Now I'm delighted to welcome today's speaker Ruth Schieferstein,
Ruth studied History and Museum Studies at the University of Aberdeen
before joining Historic Environment Scotland in 2015. She has a passionate interest in digital
preservation, history, and heritage, and in November 2018 she joined our
Digital Projects team as an Archives Officer. So Ruth, over to you!
Okay thank you Neil, hi everyone and welcome to joining me today. This talk is about our
four year project - HES archives digital project - and also about
digital preservation at HES in general. The beautiful Charlestown lime kilns
will be the backdrop for the talk and will act as a case study to
showcase the steps we're taking in making digital material available to the public.
Before I start my talk I would like to highlight and explain some words that
I will use quite frequently throughout my talk, some of you may already be familiar
with these phrases but some might not be, so please bear with me while I go through those.
First of all there is digital preservation itself, in its simplest form digital preservation
describes the series of managed activities that are necessary to ensure continued access
to digital material for as long as necessary. Then there is accession which is a new item
or collection of items from the same source accepted into the HES archives collections.
Then born digital is material that has been created in digital format
as opposed to created using paper or other analog formats and converted to digital.
Appraisal is the process of distinguishing records of continuing value from those of no further
value, so that the latter may be eliminated. So basically making sure that only relevant records
are being kept. Then ingest is the process of putting data into digital archive storage.
And finally metadata is a set of information or data that gives information about
another set of data. So I hope that this glossary is helpful throughout the talk
and we're now ready to start! So first off I want to introduce our archives. HES archives
brings together items held previously by Historic Scotland and the Royal Commission on the Ancient
and Historical Monuments of Scotland, prior to the creation of Historic Environment Scotland.
Overall we collect, care for, and make available material relating to Scotland's archaeology,
buildings, industrial and maritime heritage. We also continue to record all aspects of Scotland's
historic environment through our own survey and recording work, as well as from a wide range of
other organizations, communities, and individuals who are helping to enhance our national resource.
As you know digital material is becoming more and more common, not just in our everyday life
but also in the archive. The tangible forms of paper and vellum traditionally associated
with archives are now increasingly accompanied by digital surrogates created through digitization,
and digital is becoming the de facto format for contemporary records as well.
At the start of 2017 we had around 1.4 million catalog items of which
530 000 were digital records, all of these digital records are available from our Canmore website,
you can see the link on the slide as well. However having only 530 000 digital records
meant that the majority of our collections were only available to those able to visit
us in our search room in Edinburgh itself. In 2017, through investment funding we started a
pilot approach to mass-digitize collections to significantly increase online accessibility.
That pilot year added a further 175 000 digital images, which were made available online for
public consultation. Among those collections were the Aerial Photography and Buildings of
the Scottish Countryside collections, which I've used here as an example on the slides.
The success of the pilot year led to the continuation of investment
and the digital projects were established to carry on this work until 2021.
So the digital projects had four aims: Increase in volume of digital material cataloged and
discoverable by users; increase the volume of physical material digitized catalogued
and available online; improved management and long-term preservation of greater or proportion
of HES archives; and the reduction in inaccessible and invisible archives.
To meet these aims the project had two key remits: The cataloging of at-risk born digital archives
and process these through all stages of the digital preservation lifecycle to ensure long-term
preservation and access; and the second aim is the digitization of archival collection and
historic photography which are currently only accessible in-house and are uncatalogued and invisible.
I was predominantly involved with the first remit of the project, and will therefore
focus on that for this talk today, so not so much on the digitization side of things.
The volume of newborn digital accessions has increased annually since the late 1990s.
Despite this the ability of the digital archive to process all these collections had not been
able to keep up, thus creating a backlog of digital accessions. At the beginning of
our project a scoping exercise was undertaken to understand the extent of material we hold
in our non-public accession database. Across nearly 500 individual deposits collections we
identified over 300 000 digital files in over 400 file formats ranging from 1997 to 2017.
Among this backlog, I came across the Charlestown project archive. It was one of 141 digital project
archives deposited with us by AOC archaeology group in 2017. The whole accession contained
more than 15 000 individual files as well as physical items, and our Charlestown project
was itself a fairly large project with 655 individual files spread over 14 folders.
