3. Hansard
• the official report of debates in Parliament
• actually an unofficial private enterprise at first
• “nationalised” in 1909
• early reports written in the third person
• eventually developed into a (nearly) verbatim
account
• volumes from 1803 – 2005 were digitised
• nearly 3 million pages
4. “though not strictly verbatim, [it] is substantially
the verbatim report, with repetitions and
redundancies omitted and with obvious mistakes
corrected, but [...] on the other hand leaves out
nothing that adds to the meaning of the speech
or illustrates the argument.”
5. why digitise?
• enable preservation
• conservation is expensive
• increase access
• increase usability
• improve business processes
• re-use physical storage space
• costs have fallen significantly
• quality improving steadily
6. preservation vs. conservation
conservation
direct intervention to prevent/make good damage to
materials
preservation
a broader term than conservation. It includes all
managerial and financial considerations including
storage and accommodation provision, staffing levels,
policies, techniques, and methods involved in preserving
library and archive materials and the information
contained therein
7. preservation
• originals printed on poor quality paper
• starting to deteriorate
• reduce wear and tear from daily use
• keep in a controlled environment
• conservation is expensive
8. improve access
• internal
– extensive day to day business use across a very large
site
• public
– national heritage and birthright
– disposal by libraries
– international interest
10. costs
• costs have fallen significantly
• alternative funding models
• reduce physical storage needs
– dispose of surplus copies
– locate in less valuable space
• but beware the hidden costs…
11. ongoing costs
• developing a front-end and database
• hosting
• storing images
• digital preservation
• format migration
15. doing the work
• In house or contractor?
• method
– image only
– re-keying (single, double, triple...)
– OCR (optical character recognition)
– image plus text
– metadata capture
– manual intervention increases quality and costs!
17. OCR
• how accurate does it need to be?
• mass vs batch capture
• double or triple compare
• diminishing returns
18. QA (quality assurance)
• automate where possible
• contractor
– 100% proof reading
• client
– heavy sampling of images
– 1% sampling of text
• third party?
19. the need for a policy framework
• Hansard was the first major digitisation project in
the UK parliament
• an earlier project to digitise Local and Private
Acts captured images only
• we needed a digitisation policy for parliament to
ensure consistency and learning from
experience
20. policy aims
• ensure that individual projects:
– take into account the wider information context both
inside and outside Parliament
– deliver their target benefits
– offer value for money
• ensure the resources created can be:
– exploited fully
– used for as long as is required
21. policy scope
• publications
• photographs
• archival documents
• business records
22. policy principles
• digitisation needs to be seen as an integral part
of the information work carried out by parliament
• use of appropriate technical standards
• scan once for many purposes
• business cases should take account of all
relevant costs
23. selection criteria
• measurable user demand (for public use)
• business need (for internal use)
• the potential for learning and educational use
• cost and the availability of other resources
• technical considerations
• the uniqueness of the items
• conservation requirements
• intellectual property rights and copyright issues
• the availability of digitised versions of the same material
elsewhere
• the potential for revenue raising
• the feasibility of long-term preservation, where required
24. other aspects of the policy
• the delivery method will be planned at the outset
• the preservation master will be an
uncompressed TIFF file
• metadata will be created, to support resource
discovery, use, storage and digital preservation
• we will adopt international standards where
possible
• we will work with partners where possible
25. developing a digitisation strategy
• a project board has been created
• an integral part of an online parliamentary
history programme for parliament
• will use the criteria set out in the digitisation
policy to prioritise future digitisation work
26. practical guidelines
• guidelines have been developed for all parts of
parliament which need to create digitised assets:
– a checklist for doing the work
– glossary
– details of file formats, OCR options
– describes popular myths on costs
27. hosting
• text and images
• text only
• navigation
• search
• web 2.0
• funding models
• give it away!?
http://www.parliament.uk/publications/archives.cfm
28. developing a web interface
drivers
• keep costs down
• work closely with users
• meaningful search across a large amount of data
solution
• experimental approach
• open source
29. methodology and progress
• small team of developers from Parliamentary
ICT working closely with users (inside and
outside Parliament)
• uses “micro formats” approach
• XML is parsed into HTML before loading into the
database
• JPEGs not currently being used
• half of the data has been loaded (mainly 20th
century)
• public discussion group and issues log
34. faceted classification
• faceted approach to browsing and searching
• assignment of multiple classifications to an object
• classifications can be to be ordered in a variety of ways
• facets include
– date
– volume number
– monarch
– chamber
– content type (debates or questions)
– constituencies
– Members of Parliament
– offices held.
35. other features
• references using the standard format can be located
using the search box
HC Deb Vol 385 13 May 2002 c498
• predictable URLs
http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1941/may/07/w
• pages created for:
– individual Members of Parliament
– constituencies
– acts
– bills
– divisions
Today we’re going to say a little bit about our project to digitise Hansard, which is of course the official record of debates in Parliament. Although this isn’t records management in the traditional sense, it is about taking one of the most important records in the country if not the world, using it to create a new digital asset and fully exploiting its value as an information source rather than gathering dust on a shelf
