Dan Jones – Head of Business Development

8 April 2008

Mass Digitisation of Public Records

•Executive Agency of Secretary of State for Justice, and a Government Department

•175km shelves crammed with government records

•Home of the Domesday Book

•Family History research

National Archives: Kew

•For each document delivered on site, over 100 are delivered online.

•Over 60million documents are available to download digitally, instantly.

•Digitally archiving emails, websites and other electronic information.

•at the heart of information policy for Government.

National Archives: A Digital Archive

Why Digitise?•Create high quality digital surrogates to ensure preservation of original documents.

•Deliver digital documents over the Internet to maximise access.

•Use digital technology to add value through indexing, contextualisation, search algorithms etc.

•Optimise your online and onsite services along stakeholder segmentation.

Only wholesale digitisation of complete collections deliver this package of benefits.

National Archives: Key DriversTechnology

•Services via Broadband•Intuitive powerful search: ‘Google effect’•Web 2.0: Wikis/blogs•Emergence of specialist providers

Rising Expectations

•Expectation that all information will be online.•Instant access at home or work.•Global audience•Expert help and advice•Free our data

National Archives: Resource constraintsScale of the Collections

Financial Constraints

•Over 175kms shelving

•Over 10million Catalogue entries

•Huge swathes of the archives are still largely un-researched.

•Cost to digitise the archive circa £5bn +•Tight financial environment•Importance of strategic partnership

Models of DigitisationThe National Archives exploits a ‘mixed economy’ to develop these access services:

•Internally funded – primarily smaller projects (< 1 million images), niche interest, miscellaneous releases (e.g. FOI releases).

•Commercially funded – Major projects requiring major investment and infrastructure e.g. genealogical databases – censuses, military records, major academic projects.

•Grant funded – chiefly UK academic/ HE interest, e.g. Social/Political History.

Services can be free at the point of use or paid for, along the lines of agreed stakeholder segmentation.

More Digitisation – a ‘family’ of digital services

Licensed publication of largest most popular collections by private sector partners.

Censuses, military collections, migration records.

Strategic partnerships

Our own e commerce service ‘Documents Online’ continues to make available a range of material either internally funded or grant funded.

e.g. Domesday Book, CAB 129

Internal Delivery

Material not available for instant download can be requested within an 8 hour turnaround, scanned ‘on demand’ and emailed directly to you.

Digital Express

In instances where a specific item cant be identified, remote research services can be commissioned.

Paid Research

Decreasing usage recurrence of records

Strategic Partners: Awarding Contracts

•Avoid costly time consuming services contracts and tenders.

•Requirements are ‘output driven’ rather than ‘activity driven’ – i.e. the ‘what’ rather than the ‘how’.

•Non exclusive.

•Encourage competition – fuels innovation, quality of output, and services to non-core stakeholders.

•Package collections, commercially attractive with less attractive, accessible with difficult.

Strategic Partners: 1911 Census

•Partnership with Scotland Online

•Over 18million individual document images scanned in full colour.

•Approx 40,000 images per day throughput using 5 Microform S655 scanners.

•Details of over 35million individuals transcribed and fully searchable

•over 0.5 petabyte of Data!

•Additional Services: Academics, Schools, Statistical Analysis will roll our subsequently.

•Launches 2009

•All financial risk with commercial partner.

•Encourages re-use within the ‘knowledge economy’

•Allows simultaneous development of several products at once.

•‘Future-proof’ cutting-edge technological infrastructure.

•Promotes Maximum access

Advantages Disadvantages

•Potential loss of Control

•Potential divergence of interests of respective parties

•Have to agree the agenda rather than set it unilaterally

•Fragmented user journey

•Have to trust third parties with uniquely valuable material.

•Sometimes tricky balancing interests of all stakeholders.

Strategic Partnership

Strategic Partnership: Organisational Impact

•Sea-change in organisational direction – to enable rather than to provide where others are better placed.

•Existing resources across the Archive committed to facilitating 3rd parties rather than actively preserving, delivering, storing etc…

•Drain on existing resources for training, supervision, developing guidelines etc.

•New resources required: Business Development, Contract Management, Finance, Strategy.

Internally Delivered: Cabinet Papers 1916-1975

•Funded by the JISC

•Delivered by Documents Online

•Over half a million minutes and memoranda.

•Fully Searchable OCR’d metadata.

•Launches 2009

Providing Context: Enhanced Search

•One single search capability across all our databases and websites, 30million records over 1000 years.

•Presenting the results in an intuitive and logical manner.

Providing Context: Embracing Social Media

‘Your Archives’

•‘wiki’-based resource which allows individuals experts to contribute their ideas and information.

•Recognition some of our users are far more expert in particular areas of these holdings than we are ourselves.

National Archives: Future Challenges

•Continue to work to digitise the collections, new markets, new stakeholders, new partners.

•Provide our expertise online.

•Continue to develop and apply customer insight tools.

• Financial sustainability of projects and programmes.

National Archives: A Digital Archive

•Over 80million National Archives documents delivered digitally 2007 (37 million in 2005).

•Over 100million documents will be available to download by 2012.

• Equivalent investment in digital services of circa £45m since 2004.

•Accomplished without recourse to additional public funds.

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National Archives: A Digital Archive

•81.5% of users are satisfied or very satisfied with our online services (2007).

•95% of users are satisfied with our onsite service (2007).

•Global Reach.

•Maximise access to and understanding of the material we hold.