Summary
Mine of Information was a cross-sectoral project led by the University of Wales Swansea and funded by the Research Support Libraries Programme. It ran from 2000 to 2002.  The aims of the project were to improve access to research resources relating to the South Wales Coalfield by creating online catalogue records for archives and printed books located in partner institutions, holding the records in EAD and MARC databases at the University of Wales Swansea, and enabling cross-searching of these by the end-user via the Web.

Background
The South Wales Coalfield is the largest continuous coalfield in Britain, covering much of the former counties of Mid and West Glamorgan, Gwent, Eastern Dyfed and southern Powys. The development and history of the coalfield is an important area of research in its own right, but it also demonstrates the far-reaching effects of rapid industrialisation, nationalisation and later denationalisation, and affords valuable comparisons with other coalfields in the UK and abroad. The development of the coalfield reflects developments in Wales as a whole, and may be regarded as a microcosm of the changing historical, economic and political circumstances of the Welsh nation. 

Project objectives
· Improve the quality and quantity of research on the South Wales Coalfield by helping researchers in all sectors to identify materials of interest using the Internet.
· Relate this material to the wider context of the development of the coal mining industry in this century.
· Increase knowledge of material held outside partner institutions by means of a mapping exercise.
· Facilitate cross-searching of MARC (bibliographic) and EAD (archival) descriptions, evaluating the ENCompass content management system from Endeavor Information Systems Inc., along with other less costly options.

Technical information
In the Mine of Information project bid we indicated that we proposed to use the ENCompass software from Endeavor Information Systems Inc., to enable cross-searching of the MARC and EAD records created by the project. During the first year of the project we looked more closely at ENCompass, and clarified its cost with the suppliers. The product was at an exciting stage of development, and clearly appeared capable of doing far more than we had originally envisaged, particularly in terms of managing access to electronic journals and databases. However, the functionality for EAD had not yet reached a point where we felt comfortable about committing to using it for Mine of Information, and we decided on an alternative solution, given the timescale of the project.

We reviewed a number of possiblities, including TextML which is used by the Public Record Office for the Access 2 Archives project, the RSLP Collection Description Focus work, and the very relevant work being undertaken by other RSLP projects (NAHSTE and GASH in particular). Our final decision however was to make use of in-house expertise at Swansea, and develop an in-house solution using Java XML tools to convert our EAD and MARC data into XML format and store it in an SQL database. Java XML would also allow us to convert legacy data from MODES and Access.

The method uses a relational database driven by active server pages using VBscript.  There are three main elements:

The advantages were identified as follows:

• using established technology that is reliable and for which in-house expertise is available;
• operational efficiency - we could expect fast results without needing an especially powerful server;
• flexibility for importing information from other systems.

Technical update - summer 2003
When all our project staff finished their contracts at the end of 2003, we recognised that although we had catalogue records for all the collections planned for inclusion in the project, the central database was not yet in a usable state for effective end-user searching.  Established LIS staff are now continuing the work at a steady pace in order to review the various different data formats we have, and to establish a workable means of linking the various hierarchical levels within the collections.  We aim to achieve this by Christmas 2003.  The next stage will be to import each data type correctly into the database, and finally to enable end-user searching.

Please contact Alex Roberts or Martin Price for further technical information on Mine of Information.