Investigations of a Dog

Your Archives is a wiki based site launched by the UK National Archives which allows users to contribute information and about, and transcripts of, documents held by the NA (and also information to supplement the National Register of Archives). Despite being excited about the possibilities of the site, I’ve been too busy to actually get involved. But today I finally registered and started contributing. I’m pleased to say that the terms of use now make it clear that restrictions on re-use of content don’t apply to transcripts of documents which are covered by waiver of Crown Copyright, and don’t apply to fair dealing under UK copyright law.

To start with I put up a transcript of a report on prisoner of war camps in the First World War, which you can see here. My first impression is that the site is very easy to use. Anyone who can use a web forum or a blog shouldn’t have any problems with it. The help pages are still very basic and there’s no style guide, but the easiest way to work out how to do things is to look at existing pages for examples.

I’ll be adding more contributions whenever I have time, and I’m also trying to encourage other people to contribute. I’ve posted on the Great War Forum asking people there to get involved. Between them forum members have a huge amount of relevant knowledge which needs to be more accessible. There have been some concerns raised on the forum that information is increasingly hard to find there because there’s so much of it. Your Archives could help to improve this situation, at least for the information which is within its remit, as a wiki based site would make the content much more accessible than a forum. It remains to be seen how many people will actually get involved. And if you’re reading this post and have any knowledge about TNA/PRO documents or other UK archives, go and sign up! Now!

Yesterday I went to that London. I spent the afternoon in the Public Records Office (it will never be the National Archives!) looking at seventeenth century wills and more First World War stuff. The most exciting discovery is that the PRO has started a wiki in which readers can contribute their knowledge of the documents. This is a fantastic idea, as some classes are very poorly catalogued and barely documented at all outside the class lists. I’m thinking particularly of SP28, which is a very important source for the English/British Civil Wars and Interregnum, and which I know an awful lot about (probably more than most PRO staff), so I’m looking forward to contributing. At present it’s in beta and only seems to be available at Kew, but I hope they’ll put it on their website soon.

Afterwards I went up to the IHR to hear Patrick Little’s paper on Cromwellian studs. It was interesting to find out more about horses in the 1650s as my thesis stopped in 1646. Patrick pointed out that whereas most histories of the period ignore Cromwell’s interest in breeding and racing horses, or put it down to the utilitarian aim of breeding cavalry horses, there is a lot of evidence that a common interest in horses was an important aspect of social and political networks during the protectorate. The paper also got me thinking about bloodlines and heredity, which I’d like to look into a bit more as it has possible implications for patriarchy and masculinity.

I hope it wasn’t too intimidating for Patrick to be asked questions by Peter Edwards and me. Peter knows more than anyone about horses in early-modern Britain. He was an unofficial mentor to me during my PhD and has given me all kinds of help, but this was the first time I’d seen him in person since I came back from my career break so it was good to catch up.

Expect some proper posts next week, if I survive the upgrade to WordPress 2.1. It seems to be going wrong for other people, but it hasn’t caused any problems on my test blog on localhost.