National Librarian's Report, September 2020 (PDF)
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National Librarian and Chief Executive’s Report to the Board September 2020 LIBRARIAN’S KEY EVENTS SINCE JUNE 2020 On 11 August 2020 following five months of lockdown, the Library reopened to the public. Hidden Collections – Quarterly Update During this reporting period the Metadata & Maintenance Team have been concentrating efforts on providing metadata for the wider access Scottish electronic publications from the hidden collections. This work has been carried out by staff members working from home and 2445 have been catalogued. The hidden collection contains publications from a variety of organisations ranging from Healthcare Improvement Scotland and the Scottish Parliament to Scottish Environment Link. It includes a significant donation of publications from Scottish Natural Heritage, who have chosen to archive their publications with the Library. The electronic publications in this collection are a significant contribution to worldwide scientific knowledge and chart the changes in approach and attitude to environmental conservation from the 1970s to the present day. The Scottish Government and Scottish Parliament continued to deposit new electronic publications during lockdown, many of these present the Scottish Government’s response to Covid-19. These electronic publications are accessible through Library Search and are freely available to all, not only registered readers of the Library. The Team continued to build on the success of the House of Commons hidden collection and provided access to 42,869 nineteenth century House of Lords publications. As with the previous project this involved loading records for electronic items accessed from the United Kingdom Parliamentary Papers e-resource into the Library catalogue and adding the holdings for the physical items to the catalogue records for the electronic versions. A springtime harvest The statistics for the curated additions to the UK Web Archive for the first quarter of the reporting year (April-June) have revealed a bumper crop courtesy of the National Library of Scotland. The curated additions are those where a deliberate targeting took place to make sure we captured web content that might otherwise have been missed by the general domain crawl that takes place annually. The National Library of Scotland was responsible for archiving 5,455 websites out of a total for all six of the legal deposit libraries of 8,439 (that’s 64% of the total). Nearly three quarters of the National Library of Scotland’s total were archived by Trevor Thomson – a whopping 3,985 websites in three months (which is 47% of all of the curated web archiving for the whole country). Although a large amount Trevor’s work was focussed on collecting Scotland’s experience of COVID (1,367 websites), it wasn’t the only collection he developed. An even greater focus was the building of a collection Scotland’s schools (over 2,000 websites), with other important collections being built too, including Scottish responses to Black Lives Matter, a collection on Edwin Morgan’s centenary, a large and ongoing collection of the websites of community initiatives in Scotland, and the archiving of the websites of 120 Scottish orchestras. With web content especially vulnerable to deletion or edit, and with the output of some communities and organisations now mostly online rather than in print, building curated collections of these archived websites is crucial in terms of safeguarding the memory of the nation. One Third Digital: Update for the Librarian’s report to the Board The Mass Digitisation Team returned to the studio when the Library reopened to staff on 27 July and are now back up running and working close to pre-lockdown capacity. The team have resumed digitisation of the Antiquarian Books of Scotland (ABS) collection, MacKinnon photography albums, fragile maps of Scotland on the hired Versascan scanner, and medieval manuscripts funded by Alex Graham. At the end of August, their focus will move to digitisation of the outstanding part of the Scottish chapbooks collection, as well as resuming digitisation of robust single sheet maps of Scotland on the studio’s new 400 maps per day sheet-feed scanner. While working from home during Lockdown, the team have carried out rights assessment on over 4,000 volumes from the ABS collection in preparation for them to go online. This included work on over 300 items which were previously flagged as in copyright and are now confirmed to be out of copyright. The team has hosted a Robertson Trust intern, Brodie McKenzie, who is undertaking a six-week internship throughout July and August. Brodie is working to improve the Library’s presence on Wikipedia by investigating how other organisations use the platform and writing articles on the Library’s collections, for example this new article on the John Murray Archive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_John_Murray_Archive. Wikipedia is the world’s fifth most visited website; improving the Library’s presence there will help to raise