Innovative ways, sustainable means: The Archives Hub and AIM25

The Archives Hub (www.archiveshub.ac.uk) and AIM25 (www.aim25.ac.uk) provide electronic access to descriptions of thousands of unique and diverse archive collections. The Archives Hub focuses on archives for education and research right across the UK, and AIM25 represents higher education institutions, learned societies, cultural organisations and livery companies within the greater London area. Services such as these have an important role to play in investigating and implementing innovative developments. We believe in an open and flexible approach to access, something that lies at the heart of the 'Web 2.0' mindset. Archives 2.0 should, fundamentally, be about developing an open and transparent approach, based on agreed standards, that enables others to engage with us and with the data that we hold on their own terms. We are working together to explore ways of increasing interoperability between both of our services and other archive catalogues, thus facilitating the exchange and reuse of data. The Archives Hub is also moving towards a distributed model, encouraging contributors to take ownership and control of their own data, and it is working on an exciting new project with The Women's Library, investigating using Hub data for a subject-based portal. AIM25, meanwhile, has undergone a major relaunch with new descriptions, partners and Web 2.0 features in a revised interface. The addition of descriptions from the London Metropolitan Archives and National History Museum paves the way for the archives of local authorities and institutions with international reach to join the project. While content is being broadened, rigorous standards and rich and detailed indexing remain at the heart AIM25's offer to the public. AIM25 also serves as a discussion group for London archivists, who act as mediators between users and collections and whose experience serves to explore the limits of free access - between open catalogues and closed collections.