Digitisation and Community Engagement - Future JISC funding
Following the success of projects such as the University of Oxford’s Great War Archive, JISC have continued exploration into the concept of community collections, that is digital resources that are created or enhanced by both user groups inside and outwith traditional academic audiences.
1914 Christmas ‘Comforts tin’ and card, from the Great War Archive
This was followed up the report by Chris Batt Consulting, Digitisation, Curation and Two-Way Engagement, which looked at some of the key strategic issues in creating and curating under such a model.
JISC will be continuing this work by publishing a call for projects undertaking the development of community content. It will be a joint call between the JISC Digitisation & eContent, and the Business and Community Programmes. Around £400,000 will be made available, for funding projects up to £75k each.
There will be two strands. Details are also on the JISC roadmap.
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 call will be published in December 2009, with a closing date for proposals likely to be the very end of January 2010.
Potential applicants may also be interested in the follow on project by the Great War Archive team at the University of Oxford. Entitled RunCoCo, the project will be helping to share and establish best practice in the development of community collections.
Twitter and Digitisation Projects
Many digitisation projects have an interest in (or feel that they should be) engaging with social networking and communication tools.
Many projects are tempted to automatically adopt the use of sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, LinkedIn, as well as share information through Flickr, Vimeo, You Tube, Second Life, Digg, StumbleUpon, Google Groups…etc….
But with so many different tools and sites out there, and with the different range of projects and outputs that digitisation produces, it can be difficult to find the tools that will really work for your project.
It is important that time is spent on using the tools that help maximise the aims and objectives of the project itself. Resources are often limited meaning that participating in Web 2.0 simply for the sake of it is not a viable option.
There might be a variety of ways to assess the use of a particular tool or site to a project, but one way would be to create a chart to plot the use of a resource against the aims and objectives of the project.
I have created a very simplistic example of what such a chart might look like.
Examples of some recent projects that have sucessfully used Twitter for their project are:
- First World War Digital Poetry Archive - Have used a range of social networking sites very effectively including Facebook and Twitter.
- East London Lives - Although this project only has a holding website, they have been able to engage a wide audience of interested followers with Twitter and Flickr.
- Serving Soldier - Again this is a young project, but have successfully used Twitter as a way to highlight interesting parts of their collection, and engage interested communities. They have also been very strong bloggers.
Like many social networking sites, Twitter in particular is an excellent way for projects to highlight new collections they have digitised, or recently made available online.
It is also a wonderful way to create a ‘count down’ to the launch of a website or new online presence. Twitter also offers projects a unique way to ask for help, get feedback and call upon a vast and interested community of possible users.
Most important of all, it is fast and demands a limit on the amount of time and input it asks of you!
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.