2010-10-13 New Site Regional Archive Leiden
real change
new site: archives 2.0
Tomorrow, the Regional Archive Leiden will introduce its new website. This is not some superficial make-over, the differences are more than skin deep. There are real changes. The archive advertises the new site is as a web 2.0 site, mostly because it supports user-generated content. Few will recognise the site as web 2.0; it does not have a typical web 2.0 design, it does not integrate with FaceBook or Twitter, and it does not seem to have its own social community either. The new site does set out to create one, but that is not immediately obvious.
The new site has a few web 2.0 features, which is advanced for an archive, but does not have a web 2.0 character. The new site is not really web 2.0, but archives 2.0, and that is only partially visible. That the site shows links to sites of other archives is immediately visible, but a large part of archives 2.0 is organisational culture. The Regional Archive Leiden looked beyond their own organisation and worked together with other archives to create the new site, take advantage of the experiences of other archives and their best ideas for its own site. In turn, other archives now look to this site as an example for their site.
visible changes
This is what site currently looks like. There is a menu with links to information about the archive along the left with address information below it, a menu links to major collections in the centre, a sidebar with news on the right, and a marquee along the top. The menu includes links to three other sites about Leiden; Pilgrim Archives, Jan van Hout and Leidse Canon.
This is what the new site looks like. A large part of the home page is used
to show an image. There are four different images, and the text in the yellow
box - sadly overlaying the image - provides a brief description. The marquee is
gone. The home page still provides the email and phone number. The contact page
provides the full address. News items are in the red box.
The home page is a bit of an exception, but the use of the blue, red and yellow is fairly consistent throughout the site;
blue for the collections, red for the Regional Archives Leiden, and yellow for
user-provided content.
Most of the menus are gone from the home page. Instead there are three buttons along the bottom now. The Het RAL
button leads to an about page that has information about the archive. There is more information here than on the old site. For example, there are separate pages for each town covered by the regional archive, and those pages have links to local
museums and organisations.
Notice the bread crumbs menu above the content that shows the menu choices made to arrive at this page. This show you how you arrived at this page and can arrive at it again. The browser back button works as well.
searching collections
The old site put the major collection at the centre of the home page. You could click through for brief descriptions and specialised search for that particular collection.
The old search page for the image bank. Notice that it immediately shows a lot of search options. That is handy, but also a bit overwhelming. The new search page keeps things deliberately simple; there are options, but new site design encourages you to start searching by merely entering a search term in the search box.
The new info page for the image bank.
On the new site, the Collections
button leads to an overview page that
offers the same information as the old home page, but the links no longer lead
to brief descriptions and specialised search pages. The links lead to
information pages with more extensive descriptions, an a simple search box on
the right. That simple search box leads to the same search as the search box on
the home page. There are no specialised search engines anymore.
technology
The new site is technologically dated. The navigation works without JavaScript, but the search results look horrible unless you decide to surf unsafely and turn JavaScript on; the site does use CSS for layout, but apparently not for the entire site.
Like the old site, the new site has been created using Joomla! Content Management System (CMS). The Joomla! system allows liquid layout, yet it is a fixed-sized design that looks good at a resolution of 1024 x 768 only. The site does not adapt to the browser window size. The result on larger monitors is the so-called postage stamp effect; a very small site in the middle of an ocean of wasted space.
What the site looks like when the browser window is maximised on a 1920 x 1080 widescreen display like most people buy nowadays; a fixed-size postage stamp against a huge grey background.
The new site isn't technologically perfect, but it isn't a step backwards either. On the contrary, it is several steps forward.
These observations are a bit disappointing, but the old site suffered the same problems. The new site isn't technologically perfect, but it isn't a step backwards either. On the contrary, it is several steps forward. The new site gets several things right that the old did not.
The old site used XHTML 1.0 Transitional and did not validate; the W3C
Mark-up Validator Service reported 31 errors and 22 warnings. The new site
uses XHTML 1.0 Strict and the home page actually validates; there are no errors
and no warnings. I tried a few random pages, and most do have a few validations
errors, so there is still some work to be done, but the new site seems an
improvement on the old one; the pages are of a higher technical quality.
While the old site still encoded pages in ISO 8859-1
(ISO Latin 1), the new site uses UTF-8.
scan on demand
The new site puts an emphasis on delivering data digitally, so that you can
research the archive without having the visit. It attempts to deliver much of
the most often requested information in digital form.
The idea is that you will
often find a scan at a reasonable resolution, but can order higher quality scans
for a price. If there is no scan, you can opt to commission the scan; the
archive will scan the item on your demand, you will
pay for the scan, and the next visitor will find a reasonable resolution of that
scan.
reservation
Another option is to make a reservation to view the original document. When you create a user account, you can indicate a date and time you want to visit the archive to view a particular document. The archivists will fetch it the day before, to have it ready and waiting for you when you arrive.
I seem to recall from a demonstration of the still unfinished site a few
weeks ago that it should be possible to undo a registration, but this screenshot
shows no control to do so. I am pretty sure that there are some controls
missing, and hope this gets fixed soon.
What this screenshot does show is that the archive is closed this week because
of renovation.
profile
Once you are registered, you get a profile. That profile has a lot of buttons
along the right side. One of these is a button Reservering
that leads to page
with an overview of all your reservations and the possibility to undo these
reservations. Other buttons lead to scans, translations and transcriptions. You
can store searches, see the stories you uploaded and the comments you left. You
can join interest groups, and indicate your interests in some predefined
categories (towns, periods, buildings and genealogy) on your profile and can
subscribe to an RSS feed based on those interests.
unified search
The big technological change between the old and the new site that a regular user will immediately notice is that the old site had various specialised search engines, while the new site has a single unified search engine.
