"Well I Never!" search powered by MICHAEL UK

You can see another example of regional access being provided to MICHAEL UK through Well I Never! This is a learning resource for teachers, pupils and parents in the North East. Its collections page: http://www.wellinever.info/collections.php provides users with a list of the digital collections from the North East based on MICHAEL.

News from Rennaissance East Midlands

A new web page has been created on the Renaissance East Midlands website which includes a search portlet for MICHAEL UK, by using our HTML code fragment generator. The search box allows users to search for the 23 digital collections from museums from the East Midlands region. You can see the page at http://www.renaissanceeastmidlands.org.uk/our_work/digital_access_to_collections/east_midlands.html

Conference

We're organising a conference in London on the 23rd May, come along and find out more about the project and other initiatives from Europe, the States and Canada.

Details of the programme and the booking form are online at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/michael-may-2008/

MICHAEL: Perspectives on cultural sector resource discovery

Subject Specialist Networks

The subject specialist networks, funded through the Renaissance in the Regions programme, are now beginning to think about cataloguing their digital resources in MICHAEL. I've been contacted recently by one of the SSNs, who was interested to know if we thought that it was useful to send out a questionnaire as a starting point for data entry. It It seems to me that, as we all suffer slightly from receiving too many questionnaires, that if used they should be brief - perhaps just asking for the title, a brief description, the digital formats available and where the collection is made accessible (eg the URL). This should give enough information to start. But it would be useful to hear from others, especially if you have had sucess in using questionnaires.

'Famous people': what to do about personal names?

You may all be aware that personal names have been entered somewhat inconsistently on MICHAEL, as demonstrated by the drop-down menu at http://www.michael-culture.org.uk/mpf/pub-uk/people.html?from1=browsePeople.

The MLA would like to encourage all users to adhere to the following format: Surname, Firstname (dates), for example:

Booth, Charles (1840-1916)

Hitler, Adolf (1889-1945)

At a meeting in June, one MICHAEL cataloguer suggested we should further decide between the AACR2 (Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules) or NCA (National Council on Archives) rules for personal names, for example:

Chesterton, Gilbert Keith (NCA)
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith) (AACR2)

Puddicombe, Anne Adaliza (NCA)
Beynon Puddicombe, Anne (Anne Adaliza) (AACR2)

(examples taken from http://www.archivesnetworkwales.info/pdfs/Using%20ANW%204.ppt, slides 9 & 13)

Until such decision is reached however, and feel free to share your views on this, it would still greatly increase the quality of the content on the MICHAEL website if the Surname, Firstname (dates) format could be followed.

You may also find the Library of Congress Authorities website http://authorities.loc.gov/ of some use.

Jewish Heritage

I met Lena from the Institute for Jewish Policy Research and the European Association of Jewish Culture, and Dov, who is involved in many things including eJewish.info. We were talking about how the MICHAEL project could be used to create a register of Jewish cultural websites and collections, drawn from each of the national projects - as a 'view' of the European service - see this live link into the database. Dov has the Israeli version of the MICHAEL platform up and running, and is busy translating the interface and terminologies into Hebrew, and is also thiking about Russian.

They are thinking about the next steps, which could include a meeting in the Autumn to look at issues such as languages to be used, and targetting some UK collections to show what could be done.

RSS Feed

I have also experiemented with an RSS feed from the European Service on my blog. Again this works well - it should display the latest records that match the search criteria. I have used "film" - but I imagine you could use a region - but haven't tried this yet. Perhaps later ...