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15 March 2012

 
**Minutes of the Local Studies Librarians meeting, 
held at Sydney Centre, New South Wales State Records Office &amp; Railway Resource Centre, Renwick Street, Redfern, 15 March 2012.**

Attendees: Geoff Potter (Gosford), Donna Braye (Mosman), Clinton Johnston, (Marrickville), Michelle Nichols (Hawkesbury), Vicki Munro (Woollahra), Ellen Forsyth (State Library), Jennifer Madden (Bankstown), Joan Rowland(Ku-ring-gai), Mark Butler (North Sydney), Kelly Mitchell (North Sydney), Bruce Carter (Mitchell), Darren Ellis (Botany), Tina Graham (Warringah), Rose Cullen (Warringah), Michelle Goldsmith (Wyong), Jane Britten (Woollahra), John Merriman (Blue Mountains), Julie Fitzsimmons (Hurstville), Kay Shirt (Lithgow), David Sansome (City of Canada Bay Library), Debra Duan (Strathfield), Lisa Perugini (Strathfield), Geraldine Marsh (Chatswood), Andrew Allen (Campbelltown), Helen McDonald (Sutherland), Eileen Smith (Wollongong),Leonie Gendle (Blacktown)

Apologies: Georgina Kemp (Randwick)

Meeting commenced 10.00am.

1. Christine Yeats and Richard Lehane, NSW State Records, Presentation on changes to the NSW State Records and the introduction of the API website application.
The NSW State Records is going through some major changes in 2012 with the closing of the Globe Street reading room and a focus on the digitisation of records. Christine and Richard discussed the role of the NSW State Records as well as some of the challenges they are facing and the work they have done.
The NSW state records department has a number of functions, including being a heritage resource for the community and a regulatory body. Due to this mixture of roles and changing records methods the agency faces some big challenges.

Traditionally the State Records dealt largely in print and other physical records formats, such as negatives. However, there has been a large shift towards electronic and digital recording. This is one of the key challenges facing the State Records, what to do with these electronic records and how to provide access? It is no longer a paper only world and one of the responses has been to attempt to develop a state digital archive. 
Some of the areas in which the State Records are archiving material include convicts, immigration, employment, public building and roads, public transport, land, health and education. The archive material contains only government and public records, private individual or commercial information not produced by the state is not kept. The jurisdiction of the NSW State Archives includes NSW government agencies, universities, local councils and public hospitals.

Access is generally provided for material at least 30 years old. However some records containing sensitive information may be withheld, such as adoption information. It is the decision of the various agencies on whether to release these records. The first link below provides information about the GIPA act with regard to public access. The second link is the Register of Access Directions, which describes what access a particular agency provides to records.
http://www.records.nsw.gov.au/about-us/accessing-state-records-information/what-is-public-access-to-government-information
http://www.records.nsw.gov.au/state-archives/state-archives/register-of-access-directions

The two main sites for the State Records are the Western Sydney Records Centre in Kingswood and The Sydney Records Centre, in The Rocks. The Kingswood repository is the main reading room and storage facility for the NSW State Records. It holds the original (uncopied) material and microform records. There are about 65 kilometres in the Kingswood repository. The Globe Street reading room has the records on microform only. There has recently been a downturn in usage of the Globe Street centre and an upturn in usage in the Kingswood Centre.

This accompanied with some other challenges has led to the need to close the Globe Street Reading Room in June 2012. State Records currently pays a rent of $500,000 for the Globe Street centre, and has annual funding of $4.9 million from the State Treasury. This funding is due to be cut by $1.8 million, which is a large proportion of the funding. The best option to absorb this cut is the withdrawal of the Globe Street centre.
The State Records is still, however, making proactive plans for the future. A non-exclusive agreement with Ancestry.com.au has allowed the State Records to provide access to a quarter of their record collection, which has been digitised by ancestry.com.au.

Other future plans include relocating the Globe Street microform records to the State Library to store and provide access. Material will also be given to regional repositories in Armidale, Wagga Wagga, Newcastle and Broken Hill. There are also plans to continue digitising with third party vendors and bulk in house digitising for the web.

