Digital Archives: Creating a Regional Hub in the North East

Newcastle University's Special Collections, an Accredited Archive Service, curates over 200 unique and distinctive archival collections, including the UNESCO Memory of the World Gertrude Bell Archive. We are central to the archival landscape within the region with working partnerships with Seven Stories (the National Centre for the Children's Book), Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums, and the National Trust (Wallington), providing essential reciprocal support around collection development, management, and engagement.

Over the last 5 years, our areas of strategic development have focused on our digitisation and digital preservation facility (Digitisation Suite) based within the Library. This core function services these collections and associated research and engagement from within the University, external researchers, and partner organisations in the region. As with other Russell Group Research Libraries UK institutions, we have responded and continue to respond to the 'digital shift' imperative. This is particularly vital for unique material within research intensive contexts. It requires action in 4 key areas, skills, scholarship, space, and stakeholders, with the overall objective to provide high quality access to surrogates for the widest possible audiences in innovative and intuitive ways.

Users accessing our digitised archives have quadrupled over the last decade through this online delivery and focus on curation for access, and as a result of our increased focus on developing impactful and innovative outputs. We are committed to further digital innovation in two ways: (1) Much of the humanities research we support at Newcastle University is underpinned by Digital Scholarship, to creative experimentation, and new knowledge. We aim to support our researchers and to facilitate the sharing of their expertise and insights with external partners. (2) Through our well established local and regional partnerships, we are well situated to become a regional hub for the digitisation of the unique and distinctive collections held by partner LMAs through the access to skills, equipment, and capacity. (1) is an increasing opportunity; (2) is now urgent: our regional partners lack the resources (facilities and skills) to digitise their holdings to the extent required; this is hindering their ability to engage as widely as they would like with audiences, to develop their holdings, to benefit from the University's innovative digital scholarship, and to attract funding. To achieve objectives (1) and (2) our primary need is an expansion of our existing Digitisation Suite to double the capacity. This expansion will include building work, engineering, power and data, and bank lighting compliant with ISO 12646 (Graphic technology - Displays for colour proofing), as well as equipment and software for processing and capturing high resolution and conservation compliant surrogates.

Expansion would mean Special Collections could undertake both a commercial service to think beyond its own collections and produce high quality surrogates for regional partners' own strategic drivers, but also use the facility as a skills lab where partners can learn and access equipment themselves. We aim to be an active catalyst in breaking down boundaries between collections and removing the skills, space, and infrastructure challenges associated with creating digital surrogates for access. In the current uncertain financial climate, where the Department of Culture has called on the archives sector to be creative to ensure its survival, this would allow partners to be responsive to the 'digital shift' and stakeholder expectations of online access in a sustainable and scaled way, while also helping Special Collections address resourcing and further development.