How to run a community collection online
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Presentació d'Alun Edwards (University of Oxford) a les jornades "Biblioteques patrimonials: conservant el futur, construint el passat" organitzades per la Biblioteca de l’Ateneu Barcelonès el 24 de novembre de 2010
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How to run a community collection online
- 1. How to run a community collection onlineAlun Edwards, University of Oxford: RunCoCo
- 2. Matchbox submitted to The Great War Archive George Cavan was a Company Sergeant Major in the Glasgow Highlanders He lived with his family, his wife Jean and 3 daughters, in the Drill Hall in Carluke, Scotland. This item is from The Great War Archive, University of Oxford (www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/gwa); © MAUREEN ROGERS While away at training camp the orders came through to dispatch to France. The train he was on with his troops went through his home station but did not stop there Website: www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/gwa
- 3. George threw out onto the platform a matchbox containing a note to his family On one side: the name of his wife and on the other: his message Someone picked up the matchbox and delivered it to the family This item is from The Great War Archive, University of Oxford (www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/gwa); © MAUREEN ROGERS George Cavan was killed just a few days after arriving at the front in France on the 13th April, 1918. He lies in an unmarked grave but is commemorated on the Ploegsteert Memorial. Website: www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/gwa
- 7. links to specific poems
- 9. Text as included in letters etc.
- 11. Share in social media
- 16. The Great War Archive In 2008 the University of Oxford used the general public to build on a freely-available, online archive of the manuscripts of many of the British poets from the First World War They contributed to a community collection Funded by JISC (for 4 months only), so now we use Flickr to receive contributions. Website: www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/gwa
- 17. 2008: Simple online submissions process Contributors asked to agree to basic terms & conditions of the license Contributors enter basic metadata Offered a large open ‘notes’ field for further information or anecdotes An admin system allowed reviewers to: check items for their validity; correct or add to the metadata; flag items of particular interest/value Website: www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/gwa
- 18. ‘Roadshows’/submissions days 2008: The project collaborated with organisations Offer on the spot digitisation and advice A ‘Submissions Day Pack’ guided libraries etc. to run their own day
- 19. Photo submitted by the nephew of the William Gaunt, (seated here) Nothing particularly unusual in this photo – which had been on the mantle-piece in William’s widow’s house? This item is from The Great War Archive, University of Oxford (www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/gwa); © Jill Ross EMMA EMMA Website: www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/gwa
- 20. Live website Public interface toThe Great War Archive, with options for download, ‘zoomify’ etc
- 21. Live website An admin system for reviewers To check items for their validity. To correct or add to the metadata To flag items of particular interest / value
- 22. RSS Wiki Blogs Mindmaps Getting Your Message OutThere Our projects have used all of these “Web 2.0”, third-party services, to engage with communities and work with user-generated content
- 23. Blogging
- 24. The Great War Archive Exit Strategy Although the submission process ended in June 2008 the project has used Flickr to allow further items to be contributed. We could assess potential for user tagging / comments. www.flickr.com/groups/greatwararchive/
- 25. Flickr: No formal submission/metadata A future project might enhance metadata? Comments can be facile or funny and can sometimes be incredibly informative
- 26. 1917-reservists called up and prepared1917-временно мобилизираниБългари Flickr image from The Great War Archive Flickr Group by allilininwww.flickr.com/photos/allilinin/63081204/
- 27. Public contributions to The Great War Archive Over 6,500 items collected March-June 2008, 60% submitted by the public direct through our website The project uploaded 600 items (about 3,000 digital objects) from 5 submissions days 600 Costs per item: First World War Poetry Digital Archive cost £40.00 / item The Great War Archive cost £3.50 / item 2,750 3,500 Public contributors uploaded 3,500 digital objects to website in 4 months A Flickr group continues to collect items Website: www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/gwa
- 28. Share culture? YouTube, iTunesU, Flickr and Wikimedia Commons etc. Share your knowledge, engage with the audience with comments and conversation Share your collectionsuse a Creative Commons licence http://glamwiki.org www.flickr.com/groups/greatwararchive/
- 29. Crowdsource? JISC rapid innovation projects: developing community content, 2010 e.g. Old Weather Part of the Citizen Science Alliance which includes a number of Zooniverse projects such as Galaxy Zoo, Moon Zoo, Solar Storm Watch Help scientists recover worldwide weather observations made by Royal Navy ships around the time of World War I www.oldweather.org/ These transcriptions will contribute to climate model projections and improve a database of weather extremes. Historians will use your work to track past ship movements and the stories of the people on board.
