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Collections navbox - is there a list or hierarchy of the collections to work from?
Hmm. Sort of. Nominally the records are arranged by department and so we could supply a list of things like DEFE (Ministry of Defence), HO (Home Office), FO (Foreign Office) and so on. But many of the interesting (or defunct) departments have collections within these categories and we don't have an easy list of those. I thought maybe we'd build something up gradually as we developed better articles on some of them. I've added examples like the Children's Overseas Reception Board to The National Archives category. --Mr impossible (talk) 15:14, 5 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Okay, so if I understand correctly we will eventually want a template that covers two kinds of things: articles on departments whose archives are in TNA, and articles on individual documents in the TNA, organised by department. I think I know how I'd want to structure that; I'll start something in my sandbox and we can play with it. - PKM (talk) 18:25, 5 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Very rough beginning here. I'll need your help with the structure - should Courts be under Departments, or just listed in with the other Departments, or as a separate catregory as I have them? Do Documents need subcategories like Newspapers, and is Public Records right for Domesday Book? I am completely guessing here. :-) - PKM (talk) 18:54, 5 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I'm going to have to do some serious work on this. I'm not sure one box will work because of the sheer quantity of material. I had in mind something about private papers (like the Chatham Papers) that we hold here but - of course - the relevant articles don't exist. Leave this with me and I will have a play. Thank you SO much for what you've done so far. This is a steep learning curve for us. --Mr impossible (talk) 17:30, 7 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
You are most welcome. You might consider a set of "matched" navigation templates, one for the highest level and then individual ones for separate collections. We did something similar for the textile arts project - see the pairs of "brown" high-level and detail-level templates on Dyeing, Sewing and Textiles. Let me know if you need help with anything. - PKM (talk) 22:23, 7 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Image template with your record identifer links. (If there is another example you like better, just point me to it.)
Draft. There's a version for everyone's review at Commons:Template:TNA-image. I put the template on one file so you can see how it works. Please advise on wording, background color, etc.
PS: I cannot get it work with a space in the document record identifier...the space breaks the template. I'll ask for help on that.
This is outstanding. I need to look at this very carefully and think about whether anything is missing we need to include. The only obvious issue at this stage is that we are moving to a new online catalogue ('Discovery') and I would like references to be through the new system at http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/SearchUI/. I hope that's a straightforward fix? --Mr impossible (talk) 15:20, 5 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I've changed the template to use the new Discovery page and it seems to work: File:Rt Hon Anthony Eden MP.jpg. I'll feel better when we have it on more than one page and I can test that it's working consistently. (And as a user I am pleased to see one search page that will take either a keyword or record ID, so thank you for that!) - PKM (talk) 18:15, 5 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
This turns out to be non-trivial, annoyingly. I fear we'll have to stick with the old catalogue to begin with. Let me stare hard at these fields. --Mr impossible (talk) 17:30, 7 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
First of all - it's great to see someone putting the "A" into GLAM! I must admit, I'm not quite sure exactly what there is lurking in TNA and how they fit in relative to eg the BL and IWM. I'm sure I'm not the only one - perhaps User:Mr impossible could suggest some things? But these are some thoughts based on my general experience :
From TNA's point of view, one thing that Wikipedia is really good at is enabling information to cross national and linguistic borders. For instance photos of the Elgin Marbles can end up in the Greek Wikipedia. So anything that touches other countries and other language groups could be of particular interest for TNA, whether it's a treaty with the Kashmiris, or pictures of Queen Victoria's children or a map of the exploration of Rhodesia. Obviously anything relating to the history of India or China will have a particularly wide audience, one target might be to provide a snippet relating to every Commonwealth country?
That's a very interesting idea. Our Africa through a lens collection on Flickr might provide the seed of this. It encompasses many poorly covered subjects and we have the whole Colonial Office Photographic Library digitised and due to go live continent by continent over the next year or so. --Mr impossible (talk) 17:17, 7 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I hadn't seen Atal at the time, but yes. Without wanting to get too pompous or colonial-guilt-trip about it, it just feels important to get that kind of material out there, even if it ends up in articles that aren't 0.1% as popular as Lady Gaga or whatever. And just personally I'm a real sucker for those early watercolours of native villages and the early colonial towns. I could easily fill up the entire Photos requested 50 with suitable articles, I'm working on toning it down a bit! Le Deluge (talk) 03:23, 8 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
On the other hand, what the readers want tends to be biased towards sex and pop culture - got anything on Sean Connery's parents or Britney's ancestors? :-) That can still work in your favour, the most hits the BM website ever got from Wikipedia came from Crystal skull after the last Indiana Jones movie. Last year George VI was hot, this year it's Wallis Simpson, you just need to think ahead a bit. Lists of the most-read articles are generated for some projects; there may be inspiration towards the bottom of the lists for say British politics or military history, which still get lots of hits but might not get such attention from editors.
