Local History Archive

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Hello,

I am involved in the ‘discovery phase’ of a new local Social Justice Archive in London, UK, which has secured fairly long-term funding from our council and support from library services.

Ownership, safe and accessible viewing are concerns people have raised over existing archive collections they either own or manage. I am told that our central Library’s digital archive is made up of PDFs. I am hoping/ wondering if Solid Pods could be trialled out here.

Any suggestions, advice etc appreciated.

Thanks.
J

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Hey there,

A good place to start would be the Inrupt tutorials. I think it would be relatively easy for you to find an existing ontology, and you could annotate your PDF resource links with RDF triples to make them query-able. After that, you would just need to change the access controls for reading or appending as you see fit.

Safe and accessible viewing is a security concern with most applications. You could consider encryption keys that are locally stored to a device. Unfortunately, unless it was beyond-cutting-edge homomorphic encryption, this can destroy the semantic-ness of the resources. This would be something for you to keep in mind. You can resolve some of the security concerns by hosting your Solid resource server (this is where the Pods are stored) and the Identity Provider (this stores the agents’ credentials) in your own premise if you live in a country with an ISP that values social justice. A just-okay laptop with some Lets Encrypt! certificates, a Community solid Server instance, and an inexpensive domain name should be able to handle easily tens of thousands of concurrent requests.

There are more things to think about, but they are longer-term and more about engineering scope and scale rather than social justice.

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Hi Jacob,

This sounds like a really interesting project not just from a technical point of view but also from a social / history / citizenship perspective. I wonder if anyone involved with the project would like to give a talk about it one weekday evening?

I am involved in organising the events at St George’s German Lutheran church, 55 Alie Street, E1 8EB. It is no longer regularly used for German-language services because the immigrant population that lived in the East End for centuries has dispersed. A small group of volunteers works to raise money through events to ensure that the historic building is maintained and kept in use.

Please feel free to get in touch via my home e-mail address immo@huneke.co.uk.

Thanks in advance!
Immo

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Hi Immo,

Thanks for the invitation. I will pass your message on. The next public engagement workshop is on Sept 21st, perhaps you would like to come along and speak to people there.

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Hi Jacob,

Thank you for getting in touch.

I hadn’t realised that the initiative was so localised. It seems to me that a talk on this project might not get a large audience in Tower Hamlets.

A better bet might be to give a talk to the BCS about the SOLID project and how it is being used in this initiative. Given that Sir Tim is behind the SOLID project, I’m sure that this would get a lot of exposure. As it happens, I am also secretary of the South London branch of BCS and so I can help to organise such an event. It would be from 6:30 until about 7:30 (give or take 15 minutes) and end up with free pizza and wine all round.

Could you please pass that on too?

Apologies in advance for declining your invitation to the North Ken library. It’s a bit far for me to travel in the evening, and in any case on the date in question I will be out of the country with my wife - watching the annual fireworks at St Goar on the River Rhine (never been to this before).

Best regards,
Immo

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Please get in touch to schedule a presentation of your project at an upcoming meeting of the Solid Practitioners. We meet online regularly to discuss active Solid projects and there are several that have overlap with yours. We’ll be starting up meetings again in mid September. Here’s some info on the practitioners.

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Hi Immo,

Yes it is very localised, sorry that was not clearer.

To be clear - our council has agreed funding for the SJA, I have been invited on the ‘discovery phase’ team for my input as a local resident and developer who has created a number of campaign websites and online digital material etc. I am now just putting together a proposal to use SOLID.

I have produced a brief Conceptual Framework for the discovery team (inc archivists from the UCL) to look at, doubts were raised over the council adopting new technology for a single collection, how SOLID would fit into existing infrastructures and ICT-council-procedures in place, other collections that the RBKC council look after.

But this archive project is entirely different in lots of ways, so there might be scope to do things differently. We have learned that numerous personal and group collections exist in North Kensington and we are thinking in terms of a collection of collections that may have to exist in different physical spaces, which would align well with the decentralised nature of Solid Pods and the principles of data ownership and interoperability.

I agree that there is prestige associated with SOLID, and perhaps RBKC council will look on it in that way. So at this point I have started discussing it internally, considering challenges etc. I am a SOLID novice so not the best person to be asking the council adopt it …

I am also communicating directly with RBKC library’s team member, I feel she was quite taken by it. I will give a small presentation/ talk at the next public engagement day I linked to. So with Library’s archivist team member, UCL archivists and locals, there should, I hope be time to have a thorough discussion, scrutiny of the SOLID infrastructure merits/ benefits/ challenges etc.

I will definitely mention your offer to talk at BCS and perhaps we may even take you up on it, who knows, thank you. :slight_smile:

Thanks for providing guidance, that is encouraging … we are waiting find out the full extent of existing digital content that would need adopting into the new archive.

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If you want to dive deeper into this fascinating area, I suggest checking out Sarven’s dissertation, Linked Research on the Decentralised Web. It’s a great resource for understanding how various elements like libraries, archives, personal storages, technical specs, Solid, and decentralized (Linked Data) apps, all fit together. Dokieli (source: GitHub - linkeddata/dokieli: 💡 dokieli is a clientside editor for decentralised article publishing, annotations and social interactions), for example, is an authoring tool designed for decentralized article publishing, annotations, and social interactions, which might resonate with your current research interests.

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Hello Jacob,

that’s a very interesting use case. If I may plug some personal project, I happen to be working on an annotation platform, based on W3C Web Annotation standard, meant to annotate all sorts of online resources, like PDF, HTML, videos, …
I am currently porting that platform to the Solid ecosystem, so that the annotations are stored as linked data in your pod, and you can collaboratively annotate any online documents.

The platform is not yet open sourced, but it is testable online.
So I assembled and published in a pod a very simple example of such annotations using a PDF related to your use case. You can check the raw annotations in the pod in the Pod Browser , and browse the annotations in the dedicated Annotation Viewer

I’d be happy to discuss this further with you if you’re interested.

Best regards.

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