Here’s looking at EU - Borthcat data shared with major networks

Just in time to celebrate Europe Day, we have successfully shared Borthcat’s catalogue descriptions with two major online portals: Archives Portal Europe and the Archives Hub.

RET/8/9/3

The project builds on work to convert and import the detailed catalogues we have for some of our major holdings into Borthcat. Together with the summary descriptions from Project Genesis and the outputs of recent cataloguing projects, it makes over 670 of our collections, and thousands of detailed catalogue descriptions, more easily discoverable by wider research communities. Sharing the data allows our archives to be viewed and interpreted alongside different material from the networks’ respective European and UK contributors. This means archives can be displayed, searched on and contextualised in different and exciting ways.

“It’s difficult to imagine the power that you’re going to have when so many different sorts of data are available.” Tim Berners-Lee

Gateways to discovery

Archives Portal Europe (APE) provides access to information on archival material from across European countries. It is the first time European archives have collaborated and aggregated their data on such a scale and has brought together more than 255 million records from several hundred institutions in more than 30 EU countries. The portal also acts as a data aggregator for Europeana. This offers us future possibilities for links to our digitised archives and other digital objects to be surfaced in a portal which already brings together more than 50 million digitised items, and to continue working alongside the Archives Hub and APE to document and provide access to a shared cultural heritage.

Milnes Coates Letter 787

The Jisc Archives Hub is a vital part of the research and education landscape in the UK. Its open access and standards-based ethos give researchers the ability to search across the huge wealth of UK archives. It shares our vision of making the most of our data, creating descriptions once and using them in many different ways. The technology underpinning the Hub now allows the service to take data from various archive management systems and gives contributors even greater control in the timely uploading, publishing and modification of their descriptions, with a seamless workstream supporting publication to portals like APE.

Realising opportunities

Working collaboratively and sharing our data is central to the continued improvement and development of our resources. As we establish, adopt and drive common standards across different archive systems and datasets we can make sure our descriptions work alongside those created by others and we improve the quality and maximise potential of our data. This helps us and researchers to get the most out of the information and expands the horizons for collaboration and discovery.

Archie the Archive Squirrel

Introducing our new and improved online catalogue!

If you’re a regular visitor to our online catalogue Borthcat (and if you aren’t I recommend checking it out!) you may have noticed a few changes lately.  This is because we’ve made the upgrade to AtoM 2.4, the latest release from Artefactual systems who develop AtoM, or Access to Memory, the archives management system we use here at the Borthwick.  

We first launched Borthcat in April 2016 with 376 top level descriptions of our archival collections and 578 authority records (histories of the individuals, families or organisations which created or featured in them).  Since then Borthcat has grown enormously, reaching users in 136 different countries.  As of April 2018 it boasts 563 top level descriptions and over one thousand related authority records.  A significant number of these archives now also have full catalogues available online, including the Borthwick’s Yorkshire hospital archives, the archive of the Earls of Halifax, and the archives of the Rowntree Company and Vickers scientific instrument makers.

We are always looking to improve Borthcat and make it more accessible and intuitive for our users.  We created a special guide for those users looking for wills or other probate documents that can be accessed whenever someone clicks in the search box.  We also backed up our detailed help page with a page of frequently asked questions and a glossary of terms to help users better understand the way the catalogue works.

The new AtoM release adds yet more improvements that we hope will fill in some of the gaps on Borthcat and introduce new ways of navigating the ever growing mass of information it holds.

So what’s new about AtoM 2.4 and why should you care?

You can search by date

 You might be surprised to learn this wasn’t previously a feature of Borthcat.  When most of the archival descriptions were ‘top level’ or fonds level descriptions this was not such an issue, but now Borthcat has so many full catalogues the ability to filter your search results by date or to sort search results by start or end dates will be incredibly useful.  Are you looking for patient records at The Retreat hospital but only for the 1860s? Just open the advanced search, search for ‘patient records’ in ‘The Retreat Archive’ and fill in the ‘filter by date range’ fields with the earliest and latest date of your search.

Equally you could open The Retreat Archive, select ‘Browse as list’ from the ‘Explore’ menu to the right and order your results in order of the start or end dates.  

Or perhaps you just want to know what our earliest dated archival collection is (the Takamiya Fragments Collection dating from 900 AD) or our most recent (too many to list! We are constantly adding to existing archives).

One of our Takimaya Fragments

You can keep track of the records you’re interested in

Another new feature that we think will be very popular with both users and staff is the clipboard function, as represented by the paperclip seen here on the top right of the page.

