a) After using the British Library Archival Sound Recordings website, an FE teacher commented: “The realism of it [interviews with photographers included on the site] inspired students and encouraged them to source other material beyond Google searches. It also placed the photographs in context, which you don’t get from Google.”
b) A teacher who incorporated digitised material from the First World War Poetry Digital Archive in the classroom found that: “Most students seem to find online material far more appealing than printed material, but the content of web sites is often less than academic. It’s very good to be able to refer to students to a web site of such quality from a sound academic source.”
c) A Lecturer in Historical Geography, who used the Histpop: Online Historical Population Reports website in second and third year undergraduate courses, which led to several high quality Final Year dissertations, noted how: “Histpop made it possible to do a completely different project [at undergraduate level]… It allows them [the students] to start using primary sources and do some basic research, which otherwise they wouldn’t be able to do.”
d) More recently, the University of East London devised a new course, Performing the Archive, based on digitised collections on the Online Theatre History Archive website, which they developed with a number of partners as part of the CEDAR project.