RunCoCo is a new project based at the University of Oxford which will share online best practice and experience of running in 2008 a successful community contributed collection of digital objects, The Great War Archive, and offer free training and support to others trying to engage with the public. This blog post by project manager, Alun Edwards, explains some of the background to RunCoCo and community collections. Future posts will look at what RunCoCo will do in 2010.
Many museums and archives are engaging with the public online. For example, the First World War Poetry Digital Archive digitisation project (based at the University of Oxford) gained momentum from: Facebook; Blogger and Twitter; YouTube; podcasting on iTunes-U; Amazon Associates; photo-sharing on Flickr; online Pathway Creation tool (developed by Oxford University); plotting manuscript and biographical datasets on an interactive First World War timeline; using MyIntute to manage and display links to Internet resources; VUE mind-maps (developed at Tufts University); supporting a Google Group to maintain and foster discussions which have carried on since the project started in the 1990s; and most recently an acclaimed reconstruction of the Western Front in Second Life.
A soldier with a Christmas Pudding, France, 17th December 1917. One of hundreds of images, films and audio clips from the Imperial War Museum which are made available on the First World War Poetry Digital Archive, to put the poetry into context.
Mass digitisation?
The image below is an example of the rare manuscripts of English poets that the First World War Poetry Digital Archive‘s standard digitisation enterprise focussed on capturing. Professional photography was undertaken to very high standards by the respositories themselves, and cataloguing was done by the project’s experts.
Isaac Rosenberg's design for a Christmas card including poem, drawn whilst serving in the trenches in 1917.
Previous significant digitisation initiatives by leading cultural heritage institutions involving the public have included Our Wales (by the National Library of Wales) and WW2 People’s War by the BBC. However, the First World War Poetry Digital Archive‘s community contributed collection The Great War Archive broke new ground in terms of digitisation. During the four month initiative in 2008 not only did the public contribute over 6,500 photographs of items they held originating from the First World War, they even completed the metadata (brief catalogue record) for each item when it was submitted online.
Comforts Tin and Contents (photograph and metadata submitted to The Great War Archive by the contributor). These tins were a present sent to all the troops from the then Princess Mary, who like others, thought the war would be over by Christmas 1914.
The costing and other strategies and processes behind The Great War Archive are explained in detail in an article in EDUCAUSE Quarterly If You Build It, They Will Scan: Oxford University’s Exploration of Community Collections, written by the project’s managers Dr Stuart Lee and Kate Lindsay.
The Great War Archive was highly commended at the Times Higher Educational Awards 2008 for 'Outstanding ICT Initiative'.
Flickr photo sharing
The Great War Archive continues to collect digital artefacts from the public on the Flickr photo-sharing website. Flickr is being used by many archives, museums and art galleries to expose items from their collections and for users to share photos of their visit. These include, for example, the V&A, Kew Gardens, Wessex Archaeology, and the National Museums of Scotland.
German Soldiers Celebrating Christmas 1916, submitted to The Great War Archive Flickr Group. This is representative of the international nature of the Flickr pool, whereas the 6,500 items in the Great War Archive are predominantly British.
Amateur metadata?
The Great War Archive showed that the public will add simple metadata if they are interested enough in the objects, and the Flickr pool shows the high quality of commentary and notes provided by enthusiasts – and their willingness to share this knowledge with others.
Some innovative projects have even started introducing games to their digital resources in order to encourage the public to enhance their metadata, as explained by Alastair Dunning in ‘Making metadata fun’ in the JISC Digitisation blog.
The Galaxy Zoo astronomy site has a game which allows the public to help suggest how galaxy collision and mergers took place.
An “unusual occurrence of metadata and fun in the same sentence!” Ben Showers, a JISC programme manager
RunCoCo – How to Run a Community Collection Project
The activities and results of The Great War Archive has led its funder, the JISC digitisation programme, to further explore the concept of community collections. These are defined as ‘digital resources that are created or enhanced by both user groups inside and outwith traditional academic audiences’. The report by Chris Batt Consulting, Digitisation, Curation and Two-Way Engagement looked at some of the key strategic issues in creating and curating under such a model. The JISC have released funding (in the Developing Community Content call) to projects undertaking the development of community content (up to £75k per project) for:
- Strand A. Rapid Innovation – Rapid enhancement of existing digital resources to provide for greater engagement with previously untapped audiences
- Strand B. Content development – Building new digital collections, or significant extending existing collections, via community engagement
The closing date for proposals will probably be 8th February 2010.
“This is a fantastic recognition of the impact of the Great War Archive, and we look forward to seeing the outcomes – there are so many possibilities!” Kate Lindsay, University of Oxford, Project Manager of the First World War Poetry Archive and Principal Investigator for RunCoCo
However, you should note that the JISC have frozen all current and future JISC calls under its capital programme. Further information about the funding freeze is available at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/Home/news/stories/2010/01/funding.aspx. This includes the Community Content call mentioned above.
The team at the University of Oxford will now use the success of The Great War Archive in this follow-on project, RunCoCo: Running a Community Collection. The RunCoCo project will share and establish best practice in the development of community collections, (and will diseminate the open source software we developed), to show that such initiatives can be undertaken by smaller individual units, libraries, museums, and archives; and also with different target audiences. Potential applicants for the community collection funding may also be interested in RunCoCo‘s training workshops later in 2010. If you are thinking about running a community collection the RunCoCo team would like to hear from you.
Image credits:
- Christmas on the Front. This item is from The First World War Poetry Digital Archive, University of Oxford (www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit); © Imperial War Museum Photographic Archive
- Pozieres, by Isaac Rosenberg. This item is from The First World War Poetry Digital Archive, University of Oxford (www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit); © The British Library / The Isaac Rosenberg Literary Estate
- Princess Mary Christmas Fund Gift Tin with Contents. This item is from The Great War Archive, University of Oxford (www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/gwa); © Lewis Trickey
- WWI German Soldiers Celebrate Christmas 1916, from a photo on Flickr reproduced with the kind permission of Sunny Brook, all rights reserved.
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