The RunCoCo project began this month. We’re going to train other institutions in the experiences of The Great War Archive, part of the First World War Poetry Digital Archive, and show them how they can replicate the process for community collections in their own research areas. We’ll use this blog to let you know about our training documentation and workshops.
In January we have…
Project Management
- written a detailed project plan and work-package plans and submitted these to the JISC programme manager and our University of Oxford department management. These documents will be available to read on our project website when it’s ready. Initial response has been positive, with some interesting challenges to the assumptions one can make when immersed in the necessary paperwork of project start-up!
- started to recruit a project officer
Dissemination
- started to set-up our project website which is being designed by the Oxford University Web Design Consultancy;
- set-up this project blog using WordPress;
- set-up a Twitter account to start two-way conversations with anyone interested in crowd-sourcing, community involvement and digitisation. Please follow us!
- set-up an automated help-desk (using Request Tracker RT software) to assist the project team to communicate effectively with users (e.g. to answer email enquiries);
- set-up a Delicious account to let us show you links to interesting material online. There’s an RSS feed on the right side of this blog displaying the latest additions to the RunCoCo Delicious account, and you can subscribe to that Web feed;
- talked on the phone to a few academics planning to submit proposals for funding from the JISC Developing Community Content call who are concerned about the current funding freeze http://www.jisc.ac.uk/Home/news/stories/2010/01/funding.aspx.
Training
- attended an excellent seminar at the JISC offices about how to communicate better with our internal stakeholders;
In addition, I’ve been frustrated by the UK’s snow and ice and seasonal illness – as well as preparing to move in to an office with our P.I. – losing a couple of days work, which in general I’ve caught up at weekends. We’ve also had some interesting diversions. This month this included going to a meeting in Richmond of a new consortium investigating a bid for EU funds as part of the enhancement (with user-generated content) of the Europeana online service – (more of that in another blog post) – there I presented the findings of The Great War Archive and explained how this has fed into RunCoCo, and I also learned about some fascinating digital story-telling projects.
Next month we will…
- advertise for a Project Officer to help us organise the 4 free training workshops to be held in Oxford and around the UK;
- start to plan for the exemplar project which will run a community collection based around the study and teaching of Anglo-Saxon history and literature and language;
- revise detailed project plan and work-package plans in response to requirements of JISC or the University of Oxford;
- complete website design and publicise website and blogs;
- start further development of the open-source CoCoCo software which facilitates the online collection of digital objects.