The illustration shows the results of searching for Robinson
. The results page is
divided into nine boxes. In this screenshot, three are complete visible, three
are partially visible, and three are below the window bottom; you have to scroll
to see these. If the site had used a fluid layout instead of a postage stamp
design, all nine boxes would easily have fitted on a widescreen display.
Each of the nine boxes shows a different type of result. From left to right, top to bottom, these are images, newspapers, archives (the Leiden Archive keeps archives), persons, places, library, stories, external websites and pages on the RAL website itself. You can click on the links of the header in each to focus on just the results from that box.
results
On this particular result page are multiple images of the John Robinson memorial plaque
on the Pieterskerk. Although several of the Robinson
mentions in the
newspapers are advertisements for Robinson shoes, quite a few of the links on
the results page relate to John Robinson.
The person tab shows three hits for
the baptism of Roosje Jennings, daughter of Johan Jennings and Faer Sijnhuijs;
This record shows up because the comment field states that Faer Robinson is the
daughter of John Robinson. The places box shows the same result, perhaps because
anything in a comment field might be a place name.
The library box lists several articles about John Robinson, and the unveiling of
the John Robinson memorial in particular.
user generated content
The external websites box looks for hits on such external websites such as the National Archive, the Leiden University Library, the newspapers in Royal Library and the Institute for Dutch History. That's the archives 2.0 approach. The web 2.0 approach is that the site also links to unofficial third parties such as the Dutch genealogy site Genealogy Online and the local history society Oud Leiden.
Another new web 2.0 feature of the website is that users can upload their own stories. This box scans several related websites that have stories as well. Unsurprisingly, there were no user stories about John Robinson, or in fact about anything at all before the official introduction of the site.
The alderman for culture opened the website by uploading a picture and description of the current mayor and aldermen. Ariela Netiv, the director of the Regional Archive Leiden, uploaded a short history of the Prinsenhof, a building on the Rapenburg, and a story about the visit of Prince Maurits in 1594. Other already prepared articles quickly followed.
The user-provided content is likely to vary widely in both nature and quality of content, and archivists will have to monitor the content to some extent. All the uploaded content is included in search results, and the user of the website will have to judge accuracy and reliability of the provided information themselves.
fast
The search results page for Robinson
shows more than 11.000 hits in
newspapers. Some searches results in millions of hits, but the performance
remains excellent. A search for the Dutch definite article, quite probably the
slowest search, takes about fifteen seconds; but there are more than 200 million
results, so that is still impressive performance.
vital and marriage records
The big news for genealogist is that the new website will offer a full index
on all birth, death and marriage records (up until legal restrictions of
course), complete with scans of the original records.
The current site offers a full index of some the vital and marriage records,
without scans.
I've been trying this functionality for the past weeks, and it was working,
but I had reason to doubt that the index was complete yet; for various searches,
the old system returns more hits. It seemed to me that the new system still
offers the same data as the old one, and the systems just counted the hits
differently.
Ariela Netiv has confirmed this impression. The site current offers the same
index as the old site. The site will offer all scans within a few weeks.
Completion of the index on these scans is likely to take years, but visitors can
already search through the scans themselves.
The baptism record the Robinson
search turned up is one of the
records that has not been scanned
yet.
This screenshot shows a marriage which took place in 1621. The pop-up window
appears when you click the Inzien van de akte
(viewing the record) link.
Sadly, the pop-up window opens on the frontispiece of the marriage book, and you
have to links along the bottom of the image to navigate through it. As this
screenshot shows, the displayed resolution is too to read the image, and there
are no zoom controls. Thus, it is nearly impossible to find the right page.
This is odd, as the site does include functionality for zooming and scrolling through images, but somehow, that functionality is missing here. As the screenshots show, I've been using Google Chrome for exploring the site, but a quick test in Firefox confirmed that this is not problem with Google Chrome.
I looked at several more recent records, but the resolution of this image is typical. Even birth certificates as recent as 1908 are practically unreadable. As it is now, the scans offer little or no added value to the index.
The site should automatically navigate to the right record and display that original records in a readable resolution. There will be quite some interest in these records, so I expect these issues to receive high priority and to be addressed soon after the introduction of the new site.
Creative Commons
Very web 2.0 is that the Regional Archive Leiden allows a lot of its material to be used under a Creative Commons license, the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license to be precise. The archive may charge for high resolution images, but generally, a the lower resolution of the same image is provided free of any charge. Whether any particular falls under this Creative Commons license is indicated in the Copyright field of the details.
updates
update 2010-10-14 official opening
Article updated after official opening of the site. Several site issues have been fixed, and article now includes information provided by Ariela Netiv, the director of the Regional Archive Leiden.
2011-12-21: Leiden records
Scans of the baptisation, marriage and burial records of Leiden are on the site, and there is an index, but the index entries are not linked to the scans; clicking an entry brings up the entire book, not a page, and you then have to find the source page yourself. Today, the Regional Archive Leiden announced that it will take advantage of the new Vele Handen (Many Hands) crowd-sourcing site to fix this. The crowd-sourcing project is expected to become available in February.
2012-06-04: Leiden Missing Links project
The Leiden Missing Links project has started.
links
- Regional Archive Leiden
- Pilgrim Archives
- Jan van Hout
- Leidse Canon
- New Pilgrim Archives Web Site
- Joomla
- Creative Commons
- Many Hands
- Regionaal Archief Leiden Nieuws 2011-12-21: RAL neemt deel aan Vele Handen!
- Leiden Missing Links Project
Copyright © Tamura Jones. All Rights reserved.