Be assured, I'm on the lookout for these. If only someone would start a rumour about something written on the back of one of our copies of the Declaration of Independence... More prosaically Titanic and the Delhi Durbar are upcoming anniversaries which may offer opportunities to showcase our content. Also our regular releases of new documents may suggest interesting angles - and help predict what headlines might be. Please let me know if you think of anything thrilling. Our UFO material is underexposed on Wikipedia probably --Mr impossible (talk) 17:17, 7 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
One of the most effective uses of the time of experts like curators is just to have a look at a big general article and leave a note on the Talk page saying something like "There should be a lot more on X whereas there's too much weight on Y. Coverage of Z is biased by an overdependence on Bloggs' 1937 book which is no longer well thought of, look at Doe's 1998 book instead". Don't expect an instant response, but articles like Census and Genealogy might be candidates for that treatment.
I don't want to distract anyone from their day job but it's the sort of thing that if people are wanting to do something in a teabreak or in their own time, it's perhaps more productive than getting bogged down in the minutiae of the Wiki referencing system or whatever. Having said that, getting stuff referenced is a major focus, particularly as articles "mature", and I assume that TNA has its own library with some books that are hard to find elsewhere? If so - what's the access arrangements? Specialist libraries can be invaluable for Wikipedians who are near enough to use them - the BM are now OK with the idea that editing Wikipedia is a suitable reason to have access to their libraries. Le Deluge (talk) 03:23, 8 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
You could argue a tenuous commercial benefit for TNA from better public knowledge and awareness of parish registers and such like in the form of their Wiki articles? Like Census, they could do with more illustrations.
I'm just thinking that those are the kinds of things that are so specialist, there's probably not many people capable of writing sensibly about them, so although they mebbe don't have the greatest audience they would be good ones for TNA people to work on.Le Deluge (talk) 03:23, 8 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
In general, our coverage of archival science ain't great - even the longer articles like the Parliamentary Archives could do with illustrations and more references, whereas even major ones like the Royal Archives are pretty shabby, let alone the more obscure ones like the Westminster Muniments.
I guess there's discussions to be had - do we even want a TNA project or would a "WikiProject UK Archives" be a better umbrella for the specific stuff, given the dominance of TNA? And for the nonspecific stuff, would that perhaps be better off incorporated into the existing WP:WikiProject Museums rather than starting a new project? I've no strong feelings either way, but it's easier to change things at this stage rather than later. In general these things tend to follow where individuals take them, but I believe in critical mass so tend to "lump" rather than "split" by instinct. Le Deluge (talk) 03:23, 8 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Articles on the lists at Category:Selected anniversaries by day get a lot more hits than they "should", because they appear on the front page each year in the "On this day..." section. So if you're wanting a quick fix, just look at the next week or two to see if something appeals. More generally, it's worth thinking of "big" anniversaries and events coming up in the next year or so - obviously the Diamond Jubilee and Olympics will be big, maybe the 1948 Olympics would be one angle to consider. See also 1912 in the United Kingdom, 1812 and so on. Looking further ahead, people are already working on World War I which is obviously quite a fruitful area for TNA?
We don't make enough use of the difference in expiry between Crown copyright and the ordinary version, so one period to focus on would be Crown copyright material from 1940-1960 (and in practice a few decades before). Combine that with my previous point and 1942 and 1952 would work particularly well.
On a related note, with US federal material being public domain, topics that can be covered by that tend to be much better illustrated, so for instance the Malta Convoys or Operation Juno don't have much, whereas the Normandy landings have lots of photos and maps. OTOH, the ease of finding material does mean that things can take on a US bias.
Maps are particularly useful in understanding a subject, particularly for things like military campaigns, but are a lot of work to create from new. There's a dedicated WP:WikiProject Maps that might be able to suggest particular weaknesses.
