A Trans-Atlantic collaboration

Supported through both King’s College London and the Royal Collection Trust, the Georgian Papers Programme Collaborative Workspace is being developed to meet the requirements of both academics and information professionals involved in the Programme. The workspace aggregates data from across the Programme ecosystem (images, catalogue records and transcriptions) and offers editorial functionality allowing users to edit transcriptions and augment the provided metadata through subject indexing and the creation of person and organisation records. This activity is moderated by academic experts.

Transcription supports full text search in the collaborative workspace as well as assists in subject indexing and scholarly edition creation. It also provides a basis for digital humanities research approaches such as corpora analysis. The metadata work supports improved search capabilities as well as browsing via exposure of relationships between people and organisations. It could also assist in the production of timelines or geographic mapping.

King’s Digital Lab involvement with the Georgian Papers Programme predates development work for the workspace. KDL Director James Smithies helped draft a roadmap for developing the project’s research technical infrastructure outside the Royal Household firewall. He also worked with other King’s colleagues and Royal Household partners to define and set up a Metadata Analyst post, initially funded by a grant from the Foyle Foundation. Embedded within the KDL team, the Metadata Analyst developed the information architecture that underpins the collaborative workspace, undertook metadata mapping to guide implementation of that information architecture, subject indexed baseline archival records provided by the Royal Archives and created entity records for those who created or were referenced within the Georgian papers.

Work for the Collaborative Workspace has so far included requirement solicitation, proof of concept development (using Omeka-S) and evaluation, and then development of a workspace Minimal Viable Product. When completed the workspace will provide a platform that brings the rigour required by archivists through the implementation of archival standards but at the same time offers flexibility to scholars in allowing them to correct and augment almost all data surfaced in the workspace.