Integrated Skills, Integrated Data: Mapping Best Practice and Collections for Innovation and Engagement

In recent years the University of Edinburgh [UoE] has seen change, mergers, external partnerships and innovation at the heart of its growth and activity. Collections at UoE were not immune from these changes and have pioneered projects that both support and highlight unique educational cultures. Technology and the dissemination of collections has not only engendered positive relationships with academics but has created wider opportunities for the use of collections in teaching, learning and research. This momentum and an established commitment to the interoperability of data and standards presented an opportunity to look for a global solution to collections management within the converged, cross disciplinary environment. This included harnessing expertise in the University with systems development for large European projects and wider project management. This session will explore how UoE became the first European contributor to the collections management tool Archives Space. Snapshots of a converged culture and how 'archives' have benefited from this (including how 'techies' and 'archivists' worked together). An upbeat finale will look at what the team at the UoE achieved and are excited about for the future

Manually Annotating Gender Biased Language in University of Edinburgh Heritage Collections Archival Metadata Descriptions

These datasets contains metadata descriptions extracted from the University of Edinburgh's Heritage Collections (HC) Archives' catalogue in to create an annotated dataset for training text classification models to detect gender biased language. Four descriptive metadata fields were extracted for all collections, subcollections, and items in the HC Archives' online catalog. The ``Title'' field is the name of the archival record, which either documents a single or group of archival material. The ``Biographical / Historical'' field contains information about the people, time period, and places associated with the collection, subcollection, or item being described. The ``Scope and Contents'' field summarizes the contents of the collection, subcollection, or item to which the field belongs. Though not all records include the ``Processing Information'' field, those that do typically record the person who wrote the description for the collection, subcollection, or item's descriptive metadata fields, and the date the description was written. The datasets were manually annotated by five annotators according to the Taxonomy of Gendered and Gender Biased Language. The annotated datasets include the annotated text span, the description in which that text span appears, the label with which the text span was annotated, and a note explaining an annotator's rationale for applying the label to the text span. Please refer to the datasets' associated GitHub repositories and papers for further details on their creation and contents