An article by Richard Gartner on the LIPARM project appears in the latest issue of Ariadne, the web magazine for information professionals. The article introduces the project, the schema, the controlled vocabularies, the conversion process and the interface. The article is available here.
An article on the LIPARM project by Dan Jellinek appears in the latest e-Government Bulletin. The piece, titled “Parliamentary Metadata Language” Could Transform Political Research discusses the rationale of PML and how it could change resource discovery and historical research. The article is available here.
The final face-to-face meeting under JISC funding took place on 1 February at Parliament Buildings Belfast and appropriately focussed on implementing the Parliamentary MetaData Language (PML) developed under the project with born digital content. Specifically the meeting concentrated on what would need to be done to allow the devolved administrations’ for Northern Ireland and Wales to adopt PML for new content arising from debates in the Welsh and Northern Ireland Assemblies.
It was noted during discussions the importance of having detailed authority files containing information for each parliamentary session on constituencies, members of parliament, roles within parliament and more together with the use of URIs for each constituency, person, role etc. While not necessarily called authority files it was clear that both for Wales and NIA, such resources were available or could easily be constructed. It was also noted that some of the LIPARM functionality was already in built to xml schemas either in place or being discussed by each parliament and could be ported into PML.
It was agreed that both WA and NIA would make available sample Hansard content together with associated authority files to the project team and that the National Library of Wales would examine how PML could be applied to this material. Assuming the results of this work are positive it was further agreed that both NIA and the Centre for Data Digitisation and Analysis (CDDA) at Queen’s University, who have been responsible for the retro-conversion of sample Hansard content, would support both Assemblies in steps to introduce the schema into their day-to-day data capture workflows.
If all proceeds to plan this will take PML from a proposed schema to one that is in everyday use by two of the three devolved governments. We aim for wider use of the schema for contemporary data through and plan, thanks to the agreement of the Hansard team at NIA, to hold a meeting inviting those responsible for compiling the Official Record (and supporting it technically) from all administrations in the British Isles. We will also examine the costs of retro-converting the Official Record for the WA and NIA during their 10+ years of existence to ensure that a uniform set of tools are available to help users find and analyse content for Hansard. This is likely to be the basis of a new grant application.
Rather late, by as this was an invitation only event not a serious problem, here is the programme for the LIPARM implementation workshop. I’ll post outcomes from this meeting shortly…
Northern Ireland Assembly, Parliament Buildings, Belfast
Friday Feb. 1st, 2013.
This workshop is the final project event of the JISC-funded LIPARM project (liparm.cerch.kcl.ac.uk/), a collaboration between King’s College, London, The History of Parliament Trust, the National Library of Wales, the Institute of Historical Research, the Northern Ireland Assembly, and Queen’s University, Belfast. This will be an opportunity to review the PML schema, and the union catalogue for PML-based parliamentary data (liparm.llgc.org.uk). Representatives from the Official Record, outreach and IT Departments of the National Assembly for Wales and the Northern Irish Assembly will discuss how LIPARM outputs could be adopted and assist the work of current legislative bodies. The programme will allow plenty of time for discussion and demonstrations of significant aspects of implementation of LIPARM outputs, and the day is intended primarily as a discussion forum.
Agenda
10:30 arrival and coffee
11:00 Welcome and Introductions, objectives for the day (Lorna)
11:10 The LIPARM Project: overview and update (Lorna)
11:20: The PML schema: The historian’s perspective (Paul S)
11:35: Retro-converting the data and lessons learnt (Paul E)
11:50: The interface and union catalogue development (Lorna/Illtud)
12:00 Discussion: the requirements of the contemporary Official Record: Organisational positions and interests (WG/NIA representatives)
12:30 lunch
13:00 Discussion on data conversion/interface
13:30 Discussion on technical implementation
14:30 Discussion: how could LIPARM be used in your operations?
15:00 Concluding discussion
15:30 close
Attendees
Paul Ell (Queen’s University, Belfast)
Paul Seaward (History of Parliament Trust)
Illtud Daniel (National Library of Wales)
Lorna Hughes (National Library of Wales)
Claire Collett (National Assembly for Wales)
Sarah Dafydd (National Assembly for Wales)
Simon Ball (National Assembly for Wales)
David Hardy (Queen’s University, Belfast)
Michael Cochrane (NI Assembly)
Patrick Marsh (NI Assembly)
Martha Davison (NI Assembly)
Simon Burrowes (NI Assembly)
Gareth McGrath (NI Assembly)
John Power (NI Assembly).
The two LIPARM interfaces, one to a collection of highly-detailed, manually created PML records and one to a larger chronological spread of automatically generated records, are now available via the Interface menu option above. Please read the accompanying text carefully, in particular regarding the second interface which is more experimental.
The end-of-project workshop for the LIPARM project was held at Senate House on 28th January. Those attending including librarians from Parliament and a journalist who is currently researching technology and government.
Presentations were given by Richard Gartner on the project and the PML schema, Paul Seaward and Jane Winters on the user’s perspective, Jonathan Blaney on the controlled vocabularies, Paull Ell and David Hardy on the data conversion and Lorna Hughes (via Skype) on the interface.
Richard Gartner presented a paper at the Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL) conference in Paphos, Cyprus on 24 September. TPDL is the leading conference on digital libraries in Europe and the paper we very well received. Richard’s Powerpoint slides are available under the Publications menu option above.
The National Assembly for Wales are looking at the possibility of using the LIPARM methodologies, particularly the PML schema, for indexing their records of debates and proceedings. Richard Gartner, the LIPARM PI, visited the Assembly on August 14th to examine their current systems and how PML might be integrated into them.
The outcome was very positive and PML appears to be a good fit for the National Assembly for Wales’s requirements. As a next stage, Richard will convert some sample materials to PML using XSLT transformations before further discussions which will examine in more detail the requirements for taking this forward.
A short article by Richard Gartner (Project PI) on the LIPARM project has appeared in the current issue of Refer, the journal of the the journal of the Information Services Group of the UK Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP). This journal is widely read by UK information professionals. The article is on pages 21-24 of Volume 28, Issue 2.
Sara Weale at NLW has now produced the first mock-ups for the union interface to PML records: these have received feedback from the LIPARM team and are now undergoing further iterations before the development team to get to work.
