National Archives User Advisory Group

National Archives User Advisory Group feedback

Meeting 18 March 2014

Hi. My name is Jacqui Kirk and together with Rosemary Morgan I represent Independent Researchers on the National Archives User Advisory Group.  I attended my first meeting on 18 March.

I am still getting to grips with how the Group works in relation to the User Forum and the Online User Community Forum but as I see it the UAG should be the general picture and overview body as we only meet quarterly and day to day problems would take far too long to resolve via this.
Any thoughts or feedback on any aspects of the working of the National Archives and its policies will be gratefully received.

Accessibility Audit

I am intending to raise general Accessibility issues as an agenda item for the next meeting in June - not so much full blown disability issues but the little niggles such as not knowing which lockers are at ground level or high up when booking a table and the table booking plan not having the desk letters on it. The fact that whereas upstairs in the Map Room you are offered a trolley for heavy items you are just left high and dry in the first floor reading room and some of the boxes there are rather heavy. The lack of signposting and general help notices. The new website design and its colour backgrounds to text.  I could go on like this for ever but would like your particular beefs please. The whole will form a sort of Acessibility Audit document which I'll need to submit by mid to late May.
The notes of the last meeting are given below amalgamated into broad headings and with integral links for clarity. Let me have feedback on these too.

Meeting summary

This is my recollection of the main issues raised in the meeting. The full minutes will be published at  in due course. I have amalgamated some of the issues raised in matters arising etc into the main headings below to make it easier to assimilate.

Finding Archives workshop

This was run by Emma Bayne the Head of Systems Development and Jonathan Cates the Collections Information and Systems Manager. The Discovery catalogue is still under development with the aim of the incorporation of the A2A, the ARCHON and the NRA databases into it. A beta version had been set up with limited information and it was planned that various groups of users and of staff would be testing it with workshops set up for that day.


The User Advisory Group members were split into pairs each with a member of the systems development staff in order to look at various aspects of the new catalogue and to give feedback. Pink post it notes would be created for each aspect which the users felt needed to be changed and green ones for those which the users felt to be useful or satisfactory.


I felt that the exercise proved useful as the group members identified a great deal of areas of the catalogue which they felt needed change. (These seemed not merely confined to the new aspects of the catalogue.) In general there seemed to be many more pink post-its than green ones.


The results of the different workshops would be amalgamated and assessed and changes made as a result.

First World War update

Sarah Leggitt reported back on the National Archives' stand at Who Do You Think You Are Live which was the first for a few years and had been very successful. Based upstairs in the Military section next to the Imperial War Museum's stand it was to launch the War Diaries Project. The first section of these Unit War Diaries covering France and Flanders (WO 95) had been released on 14 January and within the first 6 weeks 200 diaries had been tagged with names, places and activities. This would ordinarily have taken 4 man years to complete. The results are currently being checked and the database is being fine-tuned.


The Middlesex Military Tribunal records (MH47) have also been digitised and released in conjunction with Findmypast and the Federation of Family History Societies.


Various events are planned for the rest of this year and the WW1 portal  is likely to change significantly in the next few months. The National Archives' first conference will commence on 28 June the anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

User Advisory Group representation

Because the group started in 2011 there is potentially a problem should all the representatives need to step down at the end of their 4 year term. It was proposed to manage this by planning that a quarter of the representatives should retire every year to ensure continuity. The representatives have now changed slightly due to recent resignations and one-off exchanges but the main recruitment period will still be once a year in September. There is a vacancy for an External Archives representative which will not now be filled until September.

Fees increase

Details of the new price changes - Digital downloads have come down from £3.36 per item to £3.30 and self-service copies remain at 25p per page.

Cataloguing update

We were given a list of updates  I requested that in future we are given a list of future projects as well as completed ones.

Digitisation update

The full document
One of the issues raised was that of the recent release via The Genealogist of the Tithe Apportionment records which are not searchable except by personal name due to the way the database had been set up. Searching by location is not possible and severely limits their use. However the microfilm copies of IR29 will remain accessible in the Map Room until the digitised records are browsable.


