GENERAL INFORMATION

Title of Dataset: 
Materiality matters: exploring how archivists engage with, and represent, textile pattern books digitally.

Author: Alison Spence
ORCID: 0000-0002-5483-2342
Institution: University of Glasgow

Qualitative data was collected as part of a doctoral research project to explore the qualities and evidential value of textile industry pattern books as material artefacts, as well as archivists' engagement with the material properties of archives. 

The project consisted of four strands:  
1) Examination of historic textile industry pattern books to evaluate their material qualities and evidential value.
2) Semi-structured interviews with staff at five heritage organisations to develop case studies exploring cataloguing, digitisation, materiality and access. 
3) Survey to explore users' experiences of discovering and using textile pattern books in their research.
4) Analysis of modes of delivering digital access in the archive sector, and associated issues.

Date of data collection: 2021-2024
 

SHARING/ACCESS INFORMATION

License: CC-BY licence on open data
Links to publication that cite or use the data: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/85223/ , https://eprints.gla.ac.uk/329321/ .


DATA & FILE OVERVIEW

Folder one, labelled Archive collections analysis, contains files relating to the researcher's physical study and analysis of documents in three textile archive collections.  File names include the collection/item reference number assigned by the collections' custodians. 

Folder one contents:
- a spreadsheet collating notes on two collections relating to Milton printworks and Patrick Mitchell (.xlsx format), namely the Milton printworks collection (Ref: MSS.17961-17997), National Library Scotland, and Napier collection (DC90), Scottish Business Archive, University of Glasgow. 
- notes on documents in the Mitchell section of the Napier collection (DC90/7) as above (.pdf format).
- notes on documents in the David Ligat & Sons Ltd. collection (Ref: UGD093), Scottish Business Archive (.pdf format). 

Folder two, labelled Institutional case studies, contains files relating to interviews conducted with heritage professionals to develop the institutional case studies. The institutions which participated were the National Library of Scotland, Natural History Museum, Southwark Archives, Sunny Bank Mills and University of Glasgow. The data was analysed using a thematic analysis methodology.

Folder two contents:
- master list of interview questions (.pdf format).
- list of the thematic codes developed as part of the analysis of the data (.pdf format).

Folder three, labelled Survey questionnaire, contains files relating to the user survey.  The data was collected through an online questionnaire.  

Folder three contents:

- copy of the questionnaire (.pdf format). 
- processed version of the data obtained (.xlsx format).

A copy of the project abstract (.pdf format) included in the thesis is also supplied to provide background information and context for the data.