THE SPP-ICA SPANISH GROUP’S EXPERIENCE WITH SOCIAL NETWORKS Paloma Vaquero Lorenzo Archivo de las Cortes de Castilla y León

1. INTRO A few months ago, when I started working on this presentation, I went for a trip to Simancas, a small town in Valladolid where one of the National Archives of Spain is located. The National Archive of Simancas was founded 475 years ago, and built in the famous castle of Simancas, built out of large stone blocks.

When walking around the National Archive of Simancas I started to imagine how it must have been for the very first archivists to work there, and I realised how much the way we work has changed over the past five centuries. We have moved from bundles into the digital era, but the aim of preserving documents and the possibility to share information continue to be as present today as in the times of King Philip II (the second). In this digital era, the diffusion of information is not only an option but a necessity for archives. 1

During this presentation, I will show you how we use our blog as a tool for standardisation and homogenisation of the archive work at the Parliamentary Archives in Spain. I will talk about its rationale, its objectives and the content of our blog, as well as challenges regarding archiving the blog as a digital document.

2. A BLOG – WHY? Today, in our society, the social networks are positioned like tools with great power of diffusion. We can communicate free and immediately with people who are located anywhere in the world. The social networks is a wellconsolidated communication system in our society, and trough these networks individuals, groups and institutions can inform and spread information to a certain audience. The SPP-ICA Spanish Group, whom I represent as the President in this Conference, has been meeting during twenty years in different Parliaments of Spain. The Group´s fundamental objective is the standardisation and homologation of professional criteria for our archives in the implementation of national and international regulations. We are doing this with the main purpose of facilitating the daily tasks of parliamentarians, ensuring the citizen´s access to this activity and preserving the historical memory of our institutions for the future. 2.1. AIMS/OBJECTIVES In 2009, we organised the annual meeting in our Parliament, in the Regional Assembly of Castile and Leon. At this meeting, we wanted to take advantage of the rise of social networks in order to spread our work. Therefore we introduced social media in these annual meetings. We saw that in other areas of archives, such as personal archives or general archives, the use of social networks was present in form of blogs, web pages and Facebook and among others. However, for Parliamentary Archives we didn’t see the same use, so we wanted to seize the opportunity to share information of our parliamentary archives trough a blog. We set ourselves a main objective; the dissemination of our work and documents. We wanted it to be easy to consult these documents for the Spanish Group, archivists, and other professionals in the sector. In this way, we 2

contribute to the archival sector with our professional view, by offering useful and authoritative information through quality content, and motivating to external collaboration. 2.2. CHARACTERISTICS With these objectives, we eventually decided to use a digital communication tool that was easy to use, intuitive and that provided an immediate possibility to share news. Therefore, we decided to create a blog. With the blog we are able to share news about our work immediately, as well as it allows us to store content, through links, at another digital repository, such as Google Docs. The characteristics that we were looking for for our blog, were: Easy to use, Immediacy, Free, Hypermedia, and Searchable. Other characteristics, such as user management and permissions, design flexibility, or privacy with sensitive information, were not that necessary for us. Therefore, a free and user-friendly tool was the fundamental conditions for us. The best option that we found was a blog server, and not a Content Management System (CMS).

3. THE BLOG OF THE PARLIAMENTARY ARCHIVES So this is how our blog was born - the blog of the Parliamentary Archives. Regarding hosting solutions, we chose the free solution that Blogger provides. This solution is one of the most popular together with Wordpress, and it has a lot of users worldwide. Blogger, which is the Blog platform of Google, is very user-friendly, it’s easy to customise the blog, it enables us to integrate different kinds of content, it’s free, fast, without any advertising, and in Spain Blogger has many users. Additionally, the blog is easy to access from any operating system, including mobile devices. The blog, as well as all documents and content stored on the blog, is written in Spanish. 3.1. STRUCTURE Now, I’m going to show you our blog http://archivosparlamentarios.blogspot.com.es/

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While entering our blog, the first I want to comment on, is the structure of this page. At the top of the page, you’ll see our banner with our logo, as we identify ourselves, the Spanish Group of Parliamentary Archives. Then you’ll see the main body of the page, where we have the main menu with different under-menus located by tabs, and a sidebar at the right. The sidebar includes the following elements: “A Welcome page”, links to social media, different labels organising the content, a blog archive, a subscription option and the counter of page visitors. 3.2. THE INFORMATION The central information is structured in four tabs: News, Other articles, Working documents from the Group, and Internal Regulations. In the first tab from left, we find the NEWS section. The posts appear ordered by date, and we’ll find the newest at the top. All the news that we upload on the blog are related to our work with parliamentary archives. For example, we can find news about our archives published in media, notifications of internships, or announcements about courses or meetings. The next tab is called OTHER ARTICLES. Here, we have included articles that colleagues of the Group have published, due to their desire of sharing the work that is being done at the parliamentary archives. 4

The tab at the very right, INTERNAL REGULATIONS, has recently been created. In this section, we have collected and saved all kinds of regulations that have been published in our Parliaments and that could affect us in any of our tasks that we are to undertake.

