Girls began, I am delighted to announce the launch of a website dedicated to the remarkable stories of the women and men behind this collection of postwar paintings.

Left to right: Stephanie Tennant, Aero Girl portrait by Anthony Devas [R/Aerogirls];
Stephanie Tennant (Archive photograph, 1960s); Aero advert, 1956 [R/Guardbooks/W20] 

As many as 40 Aero Girls portraits appeared in Rowntree Aero chocolate advertising between 1950 and 1957, in British newspapers, magazines and early ITV commercials. An accompanying slogan proclaimed, “For her - AERO – the milk-chocolate that’s different!”

These representations of modern young women formed part of a successful campaign to relaunch the Aero bar onto the UK market following a break in production during the Second World War. Since the early 1990s, 20 of the portraits have been stored in the Rowntree & Co. Ltd Archive, with little known about the artists or the sitters. While the advertisers J. Walter Thompson wanted the portraits to stand out as being ‘different’ - like the chocolate itself - they kept the female sitters anonymous, and the product firmly in the foreground.

The Search

After launching a public appeal for information and hosting a landmark exhibition at York Mansion House in October 2013, we were contacted by our first living ‘Aero Girl’, Pamela Synge. Synge, now in her 90s, is a visual artist, performer and writer. Her portrait was also the only Aero painting to feature in a television advert, on the newly-launched ITV in 1955. 

Another of our early successes was tracing the last living Aero artist, Arnhem veteran Frederick Deane, whose recollections provided the names of two more Aero Girls, former JWT Art Department employee Rhona Lanzon and the Vogue model MyrtleCrawford. Then, in March 2014, we discovered that the renowned contemporary painter (and soon to be winner of the John Moores Painting Prize 2014) Rose Wylie had been an Aero Girl. Wylie reflects that she was a “rebellious art student” at the time, adding that her true image was “more punk than Mills & Boon cover.” In fact, many of the other Aero Girl sitters also worked in the creative industries, as painters, lithographers, film directors and dancers.

Relatives of the Aero Girls and Aero painters have been tireless in helping us to piece together countless fascinating stories behind the paintings, which lead from the battlefields of the Second World War, through polite society in post-war London, to present-day celebrity, touching on art, social history, fashion, the changing role of women and even the Profumo Affair.

Who Were the Aero Girls? project website pages (York Digital Library, 2014)

A new website gathers together archive images, footage, biographies and first-hand accounts about the Aero Girls collection for the very first time and you can explore it all at York Digital Library. 

Over the last few days we have been contacted by another Aero Girl, the subject of Anthony Devas’ Art Student (c.1950). Painter and former art teacher Barbara Pitt was aged 17 and studying at Goldsmiths College of Art, London, when Devas painted her portrait. She moved to South Africa in 1965, and contacted us from her home in Cape Town with some colourful reminiscences of bohemian London and invaluable material from her own archive.

We would love to continue adding information to our online resource. If you would like to contribute to the ‘Who Were the Aero Girls?’ project please contact us at borthwick-institute@york.ac.uk

Kerstin Doble, Project Curator: Who Were the Aero Girls?