In view of this and other accessibility issues we queried whether it was possible to place restrictions as to how records belonging to the National Archives should be used by organisations who offer them online. However as the records are public records this is not feasible even when the organisations are doing this in partnership with the National Archives (my translation - basically in case potential licensees are scared off by this).

Forthcoming digitisation projects:

Household Cavalry records

1915 Merchant Navy crew lists (of which the National Archives holds all of them)

The problem of differing qualities of scanning resolution was also raised. The records which were first digitised by the NA eg the PCC wills were digitised at a much lower resolution than is now used. This causes some problems with certain record sets. This may still occur but not with new digitisation projects such as the Royal Navy records which will be scanned to different standards as it will be a digital accession. This issue will be discussed and explained further in a future meeting.


Another problem was raised with the request that the PROB 6 and PROB 8 record sets be digitised. This has been looked at a number of times but the quality of the microfilms for these record sets is too poor for this. There is no money available to digitise them from the original records but an online index to them has been suggested.


In addition the problem of documents missing from the digitised records was raised together with that of quality control. This has been tightened up but ultimately has to be done by computer (my translation - because of cost issues).

Online documents

Currently they are grayscale whereas the original document is colour in some cases. We queried whether it will be possible to either be able to obtain colour self-service copies or for the online documents to be downloaded onsite to a laptop or tablet. There are no plans for colour printers but it will be possible to download online records in future to laptops or tablets subject to a fair usage limit which is currently being discussed.

Misc datasets/information

Ships logs which have been digitised and indexed by crowdsourcing for weather data can also be used to pinpoint a ship’s whereabouts.

The Open University material connected to Jeremy Paxman’s WW1 TV series
both of these will have links from the National Archives website.

National Archives User Advisory Group

As of last month I am now one of the two people who represent paid researchers on the the National Archives User Advisory Group

However being Midlands based I also intend to represent those users (who visit either online or in person) who live north of Watford who cannot visit easily in person and whose time there is precious and must not be wasted.

I will use this blog to keep you up to date with developments with a dedicated page for User Advisory Group feedback but I will also give my own views on various issues which I think need to be explained or need to be discussed more widely on this Home Page.

The next blog here on this page will be about Digitisation in the light of the recent issue of the PCC Wills online via Ancestry and the issue throughout this year of the newly digitised Unit War Diaries which was in the press yesterday.

STOP PRESS - Leamington Local Studies

In the absence of Judith Harrington Local Studies Librarian (whose normal day at Leamington Library is Thursday) local studies and family history are being temporarily covered by Anne Thomas who will work on Wednesdays in Leamington library until Judith returns.

For those of you who have local studies queries and can't wait until Wednesday please send them to Judith's normal email address of

judithharridge@warwickshire.gov.uk

but with a copy to

librarylocalstudies@warwickshire.gov.uk

Remember that everyone was young once

Who Do You Think You Are’s episode last night featured Marianne Faithfull.  Did you hear the sound of hearts breaking all over  the country as men of a certain age found that the “Girl on a Motorcycle” had aged and was now a well-preserved pensioner?

This of course works the other way round too.  In family albums we so often see photos of rather grim-looking widows.  For them the age of photography came too late and they remain forever enshrined as forbidding old bats.

Do we then carry this misconception with us as we research our ancestors’ lives?  Do we forget that they were once young and full of vitality?  That maybe your great great grandmother was  the “Girl on a Motorcycle” to the lads in her street or village?

I remember being given some genuine 1920s snakeskin wedge sandals by my Gran when I was about 18 and being told stories of where she wore them.  I had never thought of her as a young woman before and it came as a bit of a shock that she had frequented the same rather dodgy pubs as I did. 

The thought that she had had a lively life before marrying Grandad was also a bit of a surprise.  Since tracing my family history I have found stories of her life – she got a job as a chorus girl behind her father’s back for instance and in her lunchtimes from the Lace factory she and her friends would go to Nottingham station and sing to the wounded troops on the hospital trains there.

So look beyond the packaging when you are researching your ancestors  - you may be quite surprised.