It's much harder to find illustrations for events as opposed to places and people. Not many images were made of say the Charing Cross roof collapse, but you can go down to the station and easily take a new photo of how it looks today. One type of photo that might be particularly appropriate to work on is images of the signing of independence for the colonies - many of them happened in the 1950s and are obviously of huge interest to entire countries.
One exception to the above comment about places would be images of things that are inaccessible to the general public - something like the Waterloo Vase is in the garden at Buckingham Palace, and we're not great on much of the Palace of Westminster - places like the House of Lords Library - and the historic bits of the MoD estate.
Another would be buildings that no longer exist - I've a particular interest in Baynard's Castle and Montfichet's Tower in London, but other examples are the churches destroyed in the Great Fire, great houses like Essex House and more recent structures such as the Serpentine Gallery pavilions and the Aeolian Tower. OK, some of those are mebbe less televant to TNA, but you get the idea.
It's a random thing, but there's a slot in many of the biographical infoboxes for an image of someone's signature - I'm not sure it's the most interesting thing ever, but it would presumably be something that TNA is in a good position to supply. Someone might like to take on doing a signature for all the monarchs or as many of practical of the core biographies, as a little self-contained project?
Heh, a good example of one man's "not particularly interesting" sparking something for others! I can see how it would be useful for you though.Le Deluge (talk) 03:23, 8 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I keep thinking of things and then forgetting them, but I'll mention the existence of WP:WikiProject Dictionary of National Biography which is digitising the original DNB and incorporating it into articles. I don't know if TNA can bring an angle on that - going either way, it may be useful for the TNA website to have links to it? Le Deluge (talk) 03:23, 8 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
It might be useful to have some kind of arrangement whereby there's "someone" (whether at TNA or eg a named Wikipedian) who has access to the kinds of databases that would help with resolving death dates for copyright purposes. That's maybe something to talk to Wikimedia UK about, or maybe somewhere like WP:WikiProject Copyright Cleanup - obviously that's an area of mutual interest.Le Deluge (talk) 03:23, 8 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Incidentally, a minor point of style. Per WP:CREDITS, we don't credit images in the article text, instead people are expected to click through to the image page where the audit trail gets laid out in as much detail as possible.Le Deluge (talk) 03:23, 8 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
And I was following what is pretty standard in Visual Arts articles, which is providing the museum-of-record info in the caption. But of course an image source for something that isn't, say, a Rembrandt is different. - PKM (talk) 20:08, 8 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Licencing is the sort of boring thing that needs to get really nailed down before we start - Wikipedia is a lot fussier about that kind of thing than Flickr, and it's obvious that whoever dumped TNA material on Flickr was not that careful about discriminating between genuinely public-domain stuff that is out of copyright, stuff currently subject to Crown Copyright (much of which, but not all is presumably now licenced under the Open Government Licence - we have {{OGL}} for tagging OGL material), and cases where TNA happen to hold a copy of something whose copyright belongs to a third party. For instance, this 1948 Olympics poster was posted with "No known copyright restrictions" yet in the description "Its design is a copyright of the International Olympic Committee." That's really not good enough for our purposes (not if you want to put things on Commons, a low-rez version would be OK as non-free content on 1948 Summer Olympics or somewhere). I suspect similar issues affect images like File:Londons Carnaby Street, 1969.jpg even if it passes the short-term test of having come from a Flickr page that says its copyright-free. There's potential for chaos here, and I suggest it is sorted out before there's any widespread move of material from TNA Flickr to here - in fact it's best if it doesn't get moved from Flickr but comes direct from TNA with a more watertight licence. We've got plenty to be getting on with just the genuinely copyright-free stuff and OGL material in the meantime. Le Deluge (talk) 13:31, 6 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Au contraire Le Deluge, I have been pretty careful about what I've added to Flickr Commons (I run the Archives Flickr presence as well as muddling my way through this project). As the rights holder we can release specific instances of our own content as we like and the same goes for Crown Copyright material under the OGL (or the old Crown Copyright waiver, as was). The tricky thing is that, on Flickr of course, we don't have to specify which of those methods we've used. We can just assert, in Flickr's words that we have "legal rights sufficient to authorize others to use the work without restriction". Wiki Commons requires us to go into more detail. I'm not in favour of wholesale dumping of all the Flickr content on to Commons when we could extract greater benefit from carefully matching relevant content to needy articles. I am in favour of saving us a lot of stress and suggesting that we use http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ as the licence. (That's almost certainly the licence I'll be using as we upload new material, as opposed to stuff already on Commons). The reason for this is the paramount importance attached by my organisation to maintaining the archival link between a piece of digital content and its original context within the collection. A CC-BY licence is the most straightforward way of maintaining this link. Is any of that helpful? The Olympic poster is a one off, by the way, the British Olympic Association kindly gave us permission to post it with that wording. --Mr impossible (talk) 16:30, 7 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
