In Out, In Out, And Shake It All About: A Moving Story of Data

Abstract

The Archives Hub blends data. We bring together descriptions of archives, archival resources and repositories in a way that enables us to present an effective and valuable service through our website. We spent two years creating an entirely new system that was built upon the principle of bringing in data from different sources and providing that data for different purposes. I would like to give some insights from our experience of doing this, and consider whether we have created something innovative and with inherent potential for future development. I will talk about the architecture that we wanted to create, the workflow that we believed to be essential to our aims, and the challenges that we faced in being able to create a blend of data that could be successfully deblended in different ways. It required a great deal of thought and planning in terms of what we wanted to achieve, how we should process the data to fulfil those aims, and how we would work with data contributors, who were essential to our success. Over a year after going live with the new service, have we achieved our aim of more consistent, standardised data, and have we provided the realistic potential for the data to be re-used? I will give examples of where I think we have fulfilled our aims and where we still have issues. I will argue that the ability to blend/deblend relies upon systems and technology, but it also relies upon people and their habits, expectations, understanding and ambitions.