It’s academic conference season. You know what you are going to say – but how do you coach someone else to deliver your message? This post looks at some of the conferences we’ve spoken at and what RunCoCo‘s message has been.

Delegates socialise and network at the Belgian Comic Strip Centre during ECEI10

I’ve been privileged to speak about the work of RunCoCo at a number of conferences in September. For example:

• “Rare But Not Old” a CILIP special group meeting in Lancaster- slides available from the project website CILIP presentation
• the EU Congress on E Inclusion 2010 “Delivering Digital Europe in Public Libraries” in Brussels – (a meeting which I will report back on in more detail) – slides available from the project website, EU Congress presentation
• our director spoke about RunCoCo at “IT and Community Collections”, the 45th Digital Libraries Conference, Sudak, Ukraine, June 2010 – the main digital libraries conference held in the Ukraine/Russia each year
• and our team has attended a number of other meetings as delegates (like Citizen Cyberscience) which we try to report back on, in this blog
• We’re speaking at others in October and November in the UK and in Spain, as well as running RunCoCo’s sustainability workshop in Leeds.

Colleagues from other services, even, have been in touch so they can talk about RunCoCo. For example, Sarah Fahmy, of JISC Strategic Content Alliance (of which RunCoCo’s parent department is an affiliate partner) is attending the International Culturemondo Roundtable “Bringing Practice into Digital Cultural Policy” this weekend in Amsterdam.

6th International Culturemondo Roundtable "Bringing Practice into Digital Cultural Policy", Saturday 25th September 2010 Trouwgebouw, Amsterdam

Coaching someone else really focuses the message you want them to deliver. Sarah asked – “what are the pain points from the Great War Archive?” This is not something I have thought of before.

“What are the pain points from the Great War Archive?”

At ECEI10 Susan Hazan (Curator of New Media, Israel Museum, Jerusalem) mentioned that people can remember only three things that you tell them. I’m not certain of the truth in that, but just in case, here are four (yes, I’m risking that the reader will pick and choose their own three out of the four!) ‘bullet points’ from my recent presentations about the work of RunCoCo and The Great War Archive.

RunCoCo’s crowdsourcing lessons from The Great War Archive:

1. Engagement takes significant time and resources on the part of the institution, (the project team). It is not effortless;
2. If you do this kind of project well you can tap into public enthusiasm, and the benefits include economies of scale and economies because professional processes (like digitisation/cataloguing/tagging or classification) are carried out by the public. E.g. evidence from Galaxy Zoo and The Great War Archive contributed to the findings of Chris Batt Consulting which directs us towards two-way engagement. Chris has explained this at some of RunCoCo’s events;
3. Third-party services like Flickr are an excellent way to collect material and build a community of interest e.g. The Great War Archive Flickr Group – however they’re not a solution for digital preservation;
4. In all this there is a blurring between the professional and the amateur. The wealth of information in the collective public knowledge base is astounding, and demonstrates that many so-called “amateurs”, who are not necessarily part of academia, have a lot to contribute. The comments and discussions on the Flickr site alone demonstrates the depth of knowledge out there that can be tapped into.
5. Woruldhord… (OK, I even lied about the 4 bullet points) …I always end with mention of the project currently collecting teaching and learning material about the Anglo-Saxons. Their public collection ends on the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, October 14.

“OK, I even lied about the 4 bullet points!”

To return to the initial meeting which prompted this post, from the conference website it looks like remote attendance at Culturemondo is still possible tomorrow if you are interested in “an intensive, practical and user-focussed approach to address the question – How can we ensure that culture and heritage policies are linked to digital policies and strategies?” This includes the interesting session on Crowd Sourcing Problems about which Sarah from JISC SCA contacted RunCoCo.