As you look through archival descriptions or authority records on Borthcat you will see the paperclip symbol on every entry when you browse archival descriptions as a list (with the text ‘Add to clipboard’ appearing when you hover over it with your mouse) or the option to ‘add’ to the right of an entry after you open it.  

Clicking on it automatically adds the record to your clipboard which can then be opened using the button at the top of the page.  This works for any authority record and any archival description (at any level of description from fonds down to item) and it means you can create a list of the records you are interested in as you browse, saving yourself the job of writing them out!  Moreover, once you’ve created your list in clipboard you can use the ‘print preview’ button to save the list as an image which can be kept for your own research or emailed directly to us if you’d like to preorder some records before you visit.

Tip:  If you’re saving both archival descriptions and authority records to your clipboard be aware these will display as two separate lists and that you will have to toggle between the two using the ‘Entity type’ drop down menu.

You can see the whole archive structure at once

The clipboard button isn’t the only change you’ll see when you open an archive catalogue on Borthcat.  Whereas before the full hierarchical arrangement of a catalogue was displayed to the left in a small sidebar, now it can be clearly seen at the top of the page.  

If you’ve had experience of navigating a catalogue through the sidebar the advantages to this new page-width display will be obvious.  You can now see the whole of the catalogue structure at once, without long titles being truncated by limitations of space. You can also expand each level to its fullest without concealing the rest of the archive.  You can also expand the display window to take up the full page should you wish!

We can upload or generate finding aids for you more easily

Finally the upgrade to AtoM 2.4 means we have new ways to share finding aids with our users.  We can now generate them from full catalogues already available on Borthcat - or we can upload our paper finding aids for archives that currently have only a top level archival description online.  The latter replaces a rather cumbersome system of linking across to paper finding aids that we’d uploaded to a hidden page on our website, a workaround we used to great success with our parish record collection but which was far from ideal as a long term solution.  

Now users will be able to download full catalogues to browse offline, to share, print out and annotate as needed - just look for the ‘download’ button on the right of the entry!  

To begin with we will only be uploading the finding aids that were already available as linked documents, but going forward we will be generating new finding aids from complete online catalogues and using our Twitter and Facebook accounts to let people know when these become available.

Looking to the future

AtoM 2.4 brings a number of useful new features to Borthcat but this first upgrade is only the beginning.  AtoM is under constant development, both by Artefactual and by its global user community, and future releases promise yet more innovations alongside improvements to its existing functions.  We would welcome your feedback on Borthcat, the new features, or even features you would like to see in the future - you can let us know what you think here. In the meantime we will continue to add new catalogues, new authority records, and new finding aids - so be sure to keep an eye on our ‘newest additions’ list!

Now you’ve heard about all of the new features, why not try them out for yourselves?

The World’s Largest Telescope

Anyone attending the Great Industrial Exhibition in London in 1862 could have been forgiven for passing by the sight of two circular blocks of glass, 26 inches in diameter and two inches thick, standing on their edges being displayed by Messrs Chance of Birmingham. Impressive though they were these optical glasses could easily be missed alongside the great machines - such as Charles Babbage’s analytical engine, cotton mills, maritime engines, and London and North Western’s passenger locomotive, Lady of the Lake - being displayed by the 28,000 exhibitors from 36 countries.

However, there was one visitor to the event who saw the opportunity to create a lasting legacy. Robert Stirling Newall of Gateshead, whose fortune was made from the manufacture of wire rope,  purchased the glasses for £500 pounds each. They were the largest in the world at the time, being nearly twice the diameter of the previous largest, and Newall’s intention was that they would be the foundation of a telescope that would exceed in size all that had gone before.

The project would thrust England, and York in particular, to the forefront of the optical arts, ‘as we were in Dolland’s time’ according to the journal Nature. Contemporary commentators believed the optical art had been stifled in England by an ill-advised duty on glass, and for many years England had been dependent on foreign built telescopes, mainly from France and Germany. At the time of the Great Industrial Exhibition the telescopes with the largest object glasses in England - at Greenwich, Oxford and Cambridge - were all of foreign make. Newall, however, opted to use T. Cooke and Sons of York for his grand project.

