A fascinating report on RunCoCo’s Oxford meeting on 5 May, has been written by Chris Batt OBE, one of the speakers: ChB:PhD.

How do you feel about crowdsourcing, co-creation and community engagement? Does the thought of involving outside folks in collection building and knowledge creation sound to you like the end of civilization as we know it or a liberating opportunity to build relationships that give new meaning to your service mission?
Chris Batt opens with this challenge

Chris spoke at the RunCoCo meeting on the subjects of his 2009 report Digitisation, Curation and Two-Way Engagement, and his blog post reflects on this but also the discussions and feelings expressed on the day by the delegates, most of whom were from the University of Oxford.

Last week’s RunCoCo event was one of a number of conferences recently attended where museum, library and archive professionals have reported on engagement projects and not a few, while, relishing the chance to work with communities, reflected on what might be the longer term implications for their institutions and their own professional roles. That was the undercurrent I sensed at RunCoCo. Sustaining engagement long-term will require shifts in how things are done, empowering citizens through a sense of ownership…
Chris Batt

We have our work cut out, time to roll up RunCoCo’s sleeves!