This is the first post to the official blog of RunCoCo – a project funded by JISC which helps you run your own community collection project. Contact RunCoCo.

Target audience: The blog will be most relevant to staff in UK universities and colleges, and museums, libraries and archives, as well as other groups who are interested in collecting digital items from your community, or encouraging the public to tag or comment on an existing digital collection.

Scope of the blog: The project is based at the The Learning Technologies Group (LTG) of the Oxford University Computing Services (OUCS). We use this blog to post news about the RunCoCo project, details of our workshops and training, our views and reviews about digitisation and users tagging and commenting on existing digital collections, and also to support what we hope will be a growing community of interest and community of practice of teams around the UK running community collections to support higher education and research. Postings will be about the following topics:

• RunCoCo News – about the project (including our monthly project updates), about our training workshops, as well as updates from events and organisations we are involved with.
• Case Studies – sharing best practice about community collections, e.g. how you can get the most out of the Internet, news about the project’s own freely-available open-source community collection software called CoCoCo, and discussion of the methods of engaging with the public like social networks (Twitter, Facebook etc.)
• Digitisation – news about digitisation relevant to community collections.

We will also post here news about Project Woruldhord. This exemplar community collection will be running at the English Faculty in Oxford to trial RunCoCo’s training and documentation to mobilize the public and academics to contribute material they hold related to the teaching or research of British history from 450AD-1066AD (known as the early English Medieval or the Anglo-Saxon period), covering language, literature, archaeology, architecture, and art.

Get involved

We welcome comments, particularly from those within the education and research communities.

Please use this blog to tell us your views and to share recommended sites and examples with the rest of us, so that we can all learn more about how to run our community collections.

For the benefit of all our readers, please keep your comments constructive, polite and respectful. Comments will be monitored, to maintain the scholarly and professional tone we wish for this blog.