awareness of our work and help to drive traffic to our services and collections. In July the Library won the Wikimedia UK Partnership of the Year 2020 award for the Wikisource OCR Correction project which ran throughout lockdown. More items were added to the Rare items in Gaelic collection on the Digital Gallery in early August, and around 4,000 more books will be added to the Antiquarian Books of Scotland collection in late August, bringing the total of online books from this collection to over 8,000. During Lockdown, great progress has been made bringing thousands of special collections Scottish maps online that were digitised in February and March. This includes strongroom items from both printed and manuscript map collections such as the Signet Library’s collection of 400 maps of Scotland, 1580s-1950s; 300 county maps of Scotland dating from the 1620s to the 1930s; and 300 manuscript estate plans forming a really interesting set of unique, detailed maps, stretching from Wigtownshire to Orkney. Other maps put online during the reporting period include 102 specialised maps, plans and profiles relating to Bridges, Canals and Railways in Scotland. These are grouped under Transport Plans of Scotland, 18th-20th centuries, and include early plans for the Forth & Clyde Canal, actively planned from the 1760s, the Caledonian Canal (1804-1847) and the Union Canal (opened 1822). The team also made available online 230 Goad Fire Insurance Plans of Scottish Towns, 1880s-1940s, being very detailed maps showing the function of main industrial buildings, and often the names of particular companies or institutions there. Another highlight of maps recently published online are a small set of 82 military maps of Scotland, dating 1656-1923, including battle plans of Culloden, Falkirk, Glenshiel, and Prestonpans, as well as maps of military roads and maps related to the restoration of Edinburgh Castle in the 1880s. Although we currently lack the infrastructure to make digitised sound easily discoverable online, the UOSH team posted a selection of clips from the collections being digitally preserved through the Unlocking Our Sound Heritage project on the Scotland’s Sound website. The digitisation facilities at Kelvin Hall reopened to staff on 27 July enabling the resumption of tape digitisation as part of the UOSH project, and both film and video digitisation for moving image. 100 sound tapes were captured in the first 4 weeks back in the building. The immediate priority on return for the moving image team was the fulfilment of orders for content from production companies and individuals which had been placed during lockdown. Youth Employability Update The Library has been seeking to expand our involvement in youth employability (YE) through the lockdown period in anticipation of the economic crisis to come and its predicted effect on young people. Our approach to YE is guided by these principles: • We use the resources of the Library (collections, expertise, opportunity) to support young people in the transition from education to employment; • We can work most effectively with young people who are coming out of higher education with limited work experience; • We aim to achieve a situation where good news stories about young people achieving their ambitions through the Library encourage others to support our work; and • Our work with young people in YE is also about engagement with collections and developing the audience of the Library. Our activities fall into three broad areas: • Offering young people employability coaching to fill gaps in their knowledge of the recruitment process and to level the playing field as they apply for jobs; • Creating opportunities so young people to gain workplace insights and we can establish relationships with them; and • Finding funds to support paid traineeships and internships that allow young people to demonstrate their capabilities, develop new skills and build their confidence. Pre-Lockdown Status In March 2020 the Library had two Digital Access interns in post and one Alexander Graham Trainee reaching the end of their contract. We were running the recruitment process for our next three Alexander Graham Trainees and the Collections Care trainee was about to be appointed. We had also agreed to host four Robertson Trust Scholars (a programme supporting disadvantaged young people through university) on six-week internships in the Library over the summer. The Scholars are between third and fourth year at university. We were also concluding our fashion-related YE project with a planned event on fashion and sustainability (drawing on our business collections) which would also act as a launch event for the zines produced by students at Herriot Watt University as an introduction to our fashion- related collections for their peers. We had just completed a career development event for PhD candidates interested in the possibilities of curatorial work on 28 February and were following up with specific enquiries from that. Attendees at that event, plus volunteers working with the Sound Archive had been offered employability coaching.