Cooke had been at the forefront of resurrecting the art of optical manufacture in England. Samuel Smiles in Men of Invention and Industry relates that Cooke made his first object glass from the base of a glass tumbler, and from this unlikely beginning set up T. Cooke & Sons in 1837. Based at No. 50 Stonegate, York, he specialised in making telescopes and other optical instruments, such as surveying equipment, microscopes, turret clocks and later steam engines (for an unsuccessful steam carriage or motor car). He gained a reputation for excellence, and in 1860 constructed a 5.25 inch telescope for HRH the Prince Consort that was erected at Osborne House, and also provided Sir Norman Lockyer a telescope for his Wimbledon Observatory in 1861. In 1862 he exhibited his creations at the Great Industrial Exhibition in London, bringing home two First Class Medals, one for the excellence of the object glasses and mountings of his telescopes, the other for the construction and finish of his turret clock, and it was here that he came into contact with Mr Newall.

Newall sought quotes from both Cooke and Thomas Grubb of Dublin, but Cooke was so eager for the contract that he bid too low and underestimated how long it would take to construct. The project took far longer than the year he had anticipated. Newall became increasingly frustrated throughout the endeavour, whereas Cooke frequently sought advances to cover his costs. The project nearly caused the demise of Cooke’s business which was still suffering financial difficulties as a result several years after the completion of the telescope; Sir Norman Lockyer writing in 1878 stated, ‘Cooke did not hesitate to risk thousands of pounds in one great experiment, the success of which will have a most important bearing upon the astronomy of the future’.

The general design was the same as Cooke’s equatorials  but the huge size necessitated special arrangements. The main issue was the crafting of the glass lenses. Special equipment had to be designed to handle the discs, and the lenses had to be floated in mercury to prevent them breaking under their own weight. Lockyer stated that it took 1560 hours to grind the discs to the required shape, the thickness being reduced by an inch in the process. The work took place at Cooke’s Buckingham Works, Duke’s Hall, in the Bishophill area of York, but the scale of the project required the final assembly take place in the open near the city wall; Employee Mr Graham recalled the telescope “…..was a big undertaking and it had to be erected on the moat, near the City walls about the place where Newton Terrace now stands.”. It was 1870, and the telescope had taken around six years to complete. Once assembled it was taken to Newall’s observatory at Ferndene, Gateshead, and it was not until 1871 that it was fully installed in the observatory.

The resulting instrument weighed 9 tons and was 32 feet in length. At a time when the largest lenses in Greenwich, Oxford, and Cambridge were 15. 5 inches, the largest in Russia at Pulkova were 15 inches, and the largest in the U.S. were 18.5 inches, the step forward in manufacturing techniques required to produce a telescope with 25 inch discs, weighing 144lb, was considerable. The telescope was nearly twice as powerful as the 18 inch Chicago instrument, having a 485 inch area compared to 268, and had a focal length of 29 feet. The diameter of the object end was 29 inches, the diameter of the tube centre 34 inches, the diameter of the eye end 22 inches, and the support pillar was 19 feet high.

The tube was cigar shaped and made of steel plates riveted together in 5 sections. Inside there were five other tubes of zinc increasing in diameter from eye end to object end. The wide end of each tube overlapped the narrow end of the next with an inch of space left around the end of each to aid ventilation and prevent currents of warm air interfering with the light. The ends were lighter than the centre to prevent them destabilising the telescope.

Fixed above and below the eye end of the tube were two finders, each of 4 inches aperture, 12.5 inches in area, to aid accessibility. An additional telescope with an object glass of 6.5 inches was fixed between the two finders to assist the observation of objects (such as comets) for which the main telescope was not suited.

The observatory housing the instrument was between 40 and 50 feet in diameter and packed with apparatus to allow the telescope to be easily maneuvered, the temperature always the same inside and out to prevent currents of air interfering with observations. However, the atmosphere in England was ‘not the best suited for such an instrument’ and as early as 1870 the journal Nature was reporting that Mr Newall intended to move the instrument after preliminary testing to a location more suited to astronomical observation. This was taken to mean that it would not remain in England ‘every increase in the size of the object-glass or mirror increases the perturbating effects of the atmosphere, so that the larger the telescope, the purer must be the air’. However this was not to be the case, and Mr Marth, known for his work with the Lassel Reflector at Malta, was given charge of the instrument in Ferndene.

Newall’s telescope drew widespread attention, the US government sent Commodore BF Sands of the US Naval Observatory with a deputation of astronomers to examine it and this resulted in a commission of a telescope that would be one inch larger. Austria ordered one the same size.
Cooke never got to see the result of his work as he died in October 1868, whilst Newall was only able to claim to be the owner of the world’s largest refracting telescope for a short period, being overshadowed by the 26 inch Washington Naval Observatory telescope in 1873. However, the telescope was of such exceptional quality that it was used for years to come. On Newall’s death in 1889 it was moved from Gateshead to Cambridge University Observatory and by 1925 it was in the charge of Prof James Newall, Mr Newall’s son, director of the Polar/Solar Physics Observatory, Cambridge. There it stayed until the 1950’s when it was donated to the Greek National Observatory, Mt Penteli, Athens, where it can still be found today having undergone a complete restoration in 2013.

