Nicole Hartland
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Nicole started with the Parliamentary Archives as a graduate trainee in 2020. She moved on from there to work as a cataloguer on our Prepare and Move Project which saw the preparation of our physical records for transfer to the National Archives. She stayed on with us as an assistant and later corporate information manager with our Information and Records Management Service (IRMS) team. In 2023 she moved into my team (Digital Preservation) as a Digital Archivist.
During this time she also completed her MLitt in Archives and Records Management with Distinction. Her dissertation in 2023 on ‘Web Archives for All? Towards Equitable Access to UK Public Sector Web Archives’ was selected as a Digital Preservation Awards finalist in the ‘Most Distinguished Student Work in Digital Preservation’ category this year and a peer-reviewed conference paper based on its work has been accepted as a short paper in the International Digital Preservation Conference (iPres) 2024 later this year. We have also co-authored papers on SharePoint data transfer at Parliament.
She is indefatigable in the work she puts into her development and her contributions to the professional community. She completed a coding boot camp with Code First Girls (winning Best Project Award) and attended the Cambridge Digital Humanities Cultural Heritage Data School. She is also active in a number of professional groups such as the Digital Preservation Coalition Good Practice Sub-Committee and the Preservica London User Group and has taken on committee roles in the ARA Section for New Professionals as well as the Section for Archives and Technology.
In the four years that Nicole has been with us she has become an exceptional member of our service. Since the start of 2022 she has also:
Developed Professionally
Nicole has held various committee roles with the Archives and Records Association, notably organising and hosting the New Professionals Research Showcase 2023 series. The first session, a collaboration with the University College London (UCL) Migrated Archives Working Group, was the first to showcase new professional research from outside Europe. Programme of speakers and sign-up email available here in the ARCHIVES-NRA Archive (https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa-jisc.exe?A2=ind2302&L=ARCHIVES-NRA&P=R325890) She is also a member of the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) Good Practice Sub-Committee and is currently enrolled on the ARA Professional Registration Programme and has submitted an application for assessment.
In addition to this she has completed certifications for AgilePM Foundation and Practitioner levels in summer 2023 as well as in house project management training and has since run small projects within the Parliamentary Archives.
Promoted Inclusion and Diversity
As a core member of the Parliamentary Archives I&D Group she helped oversee the office’s I&D action plan and co-ordinate I&D initiatives across the office. One of the initiatives that came our of the action plan was the Catalogue Review Project. With this she led a group of around 25 cross-office volunteers who reviewed our catalogue for non-inclusive and harmful language in descriptions using the Cultural Heritage Terminology Network’s ‘Inclusive Terminology Glossary’ available here: https://culturalheritageterminology.co.uk/glossary/. The project reviewed over 55,000 instances of potentially harmful language in the catalogue and developed recommendations for data cleansing and catalogue enhancement to contexualise language used, and engaged in knowledge-exchange with other collections teams across Parliament.
Delivered Innovative Service
The Parliamentary Archives knew that SharePoint transfer was an issue that needed to be addressed as Parliament has moved to a predominantly cloud-based way of working and collaboration within the Microsoft 365 environment. This presented a number of challenges as it has only been within the last few years that organisations have started tackling the transfer of data that lived in the cloud. To establish the fixity and authenticity of this information for preservation we needed to develop an approach to extracting it that could be validated quantitatively and qualitatively.
Nicole has led the delivery and stakeholder engagement for this project which saw our (Digital Preservation) team collaborating with IRMS to pilot the development of a robust end-to-end process using this approach to transfer Parliament’s information of long-term value from Microsoft SharePoint to the Parliamentary Archives for permanent preservation.
She has co-authored papers on the discovery and scoping work for this, including co-presenting a lightning talk at the International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC) in Edinburgh, February 2023; writing a Brief Report based on this talk for the International Journal of Digital Curation (https://dcc.ac.uk/events/idcc24/programme) and co-authoring a paper accepted for iPres 2024 in Ghent (https://ipres2024.pubpub.org/papers-long)
As the service owner for the UK Parliament Web Archive: https://webarchive.parliament.uk/ during the transition of the Web Archive Service to The National Archives, she oversaw the knowledge transfer of the web archive’s ‘seed list’ and collections information to The National Archives (TNA) and continues to engage collaboratively with them on collections management and development.
This included rethinking how we archive Twitter accounts after changes in access to the API in 2023, and engaging with stakeholders through IRMS and communications colleagues to capture high priority accounts before the new access changes were enforced. She also developed our approach to transfer and cataloguing of https://petitons.parliament.uk which replaced our hard copy transfers of petitions.
It has been a pleasure seeing Nicole develop from a trainee with a passion for archives into a fully qualified archivist who is making such an impact both with the Parliamentary Archives and across our professional sector and I look forward to what she achieves next.
Supporting Evidence
Nominated by Emily Chen, Senior Archivist (Digital Preservation)