Transforming Libraries - RLUK 2021 conference

 I         I was really keen to attend RLUK’s 2021 conference on Transforming Libraries, and so was delighted to win a bursary which covered my conference fee. I have been working in the area of special collections and archives for well over 15 years now, and had the opportunity to attend various conferences and events, but invariably closely connected to my specialist area. Having completed a teaching qualification in Higher Education (AFHEA) and the Aurora women’s leadershipdevelopment programme, I was keen to attend a more broadly focussed conference, broaden my knowledge of the research environment and put my recent learning in context.

I wasn’t disappointed. The key points I took away from the conference were that:

• Most (all?) university libraries already do a huge amount to contribute to the research environment of their institutions. What they’re often less good at is communicating this, both to their users and to those higher up the university hierarchy. There was much to take forward about alignment with strategic objectives, finding out user needs and communicating how we meet those needs.
• The pandemic had created opportunities for research libraries to demonstrate how central they are to the university – often staying open throughout lockdown to provide study space and resources for students, as well as providing digital content. For many, this had helped to communicate the library’s worth higher up the university, and there was a sense of urgency around making the most of this opportunity to influence and advocate.

I also found much more content than I had expected about teaching, with its links to research, and especially teaching with special collections material. From this I have noted down ideas to explore further, including around inquiry-based learning, aligning our services with what users want/improving communication with users and using visualisers to improve the service we can offer both now and when in-person teaching in the reading room is possible once again.

I also thought the practical aspects of the conference worked very well. I had anticipated missing the opportunities for informal networking at an in-person conference, but there were several ways around this. I enjoyed exploring the virtual terrace, including the swimming pool(!) and having the chance to chat with whoever I came across. This went some way to replicating the conference experience of chance meetings over coffee. Similarly with the ability to explore the virtual marketplace of vendors/sponsors and see what they have to offer. I also found the searchable list of delegates useful, and used the chat feature to contact a few delegates directly and to follow up with questions after one of the talks. In some ways, this worked even better in this environment than at a large in-person conference where you have to physically track down the person you want to talk to. Although it was a rather intense three days, it wasn’t overwhelming, as the talks were spread out, with plenty of time inbetween to have a break from my computer screen or to contact other delegates. There was a very friendly atmosphere, and everybody I approached to speak to was happy to talk to me, or to refer me onto a more appropriate person.

 
So, what next? I switched off my computer feeling like I’d got a better grasp of the ‘bigger picture’ in HE and research libraries, as well as picking up some useful tips for teaching using my collections. I’m hoping I’ll be able to put some of those into practice in my job over the next few months.

A big thank you to RLUK for sponsoring my place at the conference.

Developing collaboration between archives services and Higher Education

The National Archives

I attended this day long event at The National Archives in June - it was designed to launch a refreshed guide to collaboration between archives services and Higher Education worked on by History UK.

Background
The previous guide was produced by RLUK in 2015, based on research done in 2014, so this is a much needed update. It had been found that individual archives were being approached by academics keen to collaborate, but archives were unsure what REF2014 was, and the relationships that formed were not particularly resilient as they were often reliant on a single academic. From this the DCDC (Discovering Collections; Discovering Communities) series of conferences emerged.

The new guide
Includes refreshed case studies and references to REF, TEF and KEF, the 2017 HE Bill, UKRI and the Office for Students, all of which affect the landscape in which collaboration is now happening.

Several case studies were offered. These included Our Criminal Past, which brought together academics and archivists through engagement vehicles such as workshops, an advice forum and social media. They used HistoryPin to allow members of the public to add information about their criminal ancestors. I found the case studies particularly useful as they outlined the obstacles they had found to collaboration. It was apparent the same issues cropped up repeatedly, namely:

• Time/resources - without the resources for an assistant it becomes very difficult to keep the momentum of the project going.
• Maintaining relationships with the other collaborating organisations, each of whom may have their own interests/objectives, which are different to yours.
• Collaborators will have their own routines, working practices, lack of expertise and skills. There may well be several layers of processes that each collaborator has to work through internally before a project can happen
• Managing a website, particularly the costs of developing and maintaining it
• Copyright issues, particularly around using images
• Lack of awareness of the amount of work involved, eg the timeframe to produce an exhibition is usually years
• Some funding streams aren't available if you're not an accredited archive service

My group worked on identifying the challenges and benefits of collaboration

The audience at this event was fairly evenly split between archivists (working in a variety of sectors) and academics. We weren't allowed to just sit and listen either, there were several group exercises including "speed dating" where we had a few minutes at a time to talk to various academics in turn about what we were hoping to gain from a partnership. These were a great way to meet academics engaged in a variety of areas, plus people looking after other collections. 