The State Records also has many online resources that are used to help assist the agency’s core business. Some of the online tools include Indexes (with Keyname searches and finding aids), digital galleries, digital copies of records, the Archives Investigator and the API. This is complemented with Web 2.0 activity on flickr, YouTube, twitter and Facebook. These help in the collaborative aspects of the State Records’ work.
Archives outside is also a collaborative online space for archivists and other involved in collecting historical material. Methods of engaging the physical with the digital are being explored on this site, including tips reading handwritten documents. http://archivesoutside.records.nsw.gov.au/
 
Many records are being considered for digitisation in attempt to allow users to do searching and preparation work online, which will ease the burden of resources at Kingswood. 
The State records also has an outreach programs, where staff from the NSW State Records will come to libraries to run training/workshops regarding the searching and access of records in the State Records’ collections. Further to this, State Records also run training sessions in using Ancestry.com in libraries. This is a commitment by the agency to focus on educating users and promoting agency visibility.
Richard Lehane – API and open data project

The State Records’ Open Data Project can be seen in the context of wider open projects in government and other agencies. Government agencies collect and store data for their users. This includes the actual collection and data about the collection, such as the finding aids and other methods to provide context to the data. 
http://data.records.nsw.gov.au/    http://data.nsw.gov.au/

As a resource this data can be used for other purposes, be reused or linked with other data to create new resources or content. This can be seen in the linking of other data and content to the State Records’ ministries data, which lists the names and date ranges of government ministries. Aggregating this with other data gives a greater timeline of political change. 

This included harvesting data from Wikipedia and using Tim Sherratt’s unofficial API for Trove newspapers, which returns results in machine-readable format. http://srnsw.github.com/timeline.htmlhttp: 

The first step in the open data project was putting records and data available online. This included making the catalogue data, such as records, description of records, agency context information, available in machine readable form, such as XML and SQL. The data was licensed under Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution – NonCommercial licence.

The second step has been encouraging people to see what they can do with the data. There is a large potential to use the data with other data in ‘Mash Ups’ to create new products. Having all the data available and the technical hard work done means the data can quickly be used by staff, users, researchers and other government departments.

Christine Yeats – Archives Investigator and the new API
The public were finding the Archives Investigator tool quite complex and difficult to use. Tips were introduced to assist, along with the Finding Aids, but people were still struggling. People expected a simple search that would seamlessly find relevant results. The Archives Investigator has not been hugely successful; users loved using the indexes but not Archives Investigator.
The new API, called the New Search Tool, is a new way of searching what is already in Archives Investigator but provides a more user friendly experience. It is based on keyword searching, simplified in the manner of a Google type search. Entities in are classified in three general groups – What (Records, Series/Items), Who (Agencies) and Why (functions and activities).http://api.records.nsw.gov.au/

At the moment the API only searches records available in Archives Investigator. It does not search online indexes, keyname indexes or photo investigator. The API allows registered users to add tags to records, which helps to improve access. This has been an effective way of addressing the need for straightforward, powerful and effective access to the catalogues. It helps open up the collection for users as well as developers.
One of the goals of the tool was to make a search experience that was simple to use, yet advanced in the way it provided results. This was accomplished by adding the advanced features to the results page. This page provides other areas of classification, the Who and the Why which may also be relevant to the search, along with the What – series and items. It also has user friendly filtering options.

Developers can also use the API to write programs or applications that make use of the data available. Straightforward URLs are used to assist in this work, including modification for supported formats, such as XML and JSON. Functionality for different encoding formats can also be added. This can be used to get entire lists of relevant agency information or series records. This has allowed for programmatic access to search terms and collections. Libraries interested in having an API to access this data from their own online space were encouraged to get in touch with State Records.

The flickr page Archives2Share can also link to records in the API, which allows users to upload photos and link them to a particular record. Extending the API search tool encompass other collections, such as Picture Investigator, is being considered.

2. Bill Phippen – Manager Railway Resource Centre. Raliway Resource Centre, 67 Renwick Street, Redfern, NSW.
The Railway Resource Centre is managed as part of the Australian Railway Historical Society, New South Wales division, with support from the NSW Rail Transport Museum. The emphasis of the centre is collecting, organising, storing and supplying information about the history of railways. The centre has a strong focus on New South Wales railways but does include material from other states, and Australasian countries.
The centre is involved in creating and distributing two monthly magazines; Australian Railway History and the Railway Digest. Both of which have been running for some time and provide a great source of historical information regarding railways. Issues of the magazine are available on the Railway Resource Centre intranet on Renwick Street, or on DVD copy.

The Australian Railway Historical Society NSW also runs a bookshop, located near the state booking office at Central station. Material is also available on mail order or online. http://www.arhsnsw.com.au/bookshop.htm

The Railway Resource Centre also has a facility in Alexandria which holds a collection of unsorted material. It consists of one paid staff member and 50 volunteers. It is open every Saturday, 10am to 3pm, and every Tuesday, 12noonto 4pm, for researchers. Access is free for AHRS members otherwise the cost is 12.00 for access. The AHRS also has a research service for people unable to attend the resource centre. This includes a 15.00 access fee, free for AHRS members, and a $15.00 per hour charge for research.

