Part 1: CAN interviews State Records NSW

The first interview in our series focuses on how documents and records can be brought to life through the Collections Australia Network’s online collection database. State Records NSW public access manager, Christine Yeats, talks about how an aggregated search will pull-up a list of related objects held by the SRNSW and other collecting institutions, bringing stories to life. Christine believes CAN complements the SRONSW’s goals and explains how she sees the future direction of the partnership.

An excerpt of her interview can be viewed on the collectionsaustralia YouTube channel.



The transcript is available below.

Introduction
My name is Christine Yeats and I manage public access here at State Records. I look after the public side of the operation, the reading rooms, the inquiry services, the publications, the web presence, to all of those sorts of things.

State Records holds the archives created by the government from 1788 until present day. The convict indents are one of the highlights and in fact all of the convict records were inscribed on the Memory of the World Register which is in UNESCO. We are a member of the World Register which equates to a World Heritage listing for a geographical site.

Becoming a CAN partner
We have information about the collection on the website but the opportunity to join CAN gave us a much wider audience and a much greater profile within the research community.

It also allows us to capture people’s interest and capture them as users and draw them into our own site where they can do more research. For our purposes, we see this great chance to be a partner and we also see it as a great chance to show the world that State Records is alive and well in the electronic environment.

It was a fairly straightforward process. We already had as I mentioned, our own website so it was really a fairly automated process of getting a presence on CAN and building up that collaborative relationship.

Benefits of the relationship
I think the first thing that it’s done is to show people that we’re really quite genuine about moving into the whole world of technology beyond just simply adding to our own website.

It’s about engaging with our stakeholders and engaging with the research community. It’s building up that collaborative partnership. We see that as being very important because one of the concerns that archives and State Records has is that so often archives are ignored.

There is a perception of archives as being dry, dusty records that nobody would be really interested in. That’s probably one of the downsides in terms of how you promote a collection which is boxes and boxes of records which contain fascinating information but you actually have to do research and go through the boxes to identify them.

Future direction
I have always thought that objects supplement the story. They actually help to breathe life into our archives.

The whole idea of Google Mashups would be very appealing for us. We would be certainly interested in being part of that. We wouldn’t be able to, I don’t think, be able to put a huge amount of resources into it but certainly we could begin in a way that was manageable and go from there, because it would provide not only an object in time but also in place. That’s one of the big things that a lot of researchers actually want. They find material about an event or about a person but what they also like to be able to do is to link back to place.

I think a lot of people would find that quite engaging principle to be able to play around and identify that this happened here. That here are the records and this is the place now.

I think that some of the areas where we could get greater benefit from our relationship with CAN would be the development of some blogs and even a Wiki.

All of those web developments I see as providing an opportunity for people to be able to engage with the collection and give user content and user comment. That’s what brings the collection alive as well. Not only linking collections to objects or to images but also bringing peoples own responses and their experiences. I think that all of those tools have the possibility of achieving that.

An individual could do distant research, again let’s say the fireman example because that’s a good one, and build up a mini exhibition, which was the basis of their research.

It could have a list of likely records; it may have images of, as I mentioned, perhaps fires or fireman, uniform changes and uniforms over time. Maybe particular objects that are associated with an individual, perhaps a medal for bravery or something of that type.

It could be in essence, I wouldn’t say a Mashup, but it’s a compilation of someone’s research, someone’s story on a particular topic. It would be fantastic if that drew on all of the resources of all of the CAN partners. That way it’s giving other users and other visitors a chance to see what can be achieved.

Often times that’s all that’s needed. People see something and they say, “I could do that. I could do that. That’s a fantastic idea.” Then they go and copy. I see having that space, that public space for people to put up their research as being a very positive thing. Relations to objects or images but also bringing people’s own responses and their experiences. I think that all those tools have the possibility of achieving that.

It could even be one of the CAN partners who decided to do some small displays on our digital gallery. We could decide that we wanted to do a little tiny display, very small, very modest let’s say but a display drawing on the collections of all of the partners to tell a particular story.

It could be used both by individuals, or research, or academics as you mentioned or it could be by a CAN partner, or it could in fact be another small institution that doesn’t have a particularly strong web presence or perhaps doesn’t’ have one at all.

They could do, this is the story of gold mining at whatever place and presented to you by whatever. Local historic records has a You-Tube presence and State Records has a Flickr presence. We also offer RSS feeds.

I think that would be a great opportunity if CAN were to provide as sidebar option. Perhaps on a rotational basis featuring each of the different CAN partner institutions and what they’ve done in the multimedia world.

A lot of the museums of course have done an awful lot of work. They have really gone out there into the Web 2.0 world and offered different sorts of tools, all of which have that basic aim of getting people to come back to use archives and to think of archives as a resource.

To build another portal into the work that we’ve already done would be a relatively straightforward process. It wouldn’t be resource hungry. The resources have already been used to create the Flickr presence and also the You-Tube presence. In fact, it would be building on what we’ve already achieved.

Interview by Sarah Rhodes
May 8 2009

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