The guide itself outlines the steps needed to be taken when instigating a collaborative partnership, and encourages the answering of some key questions, such as who are the key decision makers, finding out what is important to each partner and getting everything in writing. It also provides a complete project template to use.

Priority cards

The final exercise was to arrange a series of priority cards into a diamond nine shape, which encouraged us to explore in groups why others had different priorities and how they might align with ours. I particularly liked this diamond nine produced by another group, who had added an extra priority card for 'budget for cake and refreshments'!

Prioritising cake!

Actions
As a result of attending this event, I:

• have joined the HEAP (Higher Education Archive Programme) mailing list so that I can remain informed about developments in this area
• am looking into using HistoryPin to put our collections on the map
• have put a reminder in my calendar to check for the publication of the new collaboration guide this summer
• have followed up with a couple of academics from other universities who are interested in using some of our Special Collections in their research and/or teaching
• have put a reminder in my calendar to check on work being done to track citations of archive services across published papers and journals

Future past: researching archives in the digital age

Last week I took part in this research symposium at the Institute of Historical Research in London. It was a great opportunity to find out what other archives are doing about digitization and born digital records, and how academic users of archives are finding their experience. It was a really interesting day, and my notes go on for pages, so I'm going to attempt to pull out some of the common themes that emerged. There were many opportunities during the day to ask questions, get feedback and talk to others, so my notes are a mixture of speakers and thoughts/ideas found from networking.


The hashtag was #digfuturepast and the symposium was recorded and should be available soon on the IHR website.

Barriers to using digital material

Paying for content. Digitization is expensive but academic users are used to having "free" access to collections (actually paid for by their institution). Yet, the digitization has to be paid for somehow, whether through institutions funding it themselves, grant funding or commercial companies providing a paid-for service (eg Ancestry) 

Making copies available. Gone are the days when a student or academic would come into an archive every day for a week or a month to do their research. Pressures of time mean they want to make the most of a single visit and be able to take copies away with them or download copies to use at home, yet it is impossible to digitize everything, and there are various reasons why copies may not be allowed at all, eg copyright, commercial sensitivity or preservation.

Poor documentation and/or OCR mean that researchers can't find what they're looking for. They may miss relevant items in a plethora of search results, or not get the result they need at all. A reliance on keyword searching misses the opportunity to search the collection more widely and loses the connection between archival sources.

Lack of a seamless user experience make it hard to use the material eg legacy systems, different systems for library/archive material, system not optimised for finding archival material.

Information literacy issues. We can't always assume that researchers will know how to search in our system, so we need to equip them with the tools to do this. We also need to address the common misconceptions found below.

Misconceptions about online access to archives

• Any online resource is complete and comprehensive. Many only represent a tiny fraction of an archive's holdings, so how do we alert users to this and encourage them to look beyond the digital? It is impossible to digitize everything, due to copyright, staff and equipment resources, having metadata available, issues with storing electronic files etc.
• Everything will be catalogued. No, digitizing is not the same as cataloguing. Most (all?!) archives have a cataloguing backlog, and, until the material is catalogued, there is no way to access it. This then gives rise to the question about whether it is better to spend resources digitizing some already catalogued material, or catalogue unlisted material that cannot be used at all yet.
• Digitized version is just the same as the original. No, frequently this isn't the case and their are users who will still need to see the original. This is also one of the reasons why it is vital never to destroy the original.

Educating researchers

Time and again the need to educate researchers came up. It was agreed by all present that this is a vital part of training as a historian and that it should be done as early as possible in an academic career. I was pleased by this as we are already doing several of the suggested activities to encourage researchers to engage with our collections, including:

• Running workshops for all history undergraduates to find out how to use Special Collections material
• Running dissertation drop ins and workshops for students needing help with a dissertation using Special Collections
• Looking for entry points beyond history - we get a lot of use by creative writing students and have widened our reach to include English and Sports Scientists too. This has repercussions for collecting policies too - are we collecting material that resonates with our researchers?

