First World War Poetry Digital Archive - Engaging New Audiences
The First World War Poetry Digital Archive at Oxford University recently held a two day workshop for teachers and lecturers to help support the creation of resources to enhance teaching and the student experience of the poetry archive.
One of the most interesting outcomes of the workshop was the immense popularity of the Great War Archive (GWA), a Flickr community for members of the public to submit images relating to the First World War. Participants drew heavily on this broad public archive of images and personal memorabillia, all directly related to the First World War.
The manuscripts, letters and texts of the poets work was often complimented with images from the GWA which allowed the participants to explore wide thematic and subject areas, including propaganda; childrens’ literature; ‘afterwards’; and women and war. All materials were then added to the education section of the archive.
While the poetic manuscripts and correspondnce is clearly at the heart of the project, and represents one of the most comprehensive archives of first world war poetry anywhere, the GWA engages the formal poetry archive in a much wider discussion with the first world war in general, and in the experiences of families and communities who were directly, or indirectly effected by it.
Institutions are increasingly under pressure to reach out to the wider community, and are finding it an ever increasing part of their remit and conditions of funding to prevent the exclusion of certain groups.
It will be very interesting in the next few years to see how heritage institutions such as libraries, museums and archives engage in this dialogue, and to see how JISC and similarly funded projects find innovative ways to address wider participation.
The Library of Congress and Flickr
A year ago the Library of Congress asked members of the public to tag and describe two sets of approximately 3000 historic photos using Flickr, the photosharing website. The LOC reports that within the first 24 hours of the project starting Flickr recorded 1.1 million total views on the account, with 3.6 million views a week later, and have had 10.4 million views on Flickr up to October 2008. Very impressive figures indeed!
The project was able to stimulate interest not only in the images themselves, and it would appear from the report that the academic and public community were surprised by the depth of cultural and historic resources available at the library. But the project was also able to prompt interest in web 2.0 technologies and foster an interest in the library and its diverse resources and collections.
The LOC reported that the project pilot had the following outcomes:
- 10.4 million views of the photos on Flickr.
- 79% of the 4,615 photos have been made a “favorite” (i.e., are incorporated into personal Flickr collections).
- More than 15,000 Flickr members have chosen to make the Library of Congress a “contact,” creating a photostream of Library images on their own accounts.
- 7,166 comments were left on 2,873 photos by 2,562 unique Flickr accounts.
- 67,176 tags were added by 2,518 unique Flickr accounts.
- 4,548 of the 4,615 photos have at least one community-provided tag.
- Less than 25 instances of user-generated content were removed as inappropriate.
- More than 500 Prints and Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC) records have been enhanced with new information provided by the Flickr Community.
More information about the project and the full report can be found at the LOC’s Prints and Photographs reading room. There was also a very interesting article in the New York Times exploring tagging and descriptive metadata in Flickr and Wikipedia.
Using Flickr for digital resources
The East London Theatre Archive is creating an invaluable database of performing arts resources, from playbills and programmes to press cuttings and photographs. It will consist of around 15,000 digital objects, taken from East London theatres.
As an extra part of their work, they have commissioned photography of some of the theatres themselves, such as Wilton Hall, the Theatre Royal or the wonderfully named Half Moon theatre.
The team have decided to put these photos up on Flickr as an extra dissemination channel. A dedicated website is currently being built, but the team wanted to test what usage was like using a publicly available platform. Usage is currently being monitored, and the team will report back as their project progresses.