T. Cooke and Sons continued to produce telescopes and exported all over the world, eventually merging with Troughton and Simms in 1922, and Vickers Instruments in 1963. The records of the company can be found at the Borthwick Institute for Archives as part of the Vickers Instruments archive. An online catalogue for the archives of Vickers, Cooke, and Troughton and Simms can be viewed on Borthcat.

Further information:
http://www.instrumentsoflight.com/newall.html 
https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/218396

A full technical description of the telescope can be found in ‘Stargazing, past and present’, by Joseph Lockyer.

Graham Hughes,
Archives Assistant.

71 Years Wild: cataloguing and exploring the archive of Yorkshire Wildlife Trust

 Reed Warbler at Askham Bog in the 1930s, by Arthur Gilpin.
BI/YWT/5/1/1/6/1

As we come into the last days of this year's #30DaysWild campaign, it seemed fitting to celebrate the end of my year-long project cataloguing the archive of the Yorkshire Wildlife Trust - and what a year it's been! I've been lucky enough to delve right into the most detailed of archives, from the papers marking the establishment of the Trust and its day-to-day correspondence, right through to the note documenting the sighting of a single rare moth and a letter recording a daring dolphin rescue mission off Spurn Point. It's been a real dream come true for anyone with an interest in the natural world, the history of the conservation movement and also for me as an archivist at the start of my career. You can explore the 2000+ entries through our online catalogue, Borthcat.

When I started the project back in April 2016, there were 3.5 cubic metres of boxes to work through. A year later and there's almost double that amount as additional material has been sorted and deposited with us. Through the project we've also been able to develop new relationships with other organisations around Yorkshire which have led to the deposit of new archives relating to natural history, including Kit Rob's botanical notes and Dr Michael Thompson's bat recording study. It's really exciting to be able to build on our existing natural science records and to open these up as as research resource for everyone to use. 

Just part of one of  the lists of evocative
English plant names - among my favourite items!

As my first post as a qualified archivist, I felt equally excited and trepidatious to take on such a significant project and I feel like I've really learned a lot over the last year, not just about the incredible work YWT have been undertaking in Yorkshire over the last seven decades, but also about working on a collaborative project, balancing the different aims of the work across a fixed timescale and (on a practical level) learning my trade! I've been able to really get my teeth into some large-scale cataloguing work, and have also had the opportunity to blend these traditional archival skills with exploring the flexibility and functionality of  our cataloguing software, Access to Memory (AtoM), the open-source interface developed by the ICA and Artefactual Systems.

Perhaps most importantly, it's allowed me to share the archive with a wide range of user communities and to gather different perspectives on what archives mean to them. The YWT archive is so heavy with the histories of people across Yorkshire; the founders of the Trust, the pioneering staff who developed the Trust and cemented its position as a fearsome campaigning body at national and international level, and - crucially in an archive like this - documenting the vast contribution made by volunteers and members of the public who have been (and still are) dedicated to the landscapes of Yorkshire and to recording and preserving its wild places. 

Environmental data on Askham Bog, 1933.
BI/YWT/5/1/2/4/1

Although the funded term of the project is now over, there is still a lot of scope to develop the YWT archive and to continue to unlock its research potential. The newly-catalogued material covers a wide range of disciplines and its relevance can be seen in the ongoing development of public policy. This is especially evident in the relationship between wildlife, habitats and agriculture - particularly in developing campaigns for raptor protection, in the control of bovine tuberculosis through badger culling and in the effects, and the mitigation of the effects, of coastal erosion. Even more recently, political changes in this country and America mean that records documenting climate and other environmental changes are ever more important. This project has allowed us to bring together an authoritative and accessible source of environmental data and to make it available to everyone. It has been a real privilege to work on this project and, although I am no longer working on the archive full-time, I will definitely be keeping things ticking over!


Lydia Dean
Project Archivist

Box count: 212/200 (couldn't resist!)

If there’s anything in particular you’d like to know about the project or how we approached it, do feel free to comment below or to get in touch through our Twitter or Facebook. You can also read other blogs on this project here.

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' .