We're just about to begin work on a new digitisation project: of the inventory volumes of the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England. The definition of a monument is widely drawn, to include historic buildings and structures of all kinds, and the volumes give accounts of their history and structure, based on a detailed measured survey. Before 1946 only monuments created before 1718 were recorded, but after 1946 coverage was extended to record all 18th and 19th century sites. The project is generously funded by English Heritage, of which the Royal Commission became part.
The 43 RCHME volumes form the counterpart to the publications of the slightly older Survey of London, which was taken over by the RCHME in 1986, the volumes of which are already on BHO. Together they offer a record of England’s monuments unrivalled in range, coverage, detail and accuracy. They also form a counterpart to the architectural content of the Victoria County History, with which the Commission’s history is intertwined. Architects, such as (Sir) Charles Peers, contributed surveys to the volumes of the VCH published before 1908 and went on to contribute surveys to both series for a short time. But the founding of the RCHME soon led to the VCH abandoning detailed survey and record, and to the two series being seen as complementary, with the VCH concentrating on using built evidence for tracing the history of settlement. Cross-searching all three series (a task often undertaken using the books) will be immeasurably enhanced by having all the volumes of the VCH, Survey of London and RCHME available online.
We expect the first volumes to appear this summer, with the set being complete by August 2013.
Monday, 23 April 2012
Thursday, 29 March 2012
An index of sustainability: ISURV
This project will investigate the creation of a sustainability index which will be the product of three variables: unique visitors, their return rate and the number of page requests per visit.
- Unique visitors: this is related to a number of factors, such as the uniqueness of the content, the longevity of the site, how it is promoted, and access fees.
- Rate of repeat visits: a measure of how suited the site is to our visitors' needs, aka loyalty
- Page views per Visit ('stickiness')
Take the example of a cafe: it can increase its business by getting more people through the doors (U), increasing the amount its customers spend each time (V), and improving the frequency with which each customer comes back (R).
In terms of resource allocation, the cafe has to decide which of these factors it could invest money in to bring it the biggest benefit; advertising to bring more people in (U), changing the product range or ambiance to increase money spent per visit (V), or the more diffuse aspects of loyalty (R) which could include more complicated activities such as taste tests.
This project will mainly focus on improving user experience (V), and refining the effectiveness of ISURV together with a set of orthogonal indicators which can be used to compare the functional performance of sub-site areas, a whole site, or even between separate sites. It will amend discrete areas of content, leaving whole other areas untouched to allow contrast, and communicate its results in a non-specialised language.
Our first set of figures will be published in April 2012.
Thursday, 8 March 2012
BHO wins new funding
We are pleased to announce that British History Online has been awarded funding by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) under strand B, 'Enhancing the Sustainability of Digital Collections', of the 16/11 Digital Infrastructure call.
Entitled 'Developing a sustainability index using British History Online (ISURV)', this project will investigate the creation of a sustainability index which can be used to compare the performance of functionality of sub-site areas, a whole site, or even between separate sites.
Its core objectives include:
- giving senior managers a richer set of performance indicators and attempting to better communicate the value of digital products upwards
- use the results to promote service excellence across the field of digital humanities
- large scale user engagement
- encourage (challenge?) historians to adopt new tools and techniques for navigating and locating content
- attempt to communicate to both audiences, i.e. senior managers and users, to create a positive environment for the product
You can keep up to date with the project, and learn how to take part, by following this blog.
Tuesday, 28 February 2012
Mapping the medieval countryside
We're delighted at BHO to be playing a part in this new AHRC-funded project, led by the Department of Digital Humanities (DDH) at King's College London. Our involvement is the digitisation for BHO of 29 volumes of the Calendars of Inquisitions Post Mortem, the single most important source for the study of landed society in later medieval
England. Those volumes will be available along the two early volumes for Henry III and Edward I that are already live. The forthcoming volumes cover the periods 1236-1447 and 1485-1509.
In addition to the volumes being accessible through BHO, the team at King's, working with colleagues at the University of Winchester, will create an additional database of the material for 1399-1447, allowing map-based and other statistical analyses of the data. Further details are available from the DDH site.
In addition to the volumes being accessible through BHO, the team at King's, working with colleagues at the University of Winchester, will create an additional database of the material for 1399-1447, allowing map-based and other statistical analyses of the data. Further details are available from the DDH site.
Monday, 27 February 2012
London Sheriffs' Court Roll
An edition of the court roll for 1320 is now live. Edited by Dr Matthew F. Stevens, it gives a complete edition and index of London's only surviving such roll for the medieval period, for July-Sept 1320. It was produced as part of the Centre for Metropolitan History ESRC-funded project 'London women and the economy before and after the black death' (2009-10). More information on the project is available on the project site; see also an introduction to the court roll itself.
