Discovery
Archives Discovery Forum
Guy Grannum
21 March 2012
What is Discovery?
Why?
3
c11 million records
c9 million records
c200K records
c10 million records
TNA records
ChallengesVolume of Catalogue and digitised data Increasing
• 11 Million Catalogue Entries = 500,000,000 “facts” (about 45 facts per entry)• Another 9 Million documents in Documents Online (digitised content)• Plus other sources• Ever increasing digitisation of our collection
Increasing prevalence of born-digital records
• Currently hold 1TB of born digital records; estimate total will be13.5TB by 2016• Specific large collections like Olympics 2012, estimate at 20TB on it's own Volume and location of Users
• Hard to count users online• For every physical ‘record’ produced here in TNA in 2009-10 (c 600,000) over 220 digital ‘records’ were downloaded• Users online from all around the world
Goal• Simple - focus on the users and on the Record
o Help the users to find relevant recordso Help the users to understand the recordso Help the users obtain records
• Principleso Be comprehensive – one stop shopo Coherent and Consistent – Structure that brings economy of scale and
flexibilityo Describe collection in ways that users understand – Different users (or
groups of users) have different ways of thinking about our collection and we need to support them all
5
What have we done? – Beta on Labs March 2011
6
Simple search
7
Search results
8
Taxonomy
9
Simple view
10
Advanced search options
11
Browse
12
Details page
13
User tags …
14
All tags page
15
Registration and sign-in
16
... and an API
17
No big bang!
Discovery is still being developed
18
User feedback
User testing
Staff feedback
Testing and trialling
What’s next …?
Discovery isn’t finished – we do regular updates and plan to keep iteratively adding new features.
• Planning for the closure of DocumentsOnline and the Catalogue• E-commerce system to buy copies• More advance search features• Refinements to the user interface• Refinements to user account page• Improvements to browse• Review other datasets and registration systems to add to
Discovery• Digital Records Infrastructure
19