Introduction
The National Archives is a government department and executive agency under the Secretary of State for Justice. It is the official archive for England, Wales and the central UK government and holds records ranging from parchment and paper scrolls through to digital files and archived websites. The vision of the National Archives is to:
- lead and transform information management
- guarantee the survival of today’s information for tomorrow
- bring history to life for everyone
Some 650 staff are employed at the offices at Kew, West London in an environment where the majority of staff are knowledge workers, many of whom are world experts in their field.
This case study describes how the new wiki technology has been used to advance the aims of the National Archives. A wiki can be defined as “a collaborative type of web application allowing end user to create and update context so generating an online community responsible for improving the quality and accuracy of content over time”. See the CIPD discussion paper Web 2.0 and HR
Your archives
In April 2007 The National Archives introduced a new web-based service called Your Archives. Users of Your Archives can not only search for historical records, they can also submit information to these records, create new records and edit existing articles. Your Archives is a Wiki built using MediaWiki: this is a tool which is freely available to any user and permits additions and editing direct from the user’s browsers.
David Thomas, the Director of Technology and Chief Information Officer at The National Archives says that the initiative was introduced because “many members of the public know more about individual records than we do. To advance our vision we must try to capture and share this information. We don’t know everything and need to capture the records and knowledge of the wider community”.
Members of the public must register if they want to submit information to Your Archives. Beyond this both rules and controls are very limited. A list of do’s and don’ts on the site includes the following:
- do feel part of the ‘community’ and feel free to contribute what you have learnt from archival records
- do edit articles, where they need to be corrected and clarified
- don’t supply information which is not in your own copyright or which you do not have a licence from the copyright owner
- don’t supply convective and unsubstantiated opinions
Another ‘don’t’ on the guidance list is: ‘don’t be discourteous or rude to other contributors’. In practice, however, the need to remove an entry because of its tone or relevance to the objectives is very rare. Articles are moderated by National Archives staff after articles are posted – they cannot confirm the accuracy of the content but check that it does not breach terms and conditions
Your Archives contains open information on both the most popular pages and those articles that have had the most revisions. The most popular (other than the home page as of June 2008) was “Research Guide: British Army Soldiers” Papers First World War, 1914 – 1918”.This had received 23,140 views. Military history accounts form over half of the 50 most popular pages. The most revised article, as at June 2008 was Great Snoring, Norfolk (with 385 revisions). This page is a shared resource for those researching families from a village in North Norfolk. A particularly active current topic concerns the diaries and papers of John Byng (1743 – 1813), fifth Viscount Torrington, Lord Byng, was among other things a Shakespearian scholar and his papers are held in various locations across the country. Using the wiki technology it is possible to add significantly to the knowledge of his life, and hence to make that knowledge generally available.
The intranet site: Narnia
The same principles apply to The National Archives intranet, Narnia, which is designed to meet the needs for shared communication of the 650 staff. According to Holly Cook, Head of Knowledge and Information Managementat The National Archives, the use of wikis “gets people to participate in organisational affairs and democratises the responsibility of keeping information up to date”. Narnia contains corporate and departmental information pages and receives on average between 40 and 50 edits a day. It uses a commercially available wiki technology called Confluence.
It is particularly important as a source of departmental information and for sharing progress on projects and plans. A major current project, for example, is the preservation of electronic records (“digital continuity”) and here all working papers are made available through Narnia. There are three levels of editing access which are colour coded: red indicates no-one can access, blue indicated edits by departmental members only; green means any editing access.
Some issues
Given The National Archives vision and the skills and commitment of its staff it is not surprising that wiki technology has been embraced. During the interviews to produce this case there was little evidence that any serious problems had been encountered either in principle or in practice.
However, as David Thomas pointed out there were some differences of opinion at the early stage. This took the form of a perceived threat to professionalism. “For some people it ran counter to the idea that they were the expert. Widening contributors would devalue what they know”. There was also a concern that the contributions might come from people who were ill-intentioned, ill-informed or simply malicious. In practice this hasn’t happened. A lot of good material has been added to the stock of knowledge but the site contains an important disclaimer that “The National Archive does not vouch for the accuracy of information appearing in Your Archives”.
The Your Archives url is http://yourarchives.nationalarchives.gov.uk