The centre holds many official documents, including timetables, maps, directories and daily control documents. The Railways were very bureaucratic and left larger paper resources. The volunteers at the centre are able to locate much of this information for researchers. The aim of the Railway Resource is to make the collection accessible. Much of the material, including more than 40,000 pages of documents has been scanned, sorted, indexed and made available on the intranet. The centre has an image collection of around 500,000 images. 150,000 of these have been scanned and indexed on the intranet. The centre is avidly trying to scan the whole collection and make it available.

Some of the types of material on the intranet include –
· All issues of rail magazines
· Timetables
· Annual reports of the Railways
· Weekly notices
· Circulars
· Carriage and wagon plans
· Maps
· Track and signal diagrams

Overall there are several terabytes of information available on the intranet. The centre provides a basic photocopy service for images, maps and documents. High-resolution copies are available at a certain price, comparable to the SLNSW.

3. Peter Cairn – Sydney Tramway Museum
The Sydney Tramway Museum began life in 1950. From 1957 the Museum operated from a site beside the Princes Highway in the National Park at Loftus. In 1988, the Museum moved to its current premises next to Loftus railway station. The Tramway Museum has amassed a large collection of tramcars, equipment and memorabilia from Sydney, Interstate and overseas. Being a volunteer group, the Museum has had to prioritise its resources. A large collection of tramway-related archives exists, but storage of the collection is problematic. Priority has been given to preserving the physical equipment. It is hoped in future that an archive will be established, but there is no public access to the archives at present.

Much of the Sydney Tramway official archive information has disappeared; going back to before the museum was opened particularly during the war effort in 1940 when much material was disposed of. However, a tremendous amount of records have been collected.

The tram workshops themselves kept records. One of the highlights of these records are the paint detail documents, which include codes and samples for the colours used on Sydney trams and record cards for many of the tramways. 

4. General Meeting

4.1 NSW Local Studies Flickr Page

Donna thanked John Merriman and Geoff Potter for setting up the Flickr page. The yahoo id needed for login is localstudiesnsw and the password - Utopia_7000. Libraries are encouraged to add content if they are able to. The National Year of Reading themes are up as sets and images relating to these themes are one way to contribute.

Ideas for use of the group include librarian’s favourite image and putting up images that need help being identified. Librarians willing to put a picture of themselves up, or a photo of their office, work space, archive or local history area is another good way to contribute. Any other ideas for using the Local Studies NSW Flickr site would be welcome.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/local_studies_nsw/

4.2 Digital Practice Guidelines update

The Digital Practice Guidelines are now live on the SLNSW website. It is very difficult to make the guidelines into a PDF as it has been developed as an interactive website, which is its intended use. This will assist continual usage of the guidelines as the website can be updated and modified to accompany any changes.
The page is quite user friendly and will continue to grow.

http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/services/public_libraries/publications/digital_practice_guidelines/index.html
4.3 Sharing and sourcing generic forms for donations, copyright etc. To be put on LS Wiki.
It would be useful to put up examples of donation forms used in different libraries on the Wiki. This will give assistance to libraries redeveloping their own or designing new forms. The Wiki is an easy way to share this and other type of information.

To add documents or information to the Wiki, once you have signed in or up to the page ask for permission to be a ‘writer’, which is usually approved in 24 hours.

http://referenceandinformationservices.wikifoundry.com/page/Local+Studies

Another issue raised was the development of a generic letter to Ancestry.com.au, which describes the difficulties and issues in searching for Australian material, on the wiki that libraries could use send to Ancestry to entice them to find easier access to this material.

4.4 Future meeting themes and venues:

A look at uses of newer types of social media – How could these be used in local studies? The different types of social media – what would aspire to do if possible.
Heritage consultancy – having people involved in this work discuss their working relationships with local studies libraries and how the two groups can help each other.
The next meeting will tentatively be around the end of September, at Balmain Town Hall. 
Anyway who would like to present or discuss something at the next meeting was asked to let the committee know.
Manly library has been selected as a trial library for Mitchell Whitelaw’s data visualisation research project, which involves using data to tell stories visually. This is a potentially innovative and visual way to explore archives. Manly library will be part of a test case as phase 1 of the project. The second phase will be linking to the NLA API. 

Thanks to Christine Yeats &amp; Richard Lehane of the NSWE State Records &amp; Bill Phippen and the volunteers at the Railway Resource Centre for a very enjoyable day out. 

Meeting closed 3.45pm.