- 30. “E-include”? The People’s Collection, and other initiatives in Wales like: For CulturenetCymru(National Library of Wales) “heritage is the hook” for digital inclusion www.culturenetcymru.com/
- 31. “Kontaktanzeigen” “Wirsuchen...” SpontaneitätAlles was Spaß macht! Treue Humor Europeana, the DNB and the University of Oxford are looking for partners to help run The Great War Archive in Germany and beyond... Alkohol-und-Tabakkonsum Ich mag Ehrlichkeit Sportlich unternehmungslustig “Mirth in Wartime (c.1918)”, Flickr image from The Great War Archive Flickr Group by postaletricewww.flickr.com/photos/postaletrice/4382411053/
- 32. “The archive in Second Life is much more than just a fun website”Dr Stuart Lee, Oxford University Second Life
- 33. “...this is all done off-budget now carried on by enthusiasm alone.” “Attempting to form the context of a particular piece of literature is a key critical approach in the discipline, which normally involves studying secondary material, or in rare cases, site visits”. “By piloting the use of Second Life, the archive is approaching this in an innovative way & is showing how new technologies (virtual worlds) can be utilised to provide a more interesting access to key research & teaching resources.”
- 35. “Attempting to form the context of a particular piece of literature is a key critical approach in the discipline, which normally involves studying secondary material, or in rare cases, site visits”.
- 36. “Attempting to form the context of a particular piece of literature is a key critical approach in the discipline, which normally involves studying secondary material, or in rare cases, site visits”. “By piloting the use of Second Life, the archive is approaching this in an innovative way & is showing how new technologies (virtual worlds) can be utilised to provide a more interesting access to key research & teaching resources.”
- 38. YouTube WW1Lit channel www.youtube.com/user/ww1lit
- 39. If You Build It, They Will Scan: Oxford University’s Exploration of Community Collections, Dr Stuart Lee and Kate Lindsay. EDUCAUSE Quarterly Vol 32 Number 2, 2009www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Quarterly/EQVolume322009/EDUCAUSEQuarterlyMagazineVolum/174539The strategies and processes behind The Great War Archive are explained in detail. E.g. comparison of the costs per item: £40.00/itemPoetry Digital Archive £ 3.50/item The Great War Archive
- 41. Digitisation, curation & two-way engagement, Chris Batt Consulting www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/reports/2009/digicurationfinalreport.aspxThe Great War Archive showed how community collections can work and bring great benefits, most notably reduced costs... This is possibly a model we should be pursuing in the future alongside traditional high-quality digitisation... Moreover, that academia should try to engage the public in its research and recognise that the public not only may hold material, but also is willing to engage in these activities. On the subject of Two-way Engagement: “…knowledge co-creation and exchange rather than simple knowledge transfer; a dialogue which enriches knowledge for mutual benefit” and “...community engagement is more than citizen participation… it would be questionable to describe it as community engagement, unless there have been some fully open opportunities for... Collective involvement in the agenda under discussion.”
- 42. Capturing the power of the crowd and the challenges of community collections, JISC 2010 www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/programmerelated/2010/communitycollections.aspx‘Crowdsourcing’ is when a problem is broadcast to a wide audience or community that could solve the problem collectively. Mundane tasks could be outsourced to a motivated and enthusiastic community of experts. The community can assess the answers and provide the quality assurance. Refers to e.g. East London Lives 2012, GalaxyZooand RunCoCo.
