Weds 5 May 2010

RunCoCo will host a meeting of projects based in and around Oxford who share an interest in community contributed digitisation, crowdsourcing and community enriching of an existing collection with tags or comments.

This meeting is free of charge and open to anyone based in the University of Oxford or from the education/public sector near Oxford. Registration for this event is now open (closes 22 April 2010).

If you are interested in community collections (like The Great War Archive) or working to harness a community to enrich an existing collection with tags or comments (like Galaxy Zoo) then we would like to invite you to take part in the meeting which has a number of purposes:

• This is a chance for managers and others from community collection projects in and around Oxford to share best practice and exchange knowledge;
• This will be an opportunity for Oxford projects with some shared interests to meet face-to-face. The OUCS project, RunCoCo, will launch an online ‘community of interest’ for those involved in community collection or working to harness a community to enrich an existing collection with tags or comments. In the past OUCS has done this successfully for other subjects (like teaching First World War literature). However, these ventures have a better chance of working well when participants have met in person;
• RunCoCo will also disseminate the processes, open-source software and results of The Great War Archive, a pilot community collection project based at OUCS and the English Faculty, which ran for 3 months in 2008. RunCoCo will capture the results of any discussions from the day and use this to ensure our resources are correctly focussed on what projects need to run this kind of initiative;
• RunCoCo will highlight three training workshops we will hold during Spring-Summer 2010 to disseminate resources and software for community collection projects. We hope to encourage other community projects to present at one or more of these workshops, and to encourage newer projects like those funded under the recent JISC calls for developing community content to attend. The workshops will be free of charge and open to anyone from the education/public sector. The first is on 26 May at OUCS.

Places are limited, so please register your interest by completing our form on SurveyMonkey by 1700 on 22 April 2010. Confirmation of your place will be sent ASAP.

The meeting will be held 10.30am – 4.30pm, at OUCS, 13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX26NN. Lunch and other refreshments will be provided free-of-charge. Further details will be available soon. Email runcoco@oucs.ox.ac.uk if you would like to discuss anything about this meeting.