Following on from the award of the resource discovery scholarships, participants from six HEIs have now completed the pilot training programme.
Institute off Education, University College London
Museum of English Rural Life, University of Reading
Museum of Design and Architecture, Middlesex University
Special Collections, Queen’s College Belfast
Special Collections and National Fairground Archive, University of Sheffield
University of West London
Through a mix of webinars, online case studies from experts, and two day-long face-to-face workshops, participants were shown a variety of techniques and strategies to improve resource discovery for online digitized collections. Discussions among participants ranged from identifying the social media strategy that best suits their audiences, copyright issues around the posting of materials on platforms such as Flickr, Instagram, Wikipedia or Wikimedia Commons, the use of webmaster tools to track the impact of resources on the web, and the implementation of the Balanced Value Impact Model, developed by Simon Tanner at King’s College London (2012), as a means of strategically assessing resource discovery issues within organisations.
Discussions and workshops were lively, and all participants left the training with ideas on how to practically implement guidance from the sessions within their organisations. Case studies demonstrating their plans, and the intended impact on their collections, will soon be published, with updates to outcomes expected in spring 2016.
Feedback from all of the participants has allowed us to refine the resource discovery training package. The next set of sessions has been confirmed for November 3rd to December 1st, 2015. Details on registration will soon be available.
