Speaking today at the International Blended Learning Conference, University of Hertfordshire. (You may follow this on Twitter #iblc10). Presentation slides will be made available soon. Here’s the abstract:

“Community Collections: Of the people, for the people, by the people.
You may be aware of TV programmes such as James May’s Toy Stories and the Antiques Roadshow. James May mobilizes the public to celebrate Britain’s best loved toys and work together to create new projects on a massive scale. The Antiques Roadshow invites people to bring their hidden treasures to be identified and valued. How can these ways of working be utilised in a learning context?
Building on our experience and success of The Great War Archive and similar projects such as Galaxy Zoo, this presentation will introduce the concept of the Community Collection.
Through community collection projects the public are engaged directly in the digitisation lifecycle by capturing and cataloguing objects they hold or have ready access to, tapping into the concept of mass amateur digitisation. The Great War Archive initiative asked the public to contribute items they held originating from the Great War. They could do this in one of two ways: Via a website powered by the CoCoCo software (open source system developed by the project and now freely available), or through a series of ‘roadshows’ [PDF 11Mb of presentation about this] held around the country where people brought their items to the team who digitised them on the spot. The project resulted in c. 6,500 items being collected in the space of 16 weeks at a fraction of the cost of standard digitisation processes.
We will discuss how these collections can be supported and funded; the willingness of the public to become part of University research projects; the willingness of the public to openly share content and how, when digitisation is spread out across the community and not done entirely by the host institution, the resulting collection can be used, reused and cost effective.
We will report on the many teacher workshops and evaluations which attest to the community collection’s value as a learning resource for schools, FE and HE.”