It caught my eye because I knew the Charlestown lime kilns from personal visits,
and I was fascinated to see how much they had changed in a relatively short period of time.
The archaeological work had been done in 2015-16 and I have visited the Charlestown lime kilns
last year, so within the last five years they have changed quite a bit.
This first picture here is from the project archive, and you can
see what the lime kilns looked like in 2015. Everything is overgrown and the fencing looks
quite tired and ready to fall over. The next picture shows the lime kilns three years later
in 2018, which is after a major clean-up and conservation work that the kilns had undergone.
And this is also what they look like today, so much nicer and cleaner.
The conservation work was done by us - Historic Environment Scotland - between 2014 and 18
and it was part of the Inner Forth Landscape Initiative suite of projects
that safeguard the Inner Forth important built heritage.
The work of Inner Forth Landscape Initiative - IFLI for short,
that's what it says on the slide there just to let you know - the work included
clearance of encroaching vegetation which can be clearly seen on those two images,
replacing and repairing stonework, and installing new lintels and ironwork to make the structure
safe for visitors. This is by far not an extensive list of the works that have been done under the
project and I would highly recommend checking out IFLI's website if you want to find out more
about this and their numerous other projects, and you can see there the website on the slide here.
When I've looked further into the project archives that had been deposited with us I was delighted to
see that AOC archaeology group had actually been commissioned by Historic Environment Scotland.
The works, which were a measured survey of the exterior and interior,
as well as an archaeological evaluation
were meant to provide a basic understanding of the remains, and informed set conservation work.
So let me quickly here tell you a little bit about the lime kilns, and why they are so important.
The village and the lime kilns at Charlestown were built in the late 1760s and 1770s,
the lime kilns consisted of a complex of between 6 to 10 kilns at the time and
were extended in the 1790s to create 14 lime kilns in total which are still visible today.
The village Charlestown was named after Charles Bruce the 5th Earl of Elgin who was developing
lime production on his Broomhill estate, and was built for the workers of the complex.
The buildings were arranged to form the initials CE, which stand for Charles Elgin,
which was his formal title. The planned nature of the lime-works was for the
time the largest undertaking of its kind in Scotland by the 19th century.
Its biggest strength was the sheer volume of lime that was being produced at Charlestown,
it was far in excess of any other lime kilns in the country, and at its peak Charlestown
supplied 30 per cent of the UK's building lime. The largest market for Charlestown product was the
northeast of Scotland, Stirling, and Falkirk, with some also going to the central belt.
The lime was used in building and a range of industrial applications including glassmaking,
tanning, and sugar refining. The greatest use however was in agriculture for improving soil.
By the 1930s lime production had greatly reduced at Charlestown, which brought about
a winding down of the industry for the next 20 years. It was eventually closed down in 1957
and the Charlestown Lime Company who owned the site since 1890
sold off their vehicles and equipment and some of the buildings were demolished on the site,
such as those to the kiln head, the kiln head is the top of the kilns.
The demolition rubbish of those buildings were then thrown down into the kilns,
and the kilns themselves remained abandoned ever since and by the 1990s the
lime kilns had become dangerous and overgrown.
In response to fears that the kilns may be lost to decay,
the Royal Commission undertook a detailed hand-drawn floor plan and south
elevation of the site, together with a section through one of the kilns in 1993.
The plan - you can see the plan here on the slide and it's available as well on Canmore.
Some further limited archaeological investigation was also undertaken in
the late 1990s in response to some minor development. The investigation identified
some earlier 20th century buildings that had survived in front of the kilns.
So before we're going back to our project, let us now have a quick look at the digital
preservation lifecycle. So what is the lifecycle?
It is probably best explained on the Digital Preservation Coalition website or DPC.
It says that the lifecycle refers to all the stages required to preserve and sustain access
to digital content, from creation to ingest, management and administration to access and reuse.