Case studies

• The archivist from Boots Heritage who explained how Boots had moved from an entirely internally-focussed business archive to one that was available to researchers thanks to funding from the Wellcome Trust to develop a new digital resource aimed at academic researchers. She had found that getting the right tools was essential so proper cataloguing software (CALM) had been acquired and material was catalogued to stringent standards to make it helpful and meaningful, including creating authority files to be a repository of information about buildings, brands and people. For many researchers this has turned out to be the entry point into the collections. Preservation issues affected the usability of some items and repackaging them into smaller units greatly improved this issue. Care had to be taken to protect Boots' interests, so images are watermarked and download prevented, and commercially sensitive information is not available.
• Transport for London archives are aiming to collect the evidence that every journey matters, including the digital output of the organisation. They took the opportunity presented by needing to archive born digital material to overhaul and restructure their cataloguing. Although this was resource heavy it has created a more useable catalogue for staff and made it much more available to researchers.
• Kathleen Chater talked about her research into black people in England in 18th century and how digitized records hadn't helped her solve research problems such as identifying where "black" didn't refer to a person, or to those instances where a black person was identified using another term. Keyword searches frequently produced unusable quantities of results. One of the more helpful things she did was spend three months going through 10000 Old Bailey records on microfilm, which also gave her the helpful context of many other cases (eg how common was it for anyone to be convicted of a particular crime). Although the Old Bailey records have now been digitized they are difficult to search because of OCR problems (the long s) and context is lost.
• Jo Pugh, a digital development manager at The National Archives, discussed his PhD research in information journeys in archival collections. He related how the problem now isn't amassing information, but restricting what we see. His research had compared how enquiries are formulated on email, phone calls or Twitter and had looked at how the experts (archivists) worked with researchers to resolve archival queries. He had found that research guides could help to reduce uncertainty, eg by explaining how to get the best out of a search.
• Tom Scott from Wellcome Collections explained how the context of their collections isn't just medical and so users don't know what's in the collections. Searching digitized collections meant items were isolated from their context "searchable but not understandable". They wanted to provide access by having a good reading experience, whether in person or online, so had tried to "encapsulate a librarian": a single domain model from a mix of systems for books, archives etc, extracting meaning of enquiries (eg cross references for TB/consumption/tuberculosis). He stressed that it is really important to record the metrics of what people are actually searching for.

The symposium rounded up with a discussion of how we could futureproof our collections. My take aways from the day are:

• Keep doing our existing work on educating researchers as early as possible, and look at how we can expand that with the resources we have.
• "Futureproofing requires quality cataloguing" - making sure our cataloguing is up-to-scratch.
• Assess any digitization project to ensure that high quality metadata is in place first and that it will support the needs of researchers wanting to use our collections.

Webinar: preparing to digitise your archives

Long time no blog! I've been on maternity leave, and am planning to write some reflections on that and returning to work soon. But, in the meantime, here's my write up of a webinar I took part in last week from The National Archives. As with the previous webinar I've taken part in, on forward planning, this was a great opportunity to learn more about a topic in a free and easy format, as it only took an hour of my time at work and there was no need to even leave the building!

It was clearly structured and covered the basics of planning a digitisation project. This is my summary of the contents:

Scope your project

• Spent time deciding what to include and exclude in your project. Digitisation is costly so avoid creating extra work by trying to digitise too much. Be focussed!
• Start with a small pilot, digitise a small sample and run it through all of the digitisation processes.
• Consider possible outputs. Tiff files are the most sensible format to capture for the master copy, with 300PPI for most paper originals and 400-600PPI for photographs. PDF is not recommended.

In-house or outsourced?
This decision depends on the size of the project, type, budget and internal capacities. The pros and cons are:
Outsourcing
Pros: Can be cheaper, technical knowledge isn't needed, less stress for staff, saves time  
Cons: Less control over project, relocation of collection/providing access to the material, fragile or sensitive material, restrictions on rescoping the project once it is underway.
In-house
Pros: More control, staff skill development, may save money in the long run, keeps collections in one place
Cons: Lack of in-house skills, big investment in equipment needed, lack of suitable infrastructure, no in-house experience

If considering outsourcing: shop around, get quotes and look at company's existing work. Visit their site and check their set up. Ask for samples early on in the project and have regular project catch ups. Make sure you have a contract.

Document preparation
Preservation/conservation: Assess condition of the collection and whether work by a conservator is needed in order to digitise without damaging the originals. Remove all metal pins, clips etc. Digitisation can take place through Melinex sleeves. How are you going to digitise books safely - unbind the volume, use a camera rather than a scanner etc?