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3.3. WORKING DOCUMENTS 3.3.1. THE CLASSIFICATION TABLE The last section I will talk about, and more in detail, is the third tab: the WORKING DOCUMENTS OF THE GROUP. Here we have all the communications that have been presented in the different annual meetings, such as working documents approved by the Group, which now serve as technical instruments for our daily work.

All the documents that we have allocated on our blog, are available as a PDF format to be downloaded. In first place, we have the working documents of the Group. Here I can show you an example of the model of the classification table of a parliamentary institution. All the documents that we have allocated on our blog, are available as a PDF format to be downloaded, like this. Our institutions have two principal functions; the parliamentary activity and the administrative activity. The classification table is therefore divided by these two

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functions, so that each Parliament can use it as a basis when working on their own documents. 3.3.2. SERIES OF DOCUMENTS/STANDARDIZED DOCUMENT ASSESSMENT RECORD Among other working documents of the Group that we have uploaded to our blog, we find the standardised document assessment record. For us, the process of selecting series of documents to either be conserved or eliminated, is one of the principal tasks of an archivist. It’s necessary to make a profound and rigorous study of the documentation, in a way that allows the Committee on Appraisal to have all the information available to approve the proposal made by the archive. Due to this motive, we are interested in making a model that suits all the parliamentary archives in order to carry out this important task. This model is adapted to the different fields of the General International Standard Archival Description, ISAD (G), like other archives have done. 3.3.3. REGULATIONS Going back to this section of the blog, the working documents, you’ll see that we have included the General Guidelines for writing the regulations of the Parliamentary Archives, which were approved in 2004. Everyone here are probably familiar with these regulations, and in our case, they have helped us a lot in order to develop our own regulations. 3.3.4. OTHER DOCUMENTS With all these working documents, we wanted to incorporate a whole series of presentations, communications and papers that we have been presenting at annual meetings. The documents are grouped by the annual meetings in which they were presented. As I have shown you the content of our blog, I would say that we believe that this communication tool is the most suitable for sharing all the work that we are doing. Additionally, it might serve as a basis for other professionals in their daily management of archives.

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4. OTHER SOCIAL NETWORKS Besides from having this Blog, we wanted to share our work in other social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, due to their great number of users. On Facebook, we created a page in order to share news uploaded on our blog. Our intention with Facebook was to reach a bigger audience and make our blog more visible, but we early saw that Facebook was not a very agile or suitable tool for making people aware of our work. Therefore, Facebook is the social media we use the least.

We soon found out that Twitter was the tool that gave us most possibilities to share our daily work. Twitter is continuing to be the place where people seek immediate information and news, and where professionals from different sectors communicate with each other, even though the written communication is reduced to 140 characters. In 2011, we created our Twitter profile, with the username: @sppica https://twitter.com/sppica 8

Our profile has more than 600 followers, of which most are professionals and students in the area of document management. On Twitter you can find a lot of information about our sector, and there are a lot of professionals who have their own Twitter profile. Therefore, we can easily catch up on the latest news and topics about document management and archives. Our intention, just like with the blog, was to fill the existing gap of information about parliamentary archives, and in this way use Twitter to spread information and our work.

5. WEB ARCHIVING During the past years, the use of these social networks has provided us with another interesting challenge: How can we archive a web page? The user experience that we have obtained working with social media, such as Twitter, can be very useful for us in the future work of archiving web pages.

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Archiving web pages is still a pending subject to be implemented in the archives of Spanish Parliaments. The purpose of having a WEB ARCHIVE is to preserve and disseminate digital information and content for future generations. In order to do so, we have to decide WHAT, HOW and WHERE digital content should be archived. In Spain, the distinction in the different work areas between the library and its librarians and the archives and its archivists, is very clear. In 2009, the National Library of Spain created the Archive of the Spanish Web in order to preserve and facilitate future access to all Spanish content published online. The regulations that made it possible for the National Library of Spain to collect all this content came as a result of the approval by the Royal Decree 635/2015 which regulates the legal deposit of online publications. From my point of view, there might be a conflict of interest between Spanish libraries and archives by assuming the National Library of Spain work that has already been realised by archivists, such as the processing and managing of documents. This might will be a problem of competence in a short time, a problem that in my personal opinion will depend on the technological solutions that each involved departments holds. If the library has an application that supports web archiving, I have no doubt that the responsibility will be given to the libraries. If archiving solutions are moving towards web archiving and offering new solutions for these challenges, the archivists will be the ones who continue to manage documents, the work we have always been doing…Being archiving bundles (in the past) or archiving web pages (in the future… or now). I hope that this presentation has given you some examples of channels that we use to share the work of Parliamentary Archives, and I hope that I have given you a brief overview of some of the work that the Spanish Group of Parliamentary Archives in this Section has been doing over the last 20 years.

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