Oxford University Library Services at Osney Mead
I recently visited the excellent futureArch project at the Bodleian to see how they were tackling the thorny problem of hybrid archives. Hybrid archives include both traditional physical archive material such as papers, photos, diaries etc. and electronic material on diverse media, floppy disks, CD-ROMs, memory sticks and so on. In addition to dealing with the different media, an archivist dealing with electronic material also has to have some way of handling a wide range of file formats, not only the usual document and image formats. Here at the Library the Welsh Literary Archive Projecthas been raising awareness of these issues with authors and the literary community.
We were welcomed at the Bodleian by the Project Manager, Susan Thomas, who gave us an overview of the work of the BEAM (Bodleian Electronic Archives and Manuscripts) service, handling the electronic material of hybrid archives. BEAM is based in the Bodleian’s outpost at Osney Mead, which was in the process of being filled with boxes from the New Bodleian building in the town centre, which is being emptied for redevelopment. I used to work at Oxford, but I wasn’t familiar with the Osney Mead site, and despite being at the end of an industrial estate, pedestrian access to the site is a pleasant walk down the canal from the station.
Susan and the team have certainly done a lot of work on getting their workflow and processes built up. You can read about their work on their blog, http://futurearchives.blogspot.com/.
On their blog, Pete Cliff has posted about word clouds. He showed us a cloud he’d generated from an electronic collection. I’m not a huge fan of word clouds, mainly because they’re overused in applications where they don’t make much sense, but they can be used to give a good instant ‘zeitgeisty’ overview, and visibility into a corpus of text that couldn’t be easily summarised in another way, as Pete demonstrates.
…besides, they can also be aesthetically pleasing. Earlier this year, I generated a few clouds based on the searches on our main catalogue. Here’s one of them. I think that gives you a pretty good insight into the kind of material our readers are searching for.
I used Nina Jansen’s cloud generating ruby application. They remind me of David Jones’ inscriptions, especially Cara Wallia Derelicta, which you can see a small image of it on the slideshow here or buy a print of via the library’s online shop!