Preserve your website Case Study

How did you get involved with your community group? 

Paula had previously been involved in similar types of groups for years but discovered a job opportunity with Spirit of Revolt while doing the Information Management and Preservation course at the University of Glasgow to be their Project Archivist. She wasn’t successful in getting the job at the time but after cataloguing the Janey Buchan collection at the University of Glasgow and digitising materials there, Paula got a job at Govanhill Baths and the opportunity to work with Spirit of Revolt came up again and she got it. Independent community archives have always been Paula’s passion, and she was particularly interested in the materials held by Spirit of Revolt. Over the years they have also organised lots of interesting events, show and tells and archive showcases using themes that arise from the materials themselves.  

How do you collect material for your collections? 

The archive team has been very proactive over the years and would often approach individuals or organisations and ask whether they want to deposit their materials. SOR are also recommended by other people who might be aware of someone who would be suitable. Spirit of Revolt prioritises activists who aren’t part of a political party – political parties often have their own archive, but if people are not involved in a political party system (non-party political), where would their materials go? This is the point of SOR.  

The very first collection SOR received was Allan Burnett’s. This was through his sister who emailed and thought her brother’s materials would be suitable. Over the years people have gotten to know about it – this is why some of the Faslane materials are included in the archive. While The National Library of Scotland has a lot of materials from people who are referred to as anarchists, or are involved in direct or community action, there is a huge anarchist tradition in Scotland and most of these kinds of materials are coming to SOR who make sure to not exclude other types of non-political party materials. (doesn’t need to all necessarily be anarchist materials) 

What processes are in place to manage and process your collections? 

The SOR team is very small. Paula oversees cataloguing the materials and the archive relies on volunteers to scan the vast number of materials from their numerous collections. John is the founding member of the archive and the most active member, who would answer emails and upload the scanned materials onto the Internet Archive. However, due to health issues, John has required more support to continue this job, especially as the only member who was uploading onto the Internet Archive. 

Individuals have the option to keep their materials and give the archive the scans, but the archive also holds many collections in their space at the Mitchell Library.  

Over time, processes have changed slightly. For example, SOR now has a master catalogue that is backed up on a hard drive. The hope is that all cataloguing information will have a link to the digitised object that will then go straight onto the Internet Archive so that nothing is lost. The priority of the archive is to get as much online as possible rather than the quality of the scans so the catalogue will include jpegs and not TIFF files.   

They are currently in the process of redesigning their website since this was designed 12 years ago. Processes have had to change since, when updating the catalogue and new deposits were added to the same collection, John would go on the website and make changes directly to the website. Over time, because the template wasn’t robust enough, things began to go out of sync.  

The Archive is located at Glasgow’s Mitchell Library and its material is accessible in the Reading Room. Glasgow City Archives now use CALM, but previously SOR used a word processing document, now GCA want everything in an excel spreadsheet. The whole point about SOR is that the catalogued scans would go online and be accessible in the search room in the Mitchell Library. They were keen to get some collections in the Mitchell but were having to re-catalogue since the naming formats had changed.  

This was a good opportunity to sort out the website. SOR didn’t have a lot of resources and decided that the quickest way for organising the catalogue/website was to put as much information into a spreadsheet and began working with a charity called the Scottish Tech Army, a group of retired IT/early career professionals to come in and help.  

Alistair from the Scottish Tech Army exported all the metadata from the website into a spreadsheet for every catalogue. He created two different spreadsheets; one is arranged by collection, and another is item level. These were saved as CSV files and he has written script, so they can be opened as CSV files, and it is easier to view the catalogue.  

How do you preserve your collections? 

The collections are digitised and made available on the Internet Archive. The digitised materials are also saved on the archivist computer, and then it is saved to an external hard-drive and another that is in a different location.  

Since it is a small team, another team member has just been trained up to add materials on the Internet Archive. Paula works a lot with the volunteers and shows them how to create PDFs and how/where to store them. 

SOR use the Internet Archive because it is a free service and because of the vast amount of materials it would have cost them a lot of money to pay for a server that was big enough to store them all. They also like that it is a global service, and so they can be found by people who wouldn’t know of the archive otherwise. The main reason is because it reduces cost for storage. John uploads the materials onto the Internet Archive from his home since they do not have a strong enough internet connection at the Mitchell to upload.  

However, this can be somewhat precarious system to depend on. For example, during our discussion, the Internet Archive was taken offline due to a cyber-attack. While all the materials are there, 31million user’s personal details were exposed. In any case there should always be a digital back up but because of the cataloguing issues they had (unsure whether John had kept all the PDFs that he uploaded on the Internet Archive) it's tricky to cross-check to ensure that all the materials are still available. It is hoped that now if any changes are made to the catalogue this will be made to the master spreadsheet that will then be exported to CSV and will include all the links from the Internet Archive to ensure everything is there.