Big Data funding success
The National Archives was recently successful in securing funding for two bids to the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Big Data fund. We are really excited that both projects were...
View ArticleWar diaries reveal challenges of the world’s first industrialised war
Yesterday The National Archives made the second batch of 3,987 digitised First World War unit diaries from France and Flanders available online via its First World War 100 portal. These...
View ArticleThe information management academy awards
Whilst reading through the usual barrage of Oscar-related articles and gossip recently, on who won or who didn’t and who made a splash on the night, it struck me that...
View Article‘It depends what kind of distortion you prefer!’
Keeping Tracks was a lively one-day seminar at The British Library which addressed approaches to archiving music in the digital age. It went beyond ‘formal’ archives to the accidental archives...
View ArticleSecrets and spies of the First World War
What do socks, exotic dancers and scouts have in common? The answer is that they all appear in the 150 top secret MI5 files of the First World War made...
View ArticleIt’s time to start our ‘digital diet’
One or two of us were fortunate enough to attend the annual Information and Records Management Society (IRMS) Conference in Brighton, on 19-20 May. One of the biggest themes running across...
View ArticleFinding a path through the email forest
I was catching up with the latest instalment of The Hobbit film series, The Desolation of Smaug, last week. The scene where they enter Mirkwood and walk round in circles...
View ArticleBuilding the future and preserving the past
About this time, seven years ago, the foundations of an exciting new project were being laid here at The National Archives. The Digital Continuity Project initially arose out of our...
View ArticleExplore Your Archive on Twitter
Archives are amazing. Without them we could not study our personal histories or the histories of our communities or nations. There would be no historically rich novels and films. We...
View ArticleFrom letters to Lego, manuscripts to Minecraft
The Hull History Centre in Kingston upon Hull has been my home for the past seven months of my Transforming Archives traineeship. This traineeship appealed to me because of its digital...
View ArticleHelp us improve the UK Government web archive
It’s an exciting time for the web archiving team. We recently completed our first large piece of user experience research which has given us lots of interesting insights into who...
View ArticleFrom digital dark age to digital enlightenment
We explore the research we've done into managing, preserving and providing access to born-digital records…
View ArticleDirty data at the UKAD Forum 2016
The Data Forum is an opportunity for archivists to share ideas for networking collections to make it easier for users to make connections between them…
View ArticleMaking connections: tracing people through our collection
Since February 2014, we’ve been investigating ways to reveal the connections that tell the real stories of people’s lives…
View ArticleCourtroom drama: video records from the Supreme Court
Making video records available via our streaming service is a major evolution in how we present our collections…
View ArticleIdentifying digital file formats – a collaborative effort
Have you got a file format you can't identify? Send it to PRONOM, an online registry containing details of different digital file formats…
View ArticlePeace and goodwill to all records
It's that time of year again. The office starts to get quieter, colleagues and customers go on leave, meetings get fewer…
View ArticleDigitising and conserving black cultural history
I prepared and conserved the Adamah Family Collection before digitisation - a challenging project which required a large scope of treatments…
View ArticleThe generation game: evolving with the digital record
We’ve had quite a lot of practice at being an archive: we’ve been looking after the public record for over 150 years. Most of the fundamentals of archival practice were...
View ArticleDigital archiving: disrupt or be disrupted?
Economist Joseph Schumpeter popularised the term ‘creative destruction’ to describe the theory that technological advances make obsolete not just individual practices but whole philosophies, industries...
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