Over the years (centuries even!) an assorted mix of pictures, registers, documents and newspaper cuttings about life and activities in the village of Staveley, North Yorkshire had been accumulated by various local organisations and individuals. By 2021 these materials had found their way into two sets of filing cabinets stored in a back room in the village hall. Some of these materials were sorted into groups whilst other materials were just gathered at random into boxes.
While investigating the material for suitable items to display during the upcoming Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 2022, it was decided to explore if suitable resources from within the village and financial assistance through grants could be available to make better use of the materials and enable public access. An informal group formed to assess the possibilities of a village archive project.
The project commenced with two main objectives:
- to sort, sift and organise the collected materials such that the content was known and could be easily accessed,
- to make the material readily accessible to the general public.
The project group sought to achieve these objectives simultaneously by:
- creating a digital copy of each item of material,
- cataloging the material as it was digitised so that the catalogue could be searched to find required items,
- presenting the catalogue and digitised material to the public via dedicated website.
Digitisation
Different types of source material required different methods of digitisation. Flat paper-based materials were scanned using a flat-bed scanner. Paper-based materials bound in a permanent form, such as registers, were photographed using a custom frame setup. The scans and photographs were then combined as necessary into single PDF files to recreate multi-page documents.
Recordings and films methods to go here.
The resulting digital files were given a unique filename based upon an archive code derived from their catalogue entry. The original material was also marked up with this archive code so that the source and copy could be permanently linked.
Following digitisation, the original materials were filed according to their archive code.
Cataloging
The challenge was to design a catalogue structure that was easy for both those making the entries, the archivers, and those viewing the entries, the public, to use without knowing everything that was in the source material collection. After a number of drafts, a structure was adopted that enabled an archive record – the digital file and its associated information – to be assigned to one or more categories; a category being a primary classification of the material subject.
The Category structure was designed to be hierarchical, meaning that any category could have one or more sub-categories. This approach enabled subjects to be defined at a high level and then be sub-divided down to the lowest detail level. The majority of archive records are assigned to the lowest level categories.
The hierarchy is achieved by a parent-child relationship between the categories and may be visualised as a tree structure. The full archive catalogue may be viewed here, which shows the various category tiers and their respective archive records. Changes can be made to the parent-child relationship at any time i.e. a category can be assigned a new parent, and all the category dependants move to a different place in the hierarchy along with the category.
A secondary form of archive record classification was available by giving one or more Tags or keywords to a record to supplement the Categories. This allows archive records to be grouped together by common Tags and viewed accordingly. Tagging was at the discretion of the archiver.
The archive data model can be seen in Fig. 1 below.
Website
Building a website from scratch is both time consuming and unnessessary when a number of existing frameworks are now freely available. A framework provides all the basic functionality required to get a website up and running quickly and easily. All that is required is to add custom content.
One of the most popular website frameworks is WordPress and this option was chosen because:
- its popularity means that there are many experienced users around to approach if help is needed in the future,
- it provides easy uploading of files, such as images and documents, and their management,
- having input custom content it is easy to extract it again for re-use elsewhere if necessary,
- it’s highly customisable, both in its appearance and functionality, through the use of themes and plugins,
- the archive catalogue could be ‘plugged in’ to the framework to meet the specific needs of the project.
A WordPress plugin was built that enabled catalogue entries to be made by the archivers in the administrative section of the website and for the archive records to be presented to website visitors in the public interface.
The Future
Archiving all the existing source material will take a considerable time. Time however, does not stand still and new material is continually becoming available which forms the archive material of the future. The project is ongoing …
