A digital lib-bib-cell-hus

National Library of Wales [photo by Dylan Moore]

Library

Llyfrgell

Bibliotheque

Which will stand the test of time?

• Library (English) from librarium (Latin) - a chest for books.
• Llyfrgell (Welsh) - from Latin a cell for books.
• Bibliotheka - from Ancient Greek to Latin. Biblio- (from Byblos a port in today's Lebanon from where papyrus was imported to Greece) and -theke ( from Greek tithemi - to place or put).

We lost, in Middle English, bochus (from Old English) - a house for books.

In these digital days, do we need a place to store books, or a place to 'put' them. Printing a character on wood or paper seems quite similar to storing or 'printing' our digital data on magnetic or optical media - but we don't think of it like that very often and we can't see it without machines to translate back into our own languages. Our digital vaults (computer machine rooms) are more like the libraries of old - sealed, protected places where only the authorized may wander.

What about a digitheke - or is that the world-wide-web as we know it? The loss of the bibliothecary seems a shame, but lives on in the twittersphere - of course (@bibliothecary)

IHR Seminar, Senate House: Sir Deian Hopkin, Digitising the First World War

From: http://ihrdighist.blogs.sas.ac.uk

Next seminar – Tuesday 3 June 2014 – Digitising the First World War: opportunities and challenges
Posted on 13 May 2014 by Jane Winters

The IHR Seminar in Digital History would like to welcome you to its first seminar of the 2014 summer term.

Speaker: Professor Sir Deian Hopkin (President of the National Library of Wales)

Title: Digitising the First World War: Opportunities and Challenges
Date: 3 June, 2014

Time: 5:15 PM (BST=GMT+1)

Venue: Athlone Room, 102, Senate House, South Block, First floor, or live online atHistorySpot

Abstract: One of the most important legacies of the commemoration of the First World War will be an extensive range of new digital archives. The Imperial War Museum is leading a partnership of many hundreds of organisations, many of whom are involved in capturing records, visual artefacts, memoirs and much else. The National Archives now offers a wide variety of resources, from war diaries and nurses’ records to interviews with prisoners of war and records of military service appeal tribunals and has launched a crowd-sourcing site to identify data contained within war diaries. The National Library of Wales hosts the People’s Collection, also a crowd-sourcing platform, which enables individuals and organisations to upload diaries, letters, photographs and other artefacts, and a dedicated website provides searchable access to Welsh newspapers during the war, part of a much larger collection of Welsh Newspapers Online. And there is much else, on the same lines, taking place in libraries, record offices and among informal groups across the country.

In his acclaimed book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty pays a particular debt to improvements in the technology of research, most specifically computers, which enabled him to process data on a huge scale and offer a new synthesis; indeed he claims his work to be as much about history as economics. Twenty years ago, there was a rush of enthusiasm for the use of computing technology by historians. Since then, despite huge technical advances and a communications revolution, there is a sense that most historians have remained aloof from these new developments. Some of the tools available in the 1980s and 1990s have not evolved and there is much less written nowadays about techniques and methodology; indeed there appear to be little provision for historians to develop the particular skills needed to exploit rich digital archives, especially structured data.

While the new resources appear to offer exciting prospects, are we any nearer being able to exploit them? This presentation will discuss the opportunities which are now available but the challenges that still remain.

Speaker: Professor Sir Deian Hopkin spent 43 years in higher education, retiring as Vice Chancellor of London South Bank University in 2009. He was a co-founder of the Association of History and Computing and active in the CTI, the History Data Archive and other initiatives in the 1980s and 1990s. He is currently President of the National Library of Wales, a trustee of the IHR Development Trust and Chair of the Wales Programme Committee for the First World War Centenary.

Seminars are streamed live online at HistorySpot. To keep in touch, follow us on Twitter (@IHRDigHist) or at the hashtag #dhist.

Live and Kicking: The Impact and Sustainability of Digital Collections in the Humanities by Lorna M. Hughes

From: http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/openbook/chapter/dhc-hughes 

Proceedings of the Digital Humanities Congress 2012

Edited by Clare Mills, Michael Pidd and Esther Ward

"This paper discusses an initiative at the National Library of Wales to build a research programme around the digital collections of Wales. The programme seeks to document the impact and use of these digital collections for research, teaching and public engagement: and to develop new digital initiatives that will fulfil core remit of the National Library over the long term, set within to context of the “digital transformation of the Library” that “has caught everyone’s attention” (McGann). The NLW research programme seeks to understand this transformation, and its impact internally and on the Library’s users, and to address questions of sustainability of digital collections in the humanities. In order to frame this narrative, this paper will outline the development of technological innovation at the Library, and the ways in which digital collections and digital development are part of a continuum of the adoption of new technologies with a resultant effect on the mission of the organisation, and indeed on the institution itself. Understanding how digital collections are used is key to understanding their impact, and to making provision for the long term-sustainability of valuable digital content. Understanding the impact of the digital transformation in the Library also signposts how the institution itself remains relevant, with a continuing role as a custodian and advocate for documentary cultural heritage in an increasingly challenging economic climate – remaining not just alive, but kicking."

