“Open the doors and begin”: The ASPECT Parliamentary Database

Professor Derek Law

University of Strathclyde

The ASPECT Parliamentary Database, standing for Access to Scottish Parliamentary Election Candidate Materials, is a collection of ephemera relating to the elections to the new Scottish Parliament. In its digitised form it It contains a full set of over 1800 digital images of the ephemera, and a selection of machine-readable transcriptions and records for each item, searchable from multiple approaches. To this has been added the detailed election results. We have just completed the collection of the paper materials from the third Holyrood election and this will be digitised in due course.

It is difficult to remember the sense of anticipation and excitement which surrounded the first election for the new Scottish Parliament in 1999. Not only was this a historic event, but the introduction of a form of proportional representation meant a quite new kind of election which invigorated democracy and persuaded a huge variety of single interest groups and minorities to stand for election and to campaign aggressively.

Elections to the Scottish Parliament are conducted using a combination of the traditional first-past-the-post (FPTP) system and an additional member system of proportional representation, to elect a total of 129 Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs).

Each voter has two votes:

• The first vote is for a constituency representative based on the 73 UK Parliamentary constituency boundaries. These votes are counted using the first-past-the-post system.

• The second vote is for a regional member. For these purposes, Scotland is divided into eight electoral regions, each of which elects seven regional MSPs. Political parties have a numbered list of candidates in each region. The voter casts a vote for the party of their choice in their region and seats are allocated proportionally to each party.

The system produces a result much more proportional to votes cast than the traditional FPTP system, and has allowed small parties which are penalised by FPTP to gain parliamentary representation for the first time, breaking the traditional four-party model in Scotland. Six parties and one independent candidate were elected in 1999, and seven parties and three independents in 2003. The 2007 election saw a squeeze on independents for a number of reasons – although we still have a minority government.[i]

Cynics argue that the system was designed to neuter the Parliament by preventing any party from gaining a majority, but others saw it as an opportunity to encourage a wide spectrum of voices to be heard. Either way, there was a palpable sense of new beginnings, captured in Edwin Morgan’s poem commissioned for the opening of the Parliament.

At that time Strathclyde University was reviewing its archives policy. Strathclyde is, by Scottish standards a new university, being a mere 200 years old. It has no great library and archive collections, but sits three miles from an ancient university, which does. At the same time we are conscious that we build today collections in the humanities and social sciences which will be used by the researchers of the future, perhaps more than the researchers of today. It therefore made sense to focus on building collections in “modern” areas of disciplinary strength, where we would not compete with others. Politics was and is one of those disciplines.

Taking all of these elements together we decided to celebrate these first elections for 300 years by collecting election ephemera – pamphlets, posters, election addresses, mailshots and so on. An appeal was issued to all university staff to pass any electoral material they received to the Library. To our amazement, but in keeping with the sense of occasion, this proved a hugely popular project. Not only did staff send huge quantities of material to us, unprompted they contacted grannies, aunts, cousins and friends in constituencies throughout Scotland. We had expected a partial collection focused on the central belt; in practice we had an almost complete collection for the whole of Scotland. Of course we were not alone in building a collection; many others did this on a local basis. Because election literature is not covered by the legal deposit regulations, the National Library had also set up a network of libraries also trying to capture local material. The two-tier electoral system has encouraged many smaller parties to participate in the electoral process. This has increased the amount and variety of ephemera produced, and made the collection more complex, particularly given the mixture of regional and constituency level campaigning.

And so like eager schoolboys we set about a small orgy of exchanging duplicates to create a complete set of election literature.

This had proved a major undertaking, labour intensive, challenging and time-consuming. We had achieved our first objective of obtaining a set of material which we expected to be of use for scholars of the future. But as we assembled the archive it quickly became obvious that it was almost impossible to deal with it in meaningful ways. The paper archive poses a number of problems for storage, retrieval and usage. Firstly the sheer variety of shapes, sizes and types of material meant that they could easily be lost or damaged. Secondly, the individual items were too heterogeneous to be catalogued individually, but as ephemera could not readily be catalogued collectively. Thirdly, one can only file paper in a single sequence, and we chose political party. This made it almost impossible to search by candidate or constituency. Finally, the retrieval of material was inevitably very labour intensive. So although we had no doubt of the value of the collection to scholars, we were concerned over its accessibility.

By another fortunate co-incidence, the Centre for Digital Library Research is managed within the same administrative unit as the Library. It had been working on a number of digitisation projects for some time and quickly offered a neat solution to turn an interesting paper based archive into a wonderful electronic resource. Of course this digitisation project created its own problems. Acquiring permission to digitise and put material on the web from copyright holders was, for example, a non-trivial problem. Despite the fact that candidates were standing for public office, many parties – not always the smallest ones – showed a surprising ignorance of copyright law and a suspicion at having their election literature preserved for posterity. By the time we had addressed all the problems and digitised the material available over two years had passed. The next set of elections was upon us in 2003 and, encouraged by the response in 1999, we decided to repeat the call for election literature. This worked smoothly and the material was again digitised. And, of course, we have now repeated the procedure for 2007, where we are at the phase of exchanging duplicates with other libraries.

The following screenshots show how much more accessible a digital archive is than the traditional uncatalogued file boxes of paper. The Internet gives us hitherto undreamed of power to allow access from multiple entry points, to show election results, to move from constituency, to party to individual. We can show turnout and share of the vote and so on. Almost every item is hotlinked to another one, making navigation very easy. At least in part this explains the fact that each user hits a relatively large number of pages.

We had begun by collecting material for future researchers; we had digitised in the expectation of assisting present and future researcher; we have created in fact a popular national tool. Its accessibility and ready availability on the web has made it generally and easily searchable. The figures below show how the number of hits has grown on the site in general, and with each hit accessing multiple pages. Initially usage followed the monthly pattern of academic life and was in keeping with other databases used for teaching and research. There are obvious spikes at election time both in 2003 and 2007 and, curiously, during the 2005 UK national election. Clearly some of this usage comes from journalists, commentators and politicians themselves, as well as academics, but the high levels of use also imply significant popular public use. This is a source of enormous satisfaction. Not only is our substantial investment proving of public benefit; not only are we living up to our mission of being a place of useful learning; but possibly, just possibly we are enhancing the democratic process. It is not wholly fanciful to suggest that the public is looking at what our aspiring politicians promised at the last election, deciding what they actually delivered and placing their votes accordingly.

ASPECT was created to support research, without the benefit of external funding. Its very visible growth and its embedding in the Scottish political landscape are real proof, if proof were needed, that Edwin Morgan’s call for a new political engagement has been answered by many sectors of Scottish society. We have indeed opened new digital doors on our political life.

[i] . This description is taken from Williamson, A., Dawson, A. and Barton, J. ASPECT: Digital Election Ephemera to Support E-Democracy in Scotland In Proceedings of the International Conference on Politics and Information Systems: Technologies and Applications (PISTA '04) and the paper relies generally on the work produced by this team, which oversaw the project.