Archives Hub is an aggregator of content from nearly 300 UK institutions, focusing on the needs of researchers in Higher Education. When Jisc went out to tender for a new system to replace the existing Archives Hub, the requirement was not only to provide an improved discovery interface for researchers but also to improve the workflow for the ingest, quality checking and enhancement of data supplied from a wide range of diverse systems and to allow aggregated content to be supplied onwards to international initiatives such as Archives Portal Europe.
The project adopted an innovative approach to the storage of large hierarchical data structures as individual ‘chunks’ (which alleviated many of the problems encountered by the existing system).
The project was led by long-term Sero HE collaborators, Knowledge-Integration. Sero HE played a key role in the user consultation process, engaging with digital archivists as users of the system, and also in helping to ensure that workflows met the needs of the Archives Hub team to support real efficiency improvements.