Consider capture and post-processing equipment
There are pros and cons to using cameras and scanners.
Document preservation: a camera provides more alternatives to capturing the image without causing damage
Image quality: cameras tend to produce better results
Price: bear in mind that equipment needs to be kept up-to-date (this should be factored into the cost of outsourcing). Depending on the size of the project, renting equipment may work out cheaper.
Useability: scanners tend to be more straightforward to use with fewer settings. Cameras require colour calibration and that the lens be kept clean.
Versatility: scanners work well with flat materials, but aren't suitable for digitising books. Cameras tend to offer more versatility.

Post processing
Images are usually captured in RAW format then need to be processed. RAW files are very large, so this needs to be considered when assessing file storage needs. Obviously the file format must be compatibile with the image processing and storage software being used.

Metadata and storage
Technical metadata is included at the capture stage, for instance camera settings, focal length, exposure. It may be embedded within the image and then shared in a spreadsheet.
Descriptive metadata is the description of what the item is, such as names, dates and places so that the digitised image is discoverable. It can be captured by OCR (although this has severe limitations) or manually (time consuming and expensive).
Storage ensure you have the the basics, such as a server large enough to store the files and a means of backing them up.

What I've learnt and will take forward:
Visit other archives/Special Collections to learn from their experiences.
Keep it as simple as possible and only capture what is relevant. 
Know what the outcomes of the project are before commencing image capture. 
Never destroy the original after digitisation, unless they are acetate negatives.

Out of the box: enabling access to archives

The day after the charismatic connecting course, I went on a very different day. This was held at Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives, and was themed around the issue of accessibility to archives. I'd thought we were doing OK on accessibility where I work (as a couple of people who use wheelchairs had been able to use our collections with no problem) until a dyslexic student with a looming coursework deadline had arrived needing help with some handwritten autobiographies and I didn't know where to start.

This was a free day organised by THLHLA as part of the "out of the box" project, with support from The National Archives and a local disability arts organisation, Film pro. It started with seven 10 minute case studies (with a break halfway through!) from a range of organisations, demonstrating accessibility projects they had worked on. These included:

• Out of the box project (Tower Hamlets)
• Film pro
• Royal Air Force Museum - which had won an Autism Access Award. Their information packs are available to download from their website.
• Hackney Museum, which actively encourages people to say how the museum can be made more accessible.
• Sara Griffiths from The National Archives talked about their There Be Monsters [pdf link], which built a permanent legacy in the grounds, and Prisoner 4099 projects.
• Surrey Heritage about how they try to be accessible by having a guide on their website, working with groups to tailor a particular approach (e.g. they have records from asylums that have since closed, and they worked with Woking Mind to identify the places and people in photographs), have different mice and keyboards available, have a handling collection for use by people with visual impairments and produce tactile books based on stories from the archives. All the staff have been trained in being dementia-friendly and they are holding trial coffee mornings to try and help stimulate the memories of people with dementia.
• Chris Haydon from Freewheelers Theatre talked about their work producing a series of films about the history of disability in Surrey and on the Epsom Cluster of mental health hospitals.

A free (and very tasty) lunch was then provided, with plenty of time to talk to other participants about accessibility in their archives and special collections, plus an opportunity to look at the exhibition in the foyer area of the library.

The afternoon kicked off with a poetry reading by one of the Out of the box participants, Sarah. Her poetry was very funny and gave a great insight into how she had felt about using archival collections. As with the There Be Monsters project at The National Archives, it was good to see different, creative, outlets for research in archives, rather than an academic article etc.

The participants then divided into three groups to discuss topics of interest to them from a suggested three:
a) Improving access to the archives searchroom and catalogues
b) Access to collections for people with learning disabilities
c) Use and promotion of archives as artistic/creative stimuli
I opted for a), as I felt this was the most pertinent to my own situation. Ideas that came out of my discussion group included:

• Having "creative enablers" around to help on targeted days, much like a "buddy" type system. The creative enabler can help to remove those barriers to research.
• Implications of the Care Act 2014, which encourages co-production between health and social services, service users and providers. It may be that there are funding sources available from adult social care as the key is personalisation - that it's geared to the needs of the individual service user.
• Have an "access group" with the aim of demystifying a visit to archives/special collections and building confidence to help get people through the door. This might suit a volunteer who is already a keen user of collections.
• Running a new user induction session, which would apply to any user, not just someone who is disabled.