Obituaries are coming closer to home now

As a family historian I often search the newspapers for obituaries but recently I’ve been looking for those of near contemporaries and former colleagues and with online newspaper archives the search process is now fairly easy.  Obituaries in the Times or the Guardian are really rewarding to find although whilst searching for Cambridge mentions for a recently deceased friend I was saddened to find that I’d missed the death of Robert Jefford, a former colleague, in 2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/nov/30/robert-jefford-obituary     

74 seems so young nowadays!

I worked for him at Addenbrooke’s Hospital for only a short time in the 1980s although I’d known him as a colleague and mentor for longer but reading his obituary immediately conjured up a mental picture of him dressed as an elf for the 1984 Staff Christmas lunch, reciting the poem he had written for the occasion in his persona of the “National Elf” of the “National Elf Service”.  (We were all in fancy dress it being the tradition for management to dress up and act as waiters to the rest of the staff.)  Robert Jefford with his Abraham Lincolnesque beard really looked the part.

These kind of memories surface at funeral and memorial services.  Sitting listening to the eulogy we often marvel how little we knew of that person and regret not knowing them better as whole areas of their interesting life are laid bare.  We may know only one aspect of a person or perhaps only one period of their life.  Of course trying to find out all these aspects of a person after their death is what family historians do but how much do we miss because no-one took a photo or wrote the story down?

This is one story that has now been preserved for the future and perhaps someone out there has a photo of the event?  Although hopefully not of me – the skirt of my costume was meant for someone shorter and I spent most of my time trying to stay decent.

Technology and old dogs

Family history research can all too easily become a solitary experience as we search through online databases for that elusive record so getting together with other researchers in a family history group or society is vital to keep us well-balanced.  Whilst the chat is often rewarding and may lead to that breakthrough in your research occasionally we ponder on more weighty matters......

My own family history group members were recently chatting idly whilst drinking tea and eating dark chocolate ginger biscuits when the conversation turned to the digitisation of records and that OCR techonology is now apparently so much improved as to be able to "read" handwriting.

We've all suffered from the sometimes appalling transcription errors in the census records so the thought that perhaps optical character recognition could make a better job is enticing.  But feelings on digitisation were mixed mainly due to the likelihood that once digitised the originals would be deemed rendundant and destroyed.

We all agreed that nothing beats holding an original document in your hand - even when it has given you a hernia lifting the heavy volume from the trolley to the table.  We are used to not having access to the more popular record sets - the census, parish registers and military service records but even as my (hopefully) free-thinking, egalitarian soul rejoices in greater access to documents via the digitisation process a small part of me revolts against the digital age.

I'm drafting this with pencil and paper.  I can't think or write properly using a keyboard and not at all on the on-screen variety where my hard-won touchtyping skills can't operate.  I'm the product of my age - when computers lived in big temperature- controlled rooms, when slide rules weren't allowed in maths exams and we all used fountain pens not biros.  I am in some ways more in tune with those past record-keepers than with today's database manipulators.

Don't get me wrong - I am fairly technologically savvy - I have more than one pc, a laptop, netbook, tablet, smartphone and digital camera and use them all fairly comprehensively for my research.  I feel new technology is to be embraced and used to the full but still I mourn its arrival in my life.  I use it but do not love it.

5 New Year thoughts for family history researchers

1. Family history is about YOU and your immediate family as much as about your ancestors.  Write or record your memories, sort out keepsakes and photos and label them carefully.  Everything has a story and we shouldn't neglect ourselves and our memories in search of the elusive past.

2. Family history research is YOUR research and you choose how and what to research.  It is not about how many ancestors are in your tree or how far back you have got but about who and what interests you.  Every ancestor has a story to tell - the trick is finding it.

3. Family history isn't only done on the Internet but in archives, museums, record offices, libraries, streets, cemeteries and churchyards.  You don't have to have a computer but modern technology can often make your research easier and quicker.

4. Family history research is done at a pace that suits you.  It isn't a race or a competition.  If you go too fast without looking carefully at what you've found you could miss something important and then spend months or even years looking in the wrong place.

5. Family history research where you don't note down exactly where you found your information and/or take a copy can lead to a great deal of wasted time in the future when you can't find it again.  Records on the Internet may not be there in 2 years time as websites change all the time.