International Council of Archives

Greetings from Sydney!

I'm an archivist at State Records NSW, the New South Wales Government archives and records management authority. I got my start here shortly after completing a Masters of Archives and Records Management (MARM) at the Unversity of Liverpool (to all MARMites coming to Brisbane for the Congress, it would be great to catch up!).

Paul Elliott, Damien Juhasz, Cassie Findlay, Wisanu Promthong, Richard Lehane

I've been lucky to have had a number of interesting roles at State Records including indexing records for the New South Wales Aboriginal Trust Fund Repayment Scheme and working in the government recordkeeping program on the appraisal and digital recordkeeping teams. I am currently a member of the digital archives team. We're undertaking a three year project to build a whole of government digital archive for New South Wales.

One of the projects I've been working on over the last year is State Records' Open Data project (http://data.records.nsw.gov.au) . The aim of this project is to identify datasets relating to the NSW State Archives collection and publish them in accessible ways. Data published by this project could spark new interfaces to our collection, create new possibilities for federated searching, or allow creative re-purposing such as in data visualisations or mash-ups.

Initially, we extracted data from State Records' online catalogue and simply published it as raw XML files for download. As our next step, we developed a web application programming interface (web API) to that data. It's online at http://api.records.nsw.gov.au. Web APIs are a great way to publish data as they are a 'live' resource, they allow users to selectively query your data (rather than having to download the whole dataset), and they allow you to provide data in a wide variety of formats (we currently support XML, JSON, MODS, and EAC-CPF).

A key benefit of open data is that it frees the data not only for external use but also for creative re-use by your own organisation. The web API has provided State Records with a platform on which we can quickly build new services such as mobile phone applications that integrate with the catalogue. It has also provided us with an opportunity to radically re-imagine the online interface to our collection. We've created a simpler and more intuitive search tool for our users. We've also been experimenting with user-generated content such as tags, comments, and, most recently, users' photos of our archives.

Looking to the future, we're hoping to extend the web API to encompass more of State Records' online resources, to offer a wider variety of formats (including linked data formats), and to provide even more opportunities for user engagement.

I'm really looking forward to attending the Congress in August and learning more about what other archives are doing in this area. For example, I am keen to hear about NARA's 'citizen archivist dashboard' and am excited that David Ferriero will be presenting a keynote address. If you're attending the Congress, and are interested in these issues, please grab me for a chat. I look forward to meeting you there.

Richard Lehane

P.s. you can hear more about State Records' Open Data project and our organisation's other Web 2.0 activities at the 'Archives, Web 2.0 and beyond' Congress workshop: http://www.ica2012.com/pages/workshops-copy.php.