National Library of Wales: projects

From: Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru

NLW Research leads, or is a partner in, a number of collaborative e-Research projects. Current projects include:

• Cymru1914
  Funded by JISC, this is a mass digitization project in collaboration with the special collections and archives of Wales to digitize the hidden sources about the impact of WW1 on all aspects of Welsh life: language, culture, politics, and community.

• Europeana Cloud
  Europeana Cloud is a Best Practice Network, coordinated by The European Library, designed to establish a cloud-based system for Europeana and its aggregators.  Europeana Cloud will provide new content, new metadata, a new linked storage system, new tools and services for researchers and a new platform - Europeana Research

• Network for Digital Methods in the Arts and Humanities (NeDiMAH)
  European Science Foundation Research Networking Programme documenting and classifying the practice of digital humanities across Europe. NeDiMAH builds on the AHRC ICT Methods Network to document how academic researchers engage with digital content, and the emergence of new approaches to linking, annotating, and using digital content.

• The Great War and the Valleys
  An online exhibition reflecting on the reality of The Great War on the town of Merthyr Tydfil and the Cynon Valley at the heart of the south Wales coalfield.

• Wales1900
  This project will develop a crowdsourcing platform for placenames of Wales, working in partnership with Galaxy Zoo, the People's Collection, Wales, and the University of Wales.

• The Snows of Yesteryear
  Funded by the AHRC Landscape and Environment Programme, this research Network will investigate resilience and vulnerability to extreme weather in Wales, in collaboration with climate scientists and performance researchers.

• Linking Parliamentary Records through Metadata (LIPARM)
  Funded by JISC, the project will link the digital archives of parliamentary material, both historic and contemporary, by creating a unified metadata scheme for all of its key elements.

The National Library of Wales (NLW) was one of 19 leading European research libraries involved in the Europeana Libraries Project, which, in a two-year period from 2011, aimed to provide free access to 5 million digital objects on the European Library and Europeana websites. Reflecting NLW's commitment to digitisation and allowing free access to digitized collections, the NLW aimed to provide the Europeana Libraries project with over 100,000 pages of text-based material, over 5,000 images from its Welsh Landscape collection of topographical prints, over 4,000 images from the John Thomas photographic collection and over 120,000 images from the Geoff Charles photographic collection.

ARCW Digital Preservation Group 2009 report

http://www.llgc.org.uk/fileadmin/documents/pdf/DP_Archives-Wales_Report-final.pdf

Sally McInnes & Vicky Phillips 29th October 2009 On behalf of ARCW Digital Preservation Group

Recommendations and action plan

1. Key policies and procedures – Provide advice and guidance on the types of key policies and procedures required to facilitate the deposit and preservation of digital material.
2. Key documents relating to digital preservation – Raise awareness of the importance of the creation of key documentation, such as policy documents, digital preservation plans and provide templates.
3. File formats – Provide training and guidance on file formats, such as the definition of file formats, issues to consider when selecting file formats, proprietary vs Open Formats etc.
4. Digital material selection criteria – Raise awareness of the need to update selection criteria policies in order to incorporate digital material. Provide guidance on possible selection criteria.
5. Digital preservation work of organisations and projects – Circulate information about relevant activities and projects. Create an easily accessible resource, which draws information together in one place. Create a mailing list to raise awareness of new initiatives.
6. Standards – Raise awareness of standards and their importance. Provide examples of standards and their implementation.
7. Data schemas – Raise awareness of the data schemas that are available and how these are used to safeguard digital material. Consider the creation of generic schemas.
8. Digital and technological obsolescence – Raise awareness of digital obsolescence with in relation to storage media and file formats. Provide advice, guidance and training regarding the migration of these to robust storage media and the selection of appropriate file formats suitable for archiving. Ensure that measures in are in place to safeguard the integrity of the files. (Demonstrate use of open source software such as DROID so that Archives are able to discover exactly what is contained within their collection of digital material. Assist with implementation of Gaip or CDAS/Prometheus)
9. Accessioning procedures – Provide advice and guidance on procedures and workflows relating to the accession of digital material and the content of forms / documents that will enable the accessioning process, e.g. metadata information, rights clearance.
10. Providing access to material – Provide advice and guidance on the various ways of providing access to material, the potential rights issues, and awareness of the issues relating to the nature and level of access.
11. Records Managers – raise awareness of digital preservation within the Records Management field. Provide advice and guidance on the embedding of digital preservation within the lifecycle management of electronic records and promote an integrated approach to digital preservation.
12. Raising awareness at organizational level – Raise awareness of the critical role of digital preservation in maintaining access to information at the organizational level. Support collaboration between organisations through the sharing of knowledge, skills and expertise and applications for funding.
13. Relationship with ICT support – Promote and sustain the working relationship with ICT support to ensure a robust, appropriate and integrated technical infrastructure.
14. Open source software and tools – Raise awareness of the existence of relevant tools and share knowledge and experience of their implementation within Wales.
15. Digital preservation projects and resources – Raise awareness of the numerous projects and resources regarding digital preservation that are available free of charge. These contain invaluable information and guidance for archives.
16. Infrastructure of repository – Consider the options for developing institutional repositories at a local, regional or national level and undertake a feasibility and cost evaluation of the options.