Can you run a community collection where there is little sense of community? The Strandlines Digital Communities is a new project that is determined to do just that. The focus of the project is the Strand, one of the most famous streets in London, an area which the project suggests “… has at present little active sense of community”.  The project will use its interactive website and a programme of activities to reach out to the people who live and work along the famous street  and invite them to contribute with their stories and reflections.

This Work, The Cole Hole, by Clare Brant is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.

Strandlines Digital Communities will be working with life-writing “a broad and creative field which explores personal life stories, and how they intersect with accounts of the lives of others” (project website). The project will also digitise material from local archives and interview local residents and staff at King’s College. The material will be used to create an online resource where life on the Strand over the past 200 years is documented.

The project will create an online, interactive resource documenting life and work on the Strand over the past 200 years, through stories, audio and photographs. It will combine material taken from the College’s own archive, Westminster City Archives and elsewhere with people’s own photographs and memories, captured through a grassroots digitisation project. (King’s College News Highlights, 18 Aug. 2010)

A further interesting feature of the Strandlines Digital Communities is how it is working with different communities with connections to the area. The project is based at King’s College London and involves different departments there. It also has partners outside the academic community, such as the City of Westminster Archives Centre, the charity Age UK Westminster, and local residents association Odhams Walk Resident Management Ltd. Ben Showers, programme manager at JISC, comments:

“We urgently need to engage communities with the research going on in universities and colleges to ensure that we really maximise these publicly funded resources and findings.  … While the Strandlines project is engaging a community in the heart of London, the approach it uses will form a valuable model for similar work across the UK.” (King’s College News Highlights, 18 Aug. 2010)

The Strandlines Digital Community project is part of a larger venture, ‘Strandlines’, a project aiming to “explore lives on the Strand – past, present and creative”. The pilot project is one of eleven projects funded by JISC under its Developing community content call. A list of all the projects, with links to their websites or project descriptions, is available on the RunCoCo website.