We also talked about the problems of making archive catalogues accessible. Archives Hub is very clear and easy to use, but specific archive catalogues tend to be much less so. The catalogue at The Keep was recommended as particularly good though. We all agreed that one of the huge problems is lack of resources - everyone had a cataloguing backlog, which then makes it hard to justify spending time doing things like transcribing records.

At the end of the day each group reported back to all of us. I really enjoyed my day on this workshop. There was a lot to think about, and I also made some useful contacts. My thanks to the organisers.

Webinar: forward planning

I'm a bit behind with blog posts, but getting caught up again now. Back in June I joined a forward planning webinar put on by The National Archives.

This lasted about an hour, and was a good way of finding out more about forward planning for archives, particularly as I could "attend" it from the comfort of my own office without incurring any travel costs or having to take time away from work.

We started off by testing out the webinar voting buttons by comparing how much progress participants so far had made with forward planning. Some of the reasons we might not be looking into it at the moment were: no time, no budget, things change too fast, organisation is too small BUT the emphasis was really on using our resources wisely, which means forward planning is essential. In times of uncertainty a forward plan is a useful advocacy tool to show the capabilities of your service and that your resources are used well, as well as how you are contributing to wider corporate priorities.

The essential (but flexible) ingredients of a forward plan are:

1. Mission
2. Review and evaluation of previous plan(s)
3. Analysis of internal and external environment in which service exists
4. Stakeholder consultation and analysis of views
5. Strategic aims
6. Specific objectives beneath each strategic aim
7. Action plan(s)
8. Resource plan(s)
9. Date plan(s) will be reviewed

As far as timescales go, it is good practice to plan in detail for the next year

Guidelines for writing the plan:

• Keep it simple
• Focus on highlights
• Include things that haven't happened (and why)
• If you have no previous plan, review the previous couple of years.

Analysis

Use SWOT or PESTLE analysis to determine the factors affecting your service.

Aims, objectives, actions and resources

What people and budget are needed to meet the archive's objectives and deliver the plan?

Who will write the plan?

• Don't write it alone - another pair of eyes is always useful!
• Have someone in a co-ordinating role to oversee the content
• Include a range of perspectives from within the organisation
• Compare notes with colleagues in other services.

Once you have a plan:

Use it-

• to plan work loads
• identify grants
• monitor progress
• to know how well you're doing
• to make the case for new resources

Renew it-

• don't let the plan die
• revisit each year's aims and objectives
• make sure your plan moves with time

Consulting with users and volunteers?

• Don't ask too many questions - keep it targetted.
• Ask quite specific questions, not "what could we do better".

Forward planning resources

Forward planning resources on TNA.
Collections Trust

I found the webinar very reassuring, as it helped me get a handle on what I need to do to create a forward plan. It was also good to be told that it doesn't have to be 110% perfect in order to be put in for the Archives Accreditation standard!

Visit: Special Collections at Royal Holloway

At the beginning of September I spent an afternoon on a visit organised by ALISS to Special Collections and Archives at Royal Holloway.

Founders Building at Royal Holloway

I know the university well, not only did I do my undergraduate degree there, but I also worked as a part-time library assistant in the three campus libraries whilst I was studying. But the Archives were quite hidden away whilst I was a student, and, despite working in the same building, I'd never ventured up the tower to the Archives reading room.

As we discovered during our visit, the Archivist, Annabel, explained that things are very different now, with Special Collections and Archives playing a role in teaching various groups of students, as well as featuring in students' research.

Archives & Special Collections reading room

Annabel talked us through the history of the college and the part it played in women's education. She showed how items from their collections relate to this. There is a fun feature on the BBC website showing Royal Holloway students' room in the 1890s and now. Annabel showed us various items from the archives, including the foundation deed, some photograph albums and the student register showing Emily Wilding.

We then discussed ways of publicising collections. Annabel does an item of the month on the college website (it isn't always her, the Curator writes some of them too) and tweets about them using the library's Twitter account (@RHUL_Library). Heritage Open Days are a good way of getting the local community in and raise awareness of what the archives holds, and leaflets are sent out to local heritage institutions, such as Egham Museum and Surrey History Centre. The annual garden party is a way of making connections with alumni. Archives Hub has also been crucial for getting collections known about online.

I really enjoyed my visit to Royal  Holloway. As usual with these visits, conversations were sparked off with other attendees sharing experiences and we had some good discussions about storage issues. Royal Holloway has big plans for a new library, which will feature purpose-built special collections storage area, exhibition space and reading room. I hope there will be opportunities for another visit once that's built.