Friday, 9 December 2011
Citations, week 50 2011
http://postalheritage.wordpress.com/2011/12/05/thurloe-and-the-secret-room/
The British Postal Museum & Archive ()
John Thurloe, whose state papers are available on BHO, was the first postmaster general and is reported to have opened and read all of the post every night.
http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/content/71/1/147.short
Hist Workshop J (2011) 71 ()
Many of BHO's London resources provide background for this article, which points to the significance of marriage as a means of acquiring Company membership for both women and men.
http://nq.oxfordjournals.org/content/58/2/283.short
Notes and Queries (2011) 58 ()
The author draws extensively on various BHO sources to piece together the identity of Ben Jonson's 'Love Lady'.
http://auldfromreekie.wordpress.com/2011/12/04/the-thrift/
The Auld from Reekie ()
A dilapidated and remote cottage on the Willey Estate in Shropshire was the centre of family life for this blogger.
The Diary of Samuel Pepys ()
The adjournment of Parliament (from the Journal of the House of Lords) goes unnoticed as Samuel Pepys gives an intimate view of the crisis in his marriage.
Friday, 30 September 2011
Lessons learned
Integrating usability into your work patterns means being able to demonstrate that you are in touch with the full range of users in a non-jargonistic way that excludes no-one. If you want to bootstrap usability, you will find that it has to influence and inform every single step of the development process and the relationship the project has with the wider organisational/business context in which it exists.
The biggest cultural shift is to make the usability analysis usable, i.e. to make the projects outputs extensible, transparent and traceable. The project will now be able to demonstrate an existing framework of usability into which any new development can be placed, discussed and tracked. Informal relationships with key users can now become formalised, events such as workshops can be opened up appealing to different audiences. Perhaps these workshops could also be taken out 'on the road' to visit institutions which development teams would not ordinarily get the chance to go to.
One potential dividend would be to build up experiences on the development of generic pieces of functionality, e.g. a registration form, a search form. New projects could then build these items of the back of hundreds (thousands?) of hours of research and development into these functions within the HE sector - an enviable knowledge base of good practice into which their own process could be recorded.
Usability practice has been integrated into our approach with no consultancy input - whilst there may be a need to create resources to define what constitutes the usability toolkit, this is liable to change over even a short period of time. Therefore, for usability to self-propagate, development teams across the HE sector need ways of communicating and discussing these approaches through worked examples. From a personal standpoint, there's no shortage of advice on the matter - what would be more useful if how other HE teams, facing the same institutional pressures, have actually run projects.
The funding for this project has generated a large amount of raw data on usage patterns which could inform other projects (e.g. library catalogues) at their outset. The opportunity is there to for this to be a two-way process - to give results back to the community upon project closure and so build up a corpus of material which could potentially be used in a longitudinal study of systems support in HE.
The usability process seeks to make clear specific obstacles and impediments which your users face; it would be ironic if the approach taken to more closely integrate usability practice into HE systems development relied on generalised case studies and theory.
The biggest cultural shift is to make the usability analysis usable, i.e. to make the projects outputs extensible, transparent and traceable. The project will now be able to demonstrate an existing framework of usability into which any new development can be placed, discussed and tracked. Informal relationships with key users can now become formalised, events such as workshops can be opened up appealing to different audiences. Perhaps these workshops could also be taken out 'on the road' to visit institutions which development teams would not ordinarily get the chance to go to.
One potential dividend would be to build up experiences on the development of generic pieces of functionality, e.g. a registration form, a search form. New projects could then build these items of the back of hundreds (thousands?) of hours of research and development into these functions within the HE sector - an enviable knowledge base of good practice into which their own process could be recorded.
Usability practice has been integrated into our approach with no consultancy input - whilst there may be a need to create resources to define what constitutes the usability toolkit, this is liable to change over even a short period of time. Therefore, for usability to self-propagate, development teams across the HE sector need ways of communicating and discussing these approaches through worked examples. From a personal standpoint, there's no shortage of advice on the matter - what would be more useful if how other HE teams, facing the same institutional pressures, have actually run projects.
The funding for this project has generated a large amount of raw data on usage patterns which could inform other projects (e.g. library catalogues) at their outset. The opportunity is there to for this to be a two-way process - to give results back to the community upon project closure and so build up a corpus of material which could potentially be used in a longitudinal study of systems support in HE.
The usability process seeks to make clear specific obstacles and impediments which your users face; it would be ironic if the approach taken to more closely integrate usability practice into HE systems development relied on generalised case studies and theory.
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