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Digital Records and the County Durham Home Guard. Catalogue Day 2013. David Underdown @davidunderdown9 22 November 2013. About me. Worked here 8 ½ years Involved in our digital preservation activities throughout A techie But –
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Digital Records and the County Durham Home Guard Catalogue Day 2013 David Underdown @davidunderdown9 22 November 2013
About me • Worked here 8 ½ years • Involved in our digital preservation activities throughout • A techie • But – • Also carry out my own family history and other research as a reader
Project background – digital records • Initially we had focused on “born digital” records • Increasing realisation that we also needed to protect better the investment represented by digitisation projects • How to deal with the set of MOD personnel records, covering post First World War service • Large collection and personal nature of information challenging • Some previous examples of us taking material in forms that would normally be used only as surrogates • “Digitised records” concept
About the project • Home Guard personnel records initially selected as a priority for early transfer • Comprise around 4.5 million individual records, 720m of shelving • County Durham selected as pilot, approx 2% of total • Model for overall population, variety of industrial areas/urban/suburban/rural, also coastal and inland areas • Sampling from whole series had suggested only about 10% would be closed
The Home Guard • Organised by county • 1 or more battalion each • Local companies or platoons • Large employers had own units • Duties carried out on top of usual work • Active 14 May 1940–3 December 1944 (disbanded 31 December 1945)
Challenges and issues 1 • Piloting digitised record process, but also infrastructure upgrade and new version of digital repository software • Record volume still potentially a problem, even if challenge is storing digital files not paper • To store County Durham set as Tiff images, approx 7TB, 2% of total Home Guard collection (and we make 3 copies) • Therefore entire Home Guard around 380TB • JPEG2000 with lossless compression roughly halves storage required
Challenges and issues 2 • Closure: record for any person under 100 closed under data protection legislation and code of practice for archives • Can be opened via FOI request if proof of death provided • Some records also contain medical information – closed for 100 years from date of record • What information to transcribe for Discovery and supporting FOI work? • Also provenance information about digitisation process
Where next? • Developed Scanning and Transcription framework • Also sets our basic standards for digitisation projects, even those outside framework • Not intended to set standards for others, necessarily • Naval personnel records • 1939 National Registration records
Further details of our image and metadata specifications can be found on our website at: http://nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/information-management/digitisation-at-the-national-archives.pdf Questions?