Investigations of a Dog

Last week the UK National Archives launched Your Archives, a wiki which allows users to contribute their knowledge of documents held by the NA/PRO and other archives in the UK. I first found out about it on a visit to the PRO in January, but I didn’t have time to look at it then, so I was quite excited about it finally going on the web. My PhD research gave me some very specialised knowledge of English Civil War records which would be valuable to other researchers but which wouldn’t fit into any kind of “scholarly” publication, so a wiki would be the ideal way of sharing that knowledge. Now that I’ve had a chance to look at Your Archives I’m half impressed and half disappointed. Although it has huge potential it needs some changes before it lives up to my expectations.

First the good points. The scope of the wiki is much bigger than I was expecting. I thought it would only include PRO holdings, but it actually covers the National Register of Archives too, which effectively means that the site can include any archives in the UK. This is the first sign that the merger of the PRO and NRA to form the National Archives is having some tangible benefits - I previously suspected that it was just vacuous rebranding but Your Archives promises to prove me wrong. This is a particularly important benefit because there isn’t necessarily much logic to which repository documents end up in, especially older documents. For example, the records of the Parliamentarian Ordnance Office, which were a major source for my work on saddles, are split between the PRO, the British Library, the Bodleian Library, and the Museum of London. Even the ones at the PRO are illogically split between SP28 and various WO classes rather than being kept together. As far as I know, the best guide to these sources is an appendix of my unpublished PhD thesis, which is hardly ideal!

The guidance provided suggests for categories for contributions: expanding on PRO catalogue entries; publishing transcripts of PRO documents from images available through Documents Online; expanding on NRA entries; and writing research guidance to expand on the PRO’s guidance leaflets. This is a welcome surprise as I was only expecting it to cover the first and fourth items. I’m particularly pleased that the NA are encouraging people to transcribe and publish these documents - I think this could be much more productive than expensive top-down projects.

Unlike Wikipedia, Your Archives requires users to register and log in before they can edit a page. New users are required to give their real name, and to create a username which resembles their real name. I think this is a good thing as people will be more willing to contribute if they get some credit for what they’ve done, and more willing to trust articles written by identifiable individuals.

So I was really looking forward to getting started, but reading the Terms and Conditions put me off. This is what they have to say about reuse of content:

3. The content of Your Archives may only be used as set out in paragraphs 4 and 5 below by members of the public for personal or non-commercial purposes.

4. The National Archives does not permit copying and pasting extracts from Your Archives into online sources. If you wish to refer to any part of Your Archives electronically you must use a hyperlink to the relevant part of Your Archives. The pages from Your Archives must not be loaded into frames on your site. All pages from Your Archives must load into the user’s entire window.

5. Where the content is used in any other work other than an online work you must attribute the author and source of the content as well as use reasonable endeavours to ensure that the content is copied accurately at the time of publication.

You might want to read that again because you didn’t believe it the first time, or you might not want to read it again because you found it too offensive. Looks like the NA are a bit confused and don’t really understand wikis. Wikipedia is covered by a GNU Free Documentation Licence:

The purpose of this License is to make a manual, textbook, or other functional and useful document “free” in the sense of freedom: to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy and redistribute it, with or without modifying it, either commercially or noncommercially. Secondarily, this License preserves for the author and publisher a way to get credit for their work, while not being considered responsible for modifications made by others.

Surely this is the only practical way to go with documentation written and edited collaboratively through a wiki. I don’t know why they want to restrict freedom to copy documentation about public records which is supposedly created for the public good. It suggests that for all their innovation the NA are still stuck in a hierarchical way of thinking which emphasises control and ownership. I’m not sure if I want to contribute under these circumstances.

Another bizarre thing is that in order to submit a photo to the site you have to e-mail it to the NA rather than uploading it through the site. Even if they want to vet all images before publishing them (which kind of defeats the object of a wiki, but anyway…) and get confirmation from users that the image does not infringe copyright they could surely do that through the site rather than by e-mail.

However, I’m hoping they might change things, as the site is still in its early stages. The formatting guidelines are still quite brief and vague compared to Wikipedia’s style guide, so I expect they’ll be adding more detail there. The interface already seems to be more advanced than Wikipedia, as there is a visual editor with buttons which you can use to format the text if you’re not familiar with wiki markup. Although to us computer nerds wiki markup seems extremely simple, not everyone will find it easy to get on with, particularly since amateur researchers with specialist knowledge of archival sources might be older and less IT literate (the Great War Forum is a good example of this).

So Your Archives is definitely a step in the right direction and shows that the NA continues to get way ahead of other British archives (can you imagine the Bodleian or even the British Library doing anything like this?), but I don’t think I’ll be contributing unless they make the whole thing properly free under GDL.