Archives for All?

Last week I went to a day's workshop with the Education and Outreach department of the National Archives.

I found it a really useful day, with plenty of networking opportunities with other attendees (especially over a free lunch!), and a range of speakers.

First of all, Krishna Kaur (TNA Equality & Diversity Co-ordinator) talked us through Equality and Diversity at the National Archives, and we discussed the question how does your organisation promote Equality and Diversity across policy and practice?  in groups. I found this really interesting, as I've done Equality and Diversity training in both my current job and my previous one, but wanted to know how to take it to the next step, as it came up whilst I was putting together a funding bid. Not only is it important to remove physical barriers to people using your service, but how do you actively promote it so that a broader range of people use it? We talked about the protected characteristics (age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage & civil partnership, pregnancy & maternity, race, religion & belief, sex, sexual orientation) and how to actively promote equality and diversity through all kinds of areas such as: providing alternative formats for information (exhibition captions, for instance), positive action at interview (such as the Positive About Disabled People symbol that some organisations use in recruitment), and what events are recognised and celebrated through work at the archives/special collections. We also discussed barriers: time, money, resources, perceptions, listed buildings, conservation requirements.

Then the Outreach Manager, Sara Griffiths, talked to us about the new directions their outreach is going in, to inspire creativity as well as research. Their Caribbean Through a Lens project had made the most of social media, and encouraged participation by inviting comments and contributions, as well as working with community groups.

After lunch we heard about educational resources on the web from the Education Web Manager, Clare Horrie, and a colleague. This focussed on the lesson plans and more that TNA has available on its website, mainly about history and centred on their collections. It looks amazing, although I was a bit overwhelmed by the amount they had available (and how much work it must have taken to get it there). However, the ideas are scaleable. This is their document of the month feature, which is quite relevant to one of the collections I work with... They are also making a lot of use of Pinterest, Flickr, Facebook and Twitter, which is good to hear.

Sarah Hutton, the Onsite Education Manager, with Lizzie Skeaping, the Education Officer, then gave us a taster of various educational activities they offer, including a table full of documents to have a look at, and a Magna Carta lesson where we all got to play with iPads. Did people take Magna Carta seriously? is taught by TNA but the children are in their own classroom back in school. It was fun having a go at the activities, and it also helped to see the range of things on offer, some of which I can imagine using. TNA is moving to a WordPress platform for their online lessons, which is free, so something that could be used in many places.

Finally, Fleur Soper and Kate Wheeler (Collections Knowledge Managers) talked to us about the Archiving the Arts programme (which I've already participated in at work by submitting details of some of our collections), and related areas to support the arts. This included a discussion touching on a range of issues, including funding. It is looking like the introduction of the Archives Accreditation standard means that most, if not all, future funders will expect the recipients of their funding to be accredited.

I really enjoyed my day at TNA. I had several useful discussion over lunch, and also learnt a lot from the speakers and activities. It was an interesting day, that had been thoughtfully arranged to include plenty of networking opportunities and hands on activities. My thanks to TNA for organising it.

Archives Hub contributors' workshop

The same week as the digitisation workshop at the Wellcome, I was also able to go on a contributors' workshop organised by Archives Hub, and held at Tate Britain.

I found the day really useful. We covered everything from an introduction to archival cataloguing using the Hub to future developments. Although I've been using the Hub at work for cataloguing our collections (you'll find them listed here) for most of this year, I'd picked up most of it as I went along, so it was great to have an overview, and also the chance to ask questions about areas I hadn't been sure about before.

Tips I picked up included:

• Making descriptions work effectively online (bearing in mind the person reading them could be anywhere in the world), as well as within the context of your institution.
• Creating multi-level descriptions (which is going to be SO useful). 
• Adding digital content.
• Using Hub descriptions to contribute to subject-based portals. 

The top tips for cataloguing are very useful, and I was also really excited about a future development of micro-sites, which would allow us to have our own local interface to host our own descriptions. 

I also enjoyed the networking opportunities, the chance to chat about the issues with people in a similar boat over coffee and lunch, and also to meet Bethan Ruddock and Jane Ronson for the first time. I liked the way the day was structured, which gave plenty of time to ask questions and have a go for ourselves. The day gave me plenty of ideas for future developments.

Thank you to Archives Hub, and particularly Bethan and Jane, for such a great and helpful day.