Here on screen is a simplified diagram of all the stages our digital files need to go through
to protect, preserve, and to access them. It all starts with the producer who creates the content,
in our case this is the AOC archaeology group. That material is then passed to us
within an accession. Before the material gets ingested into a digital repository though,
it needs to be appraised so that only suitable material gets included in our archive.
This is done according to our strict appraisal guidelines, set out in our digital
repository management policies. For our lime kilns this meant that I had to go through
every individual file to make sure that none were corrupt or obsolete, and that they were
suitable for inclusion in the archives, for example this meant taking out any duplications.
This gave me a chance to see what the project archive contains, the majority
were digital images and vector graphics, all showing the lime kilns in great detail,
and it is amazing what can be seen and discovered while going through a project like that.
So let's have a look. This image, for example, is a shot down the kiln head,
so remember that's at the top of the kiln, and this is where the limestone and the coal would
have been dropped in before the kilns would have been lit on fire to produce the quicklime.
It's quite clear how huge this whole undertaking was, like the size and the scale of the operation,
because the the kilns would have taken quite large quantities of limestone and coal.
Then the next images show the draw hole from kiln number 11, and it was one of the few
draw holes that still had its door attached. So this is where the workers would have tended
to the fire in the kilns, and this is also where they would have withdrawn the quicklime
from the kilns as well, and I was quite fascinated to see how small those doors actually are
in comparison to that big massive hole where they're throwing in all the limestone,
and then they're just getting it all out of this small little door. And on the second image as
well you can see quite well some of the debris that the demolished buildings have left behind.
So this is one of the examples of a vector graphic that was included in the project archive,
and it was recreated for the report illustration, and depicts the south elevation.
It shows clearly the vegetation and wall cavities, and different building materials
like bricks and timber as well. So once every file had been reviewed,
and the appraisal process complete, I started to create catalog records for the material,
mirroring overall the file structure provided by the archaeologist,
thus maintaining the integrity of the way the material is displayed afterwards.
So at this point the files were ready to be ingested into our secure digital repository,
together with all accompanying metadata and cataloging information.
Throughout the project we work to improve the standards in the archival description of born
digital collection. We established an archival description standard
for cataloging digital material, which standardized captioning and metadata across
archive staff working with digital collections, improving retrieval and searchability.
So now after our ingest we are in the big blue circle, which represents our
secure digital repository. Multiple copies are regularly
made of the entire digital repository, and each copy is kept at a separate location.
We use checksums to control these copies, checksums are like electronic fingerprints
that uniquely identify a digital record. These checksums are generated prior to
transfer into our non-public accession database, so basically directly at the beginning again,
at the point where the producer is giving us the material.
To ensure data integrity and automated fixity, script is run every night to validate each
object against the stored checksum to verify checks and permissions and record counts.
This means that if a file changes in any way the checksum will also change,
alerting the system that the file may be corrupt. This is why it is necessary to keep multiple
copies within the repository, so that any faulty files can be replaced with a non-corrupted one.
Simultaneously of creating an archival digital record the system, also creates
a dissemination copy of the file which is the rendered image you can see on Canmore,
and this is what the consumer or the user would then access and use.
So at this stage, files are searchable and discoverable
on Canmore, and here you can see the catalog entry for our project archive,
and what it looks like on Canmore. From here you can delve deeper into the archive
itself and have a look at all the fascinating items, and the project in its entirety as well.
So overall to date we have processed over 80 000 individual files from the backlog,
and over 50 000 files have been ingested into the digital archive
and are now available for public view. Additionally the digitization side of
the project created another 534 340 new digital items.
Overall this means the digital archive now contains over 1.1 million digital files.
That has doubled the size of the archive in the last four years. So what is next for us?
Although the digital project in its current format ends tomorrow, we have been able to retain some
resource to continue this work into the future, further increasing the volume of digital material
available online, and supporting our commitment to making heritage accessible for all.
So finally I would like to invite you to head over to Canmore after this event,
to see our showcase - 'Beyond the Physical' -
and to explore some of our newly available collections through that.
Thank you for listening today, and I think we have some time now for questions, but please
feel free to also send me an email if we can't address your question today. Thank you, that's me!