We would like your ideas for improving Your Archives. Please leave your suggestions and comments on the Next steps page

From Your Archives

Your Archives is The National Archives' public wiki where users share their knowledge about archival documents, British history and historical research. A wiki is a website which users can edit from their web-browser. Like Wikipedia Your Archives uses MediaWiki.

Your Archives went live in April 2007 and there are over 10,500 articles (about 5500 created by researchers). The content includes:

• transcriptions, indexes, summaries and abstracts of digitised records
• expanded Catalogue descriptions
• research guidance
• descriptions of historical events, places and people
• links to material not held by The National Archives
• brief notes about users and their research interests
• discussions about the use and interpretation of documents, people and events

We are making plans for the next two years to develop Your Archives to ensure that it continues to meet the needs of The National Archives and our users. All suggestions will be reviewed.

Contents 1 What should Your Archives look like? 2 How to improve Your Archives as a research tool 3 Should there be additional functionality? 3.1 Transcribing damaged documents

[edit] What should Your Archives look like?

We welcome suggestions on how we should improve the overall look and feel of Your Archives. This is more about cosmetic changes rather than technology and functionality (which is considered below).

[edit] How to improve Your Archives as a research tool

How can we work with contributors to improve the quantity and quality of the content of Your Archives? What help do you need from the Your Archives team and moderators?

[edit] Should there be additional functionality?

What improved functionality would you like to see? If you have you used other wikis (in particular those built using MediaWiki) are there enhancements which could be useful in Your Archives? (Please include links to relevant sites and pages).

• Perhaps in the future there would be the opportunity for a companion site or perhaps some modification of this site, so that it could handle user submitter photographs of documents. This unlike external sites would guarantee their long term availability and guardianship. I know that the obvious pitfall to this is cost. But think how useful it could be for individuals or groups, perhaps working in partnership with TNA (or even the Friends), photographing series of documents (or for that matter an individual page) and working to make them available here to a wider public for the cost or their time and effort.

• A category search. This would be most useful in narrowing down what people get search results on, as in the case of the Metropolitan Police's Registers of Leavers or the Historical Streets Project, where someone wouldn't necessarily want to wade through the wider number of articles. Perhaps this could be achieved through the same mechanism that creates the category pages - the return links.

• Perhaps a 'Your Archives Databases'. By this I mean that any large document transcriptions could be placed into a unique site that would allow better searching abilities, much like major genealogy websites. The Metropolitan Police's Registers of Leavers aren't really best suited to the page model on which wikis work and would better suit this model. This would work instead of or in addition to point 2.
  • I can see why this would be useful but it is unlikely at this stage that we'll develop an additional service. MediaWiki has an export function where users can export] (in wikitext) all pages filed under specified categories - there may be a way to parse this data into a database for reuse. DBPedia do this with Wikipedia and it would be worth investigating how this is done. OpenOffice 2.3+ has an export to wikitext function which is useful for converting tables so there may be a reverse route to go from wikitext to OpenOffice. We are considering mechanisms reusing content in 'Your Archives' and the export feature seems a good route. --Guy Grannum (TNA) 11:47, 2 October 2009 (BST)

naphotorecords 21:14, 14 August 2009 (BST)

I would like to see the various strands of records and memoranda about the Second World War brought together as they were released some time ago. There are a number of subjects, like radar, the Battle of the Beams and the role of people like RV Jones and Alan Turing not adequately highlighted. I agree about just having a list of names which although useful do not add a lot and are more suited to a publication and maybe examples where the information has been found and similar cases that could be found would be more useful.

• Using categories will bring related material together. We hope to start looking at developing category structures to improve navigation. --Guy Grannum (TNA) 11:47, 2 October 2009 (BST)

David Matthew 8 September 2009

I would like to second the call for better links between Your Archives and the Catalogue - namely, the Catalogue should show whether there is anything more in Your Archives on the piece in question. --Sam 15:16, 11 September 2009 (BST)

• This is a frequent comment and we are actively looking at solutions to better integrate 'Your Archives' content with the Catalogue details page. When we have a solution and timetable I will post a message on the News page. --Guy Grannum (TNA) 11:47, 2 October 2009 (BST)

Below are comments made in the recent Your Archives survey re: areas for improvement and possible solutions. Please add your thoughts.

• “Some stronger link between Your Archives and the Catalogue in terms for improvements to one sort of reducing need to spin out your archives.”
• “I would like there to be more information on 'best practices' for adding content.”
• “A better search engine. Active help on using non English language character sets. Better methods for handling geospatial and image data.”
• “A visual editor would make it easier for less experienced people to contribute.”
• “improved navigation. It can be difficult to get an overview of the content - I'm still not sure I understand the full scope of the site. 'Browse Categories' lists nearly 400 items many of which could be grouped together under subject headings. Maybe have a limited number (under 20) fixed top-level subjects; each page (or maybe each category) must be linked to at least one subject.”

Emma-Lee Yarwood (TNA) 13:52, 8 September 2009 (BST)

On the lists of special pages it would be useful if the text articles and the file articles could be separated out - the former can be done from various sites, archives, and other sources of information, while the files for the latter have to be individually called up (and there are 'tens of thousands' of articles for files on the Short Pages at 222 bites.

Also themed or hub articles - eg biographical lists, or the List of government departments. Jackiespeel 15:58, 16 September 2009 (BST)

[edit] Transcribing damaged documents

Recently I have been looking at some documents where the paper of certain of the enclosures have been degrading to the point where they may become unusable (early copying paper turning black, edges of pages crumbling etc).

Would it be possible to set up a transcribing project - the equivalent of Project Gutenberg/Distributed Proofreaders? Jackiespeel 17:29, 8 October 2009 (BST)

Jackie - interesting suggestion. Firstly can I ask you, and other researchers, who come across any documents in an archive or library which are being damaged to let a member of staff know so that they can make steps to protect the document. I am looking at ways where we can work with users to catalogue, transcribe or index digitised material especially documents with very little meta-data (such as only having high-level catalogue data). I haven't thought about how to do this on-site with original documents and I would be interested to hear your thoughts for taking this suggestion forward. --Guy Grannum (TNA) 09:26, 9 October 2009 (BST)