SOLAR lights up Salford’s Past

City of Salford North West of England 37 Square Miles 5 districts 220,000 inhabitants

University of Salford 20,000 students 3,000 international students 2,500 staff 3 Colleges & 10 schools

The University of Salford has 25 different archives and special collections. The archive contains material relating to the history of the University, from its foundations in 1896 right up to the present day. It also holds many special collections of interest to students, researchers, genealogists and local historians, and includes the Walter Greenwood Collection, Bridgewater estate archive, Mike Craig archive – BBC comedy producer which includes comedy sound recordings. The archive contains thousands of files and hundreds of thousands of individual items. These are stored in EAD XML and are loaded on to the University’s web pages.

The archives were available to users from 3 locations: The archives and special collections web page. However, users would need to know to look there. The pages aren’t searchable, so would need to browse the collection The Library catalogue To get full access to these archives users would need to navigate to a University Web Page which has a long list of the archives with links to each of the collections. The collections can’t be searched from the web pages, and users literally have to browse through each of the collections to discover what is available in each collection

Walter Greenwood Collection

Higher level records available in our OPAC, but if a more detailed search carried out, the result wouldn’t be returned. E.G In the Walter Greenwood Collection, there is a collection of letters from Edith Sitwell. By carrying out a search for Edith Sitwell – ‘0’ results are returned.

USIR harvested by SOLAR – so allowing users to find more detailed level records. However, the repository is not metadata only, want to have digital objects, so to create records for all the special collections would have taken a great deal of resource, both to digitise the material and to get the metadata into the repository

Collections into SOLAR Needed to investigate how we could get the archives into SOLAR. The archives use EAD, and we looked at if we could put the EAD straight into Primo, however we would have had to have written a new set of normalisation rules Jenny McNally contacted the Primo mailing list to see what other people were doing, and the responses indicated that people were putting the EAD somewhere else and then converting it Jenny started to use marcedit, which is a free basic tool in order to convert the EAD to marc. However, the records were too big, and marc edit wasn’t able to convert the EAD. The started to use Kernow, which converts the EAD files to MarcXML

Thank you & Questions