That's awfully sweet of you. I might need help with a bulk upload at some point. I'm fine with individual images I think - I want to get a few up and check I'm doing it right. Then I'll be walking colleagues through the process. --Mr impossible (talk) 11:12, 8 September 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Apologies if this isn't the correct place to ask, but would File:Green cross man take it.jpg fall under the Open Government Licence? http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/legal/copyright.htm states The material featured on this website is subject to Crown copyright protection and licensed for use under the Open Government Licence unless otherwise indicated. I see no obvious other indications at either [1] or [2]. If the conditions are met, then the image could be moved to Commons. But I'm reluctant to move it yet under what may be incorrect assumptions. Thanks for reading. -- Trevj (talk) 14:50, 1 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Is this a good place to ask whether there's a consensus (on Wikipedia or more widely) on how to cite unpublished materials held in TNA? I haven't been able to find anything that seems specific enough in the general WP help or citation template pages. Docben (talk) 16:56, 7 October 2011 (UTC)[reply]
It would be appreciated if someone within the TNA GLAM collaboration team could liase with the National Archives team responsible for legislation.gov.uk, as I feel the transcription effort being made at Wikisource, has the potential to get expired (but historic) measures (which are not a priority for legislation.gov.uk) into a text format.
Currently the Wikisource transcription isn't as deeply cross referenced as legislation.gov.uk, and some guidance on the cross referencing used by legislaton.gov.uk would be appreciated.
Elsewhere on Wikisource there is a project to transcribe a 'Chronological Table of Statutes' from around 1877. (No more recent edition as yet having been found in scan form). This index is important because it assists in building Wikisource's portals
to the measures themselves, however the 1877 edition did not appear to yet contain 'short-titles' hence the transcription of
the 1896 statutes which contained a Short Titles Act. Should the National Archives hold a copy of an entire table of 'short-titles', it would be very much appreciated if this could be shared with Wikimedia projects as it would help ensure consistent
naming and referencing.
It's a lovely idea moving all the departments over to .gov.uk - but someone hasn't half made a pig's ear of it. Originally, the 404 page just said they'd moved to .gov.uk, but made no mention of the fact that the page you were looking for was probably not there, but could be found somewhere in the archives. There now seems to be some of that happening - but there's not even a custom 404 page (in fact it's a 403) for entire subdomains like www.aof.mod.uk. Just to really complicate things, some things have ended up at webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk but a lot of the older, more obscure stuff seems to be at http://collections.europarchive.org/tna/. At first I thought that must be some kind of dodgy cloning site, but from what I can work out it's legit, even if TNA do their best to disguise the fact. Is there any kind of word on what's going on? To give you an idea of the impact on Wikipedia, we have 8948 links to mod.uk alone - obviously we don't want to have to change them all to europarchive.org links if the long term plan is to mask them as nationalarchives.gov.uk links in the long term, in the meantime some more helpful 404's and/or redirects would be quite nice..... Le Deluge (talk) 12:56, 17 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I think we're all still around, but not sure if any of us are actually in and around Kew :-). MI may be able to say if this is achievable or not, but it looks at a glance that FO 508 mostly covers Uruguay and is general consular material, various naval courts and so on - there's some general South America reports but 508/8 is the only bit of confidential papers. Andrew Gray (talk) 22:37, 19 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]
@Andrew Gray: I'm not sure how the cataloging system works... all I can say is that 508/8 (as digitized here) is part III and IV of a series of cables from Petrópolis, Montevideo, and Bueno Aires. I'm hoping that parts I, II, and anything later on is under the same number (508). I could be wrong! Ed[talk][majestic titan]22:43, 19 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]
FO 420 and FO 118 seem to be your friends here. FO 508/4 and /5 (say) could be anything. There's no particular reason to assume they have any relevance to Argentina. You'd be better off sticking to what's in the AM resource. I've asked the cataloguing team to confirm that no other bits of FO 508 have been digitised. Really, Discovery should make clear that there is some mechanism to access the piece digitally and I've asked for it to be amended accordingly. --Mr impossible (talk) 11:54, 20 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]
