Discovering archives: it's all about the standards
Yesterday at the UK Archives Discovery Forum we mostly talked about standards.* Specifically metadata standards for resource discovery of archives, both physical and digital.. Standards are key to making archival data discoverable and of course this is our main reason for being - we preserve things so that they can be reused - they can only be reused if they can be discovered. The day was really relevant to work we are currently doing at the Borthwick Institute, with the installation of a new archival management system ( AtoM ) underway and scoping work ongoing for a retroconversion project which will help us move our legacy catalogues into this new system - both major initiatives intended to make our catalogue data more widely discoverable. Nick Poole from the Collections Trust talked about user focused design (both for physical buildings and digital interfaces), how we should avoid putting barriers between our users and the information we need. The gov.uk website is an obvious exam