- 44. Two-way engagement on Twitter: @runcoco
- 45. Sharing links to other relevant resources and exemplar crowdsourcing initiatives using Delicious
- 46. Maintaining momentum with the blog
- 47. Disseminating key software tools, methodologies, and work-flows developed under The Great War Archive and beyond. Developing an open source system (called CoCoCo) to collect digital objectsAlun EdwardsOUCSUniversity of Oxfordruncoco@oucs.ox.ac.uk
- 48. Any questions? These items are from The Great War Archive, University of Oxford (www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit); ©
Editor's Notes
- Title slideIntroduction slideSpecifically I’m going to talk about how we used the Communityto build on what we created for this freely-available, online archive of the manuscripts of many of the British poets from the First World War. That is – the community, the general public, who contributed to The Great War Archive, a community collection – and I’ll mention how we use third-party sites like ‘Flickr’.And most recently a small community are working in the 3-d virtual world (‘Second Life’) to visualise the materials from the archive. All this has led to JISC funding RunCoCo. This year we have been showing other projects how to run a community collection onlineThese slides are available from the RunCoCo website. There are links to further resources throughout - so from the slides you’ll be able to follow those.The Great War Archive: crowdsourcing in practice and there are some implications in terms of benefits and challenges for similar projects whether run by a University like Oxford, or a libraryI’m going to also tell you about some ‘real’ and exciting opportunities for action (things to do).There is also the social and cultural value of things like this story...
- Start with a story:While away at training camp the orders came through to a Sergeant Major in the Glasgow Highlanders to go to France. The train he was on with his troops went through his home station but did not stop there. He hastily scribbled a note to his family, stuffed it into a matchbox, and threw it out onto the platform.On one side of the note was the name of his wife and on the other this message.
- Read messageSomeone picked up the matchbox and delivered it to the family. He was killed just a few days after arriving at the front. He lies in an unmarked grave. This was submitted to The Great War Archive by someone in Australia.
- This is the First World War Poetry Digital Archive website. We’ve c. 7,000 digital images of primary source material (manuscripts, letters, photos, service records) relating to the poetsA virtual Museum to house the digitised manuscripts of dispersed collections of WW1 poerty and related contextual material from some of the major writers of the war. NO physical manifestation of this archive to compliment the online collectionBuilt up over a series of digitisation projects since 19961996: JISC funded the Virtual Seminars ProjectDrew together primary materials on Wilfred Owen scattered across a range of archives and an array of contextual resources (WOMDA)Web based tutorials to advance the possibilities of traditional teachingOne of the first multimedia collections designed specifically as a teaching resource -more than 1 million hits.Funding received for Apr 07 - Mar 09 and Oct 08 - Sept 09 to expand and enhance the archive (JISC Digitisation Programme).Primary source material dispersed amongst libraries and archives in the UK, USA and Canada.Digitisation performed by holding institutions according to project benchmarks.Images digitised as High Quality TIFFs and delivered as ‘good enough quality’ JPGs, Audio as MP3, Video as MPEG 4.Catalogued by trained cataloguers and Quality Assured twice, including by a key expert in the field.Dates, location, provenance, physicality etc. Images digitally watermarked using DigiMarkAnd we have digitised c. 500 Multimedia objects from the Imperial War Museum, official photos, audio interviews with survivors, and official film footage – as well as recruitment posters, and the like.You can see the search box where you can start exploring. And links to the Education Materials and to browse the collections of poetry.
- First here’s an example of the material we’ve digitised.Studio portrait photo of the poet, Wilfred Owen. And a draft of one of his poems. If you can imagine that the poets’ manuscripts are scattered across the globe – in libraries and private collections, and there can be as many as 7 or more versions of a poem – so if you’re trying to see these manuscripts for your research you would have had to travel, to say Oxford, Cambridge, London, Edinburgh, New York, Texas... – now you can see the texts on your own desktop computer, for free. And if you’re a teacher, whereas you’d never have considered including a poet’s manuscript in your lessons, now you can download images of these to show how the poet’s mind is working as he searches for the right phrase: “guttering”Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (Horace's Odes) "It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country”
- The Archive provides some basic information about the poet, and the collections his works are in – and you can start looking for specific poems.
- Here are the search results which show the versions of the same poem you can see in the Archive. These include the text as it was actually published, and a version from one of his letters to his mother.
- When you click on one of these, you can see the cataloguing metadata, and view the manuscript itself – zooming in, rotating it.You can download the image.You may also add this to your favourites. And what is most interesting for me as a researcher is that on screen I can compare my favourites.
- Side-by-Side.You imagine this in the context of the reading room!If I was lucky enough that the two versions of this are held in the same library.What are the chances that the reading room staff are going to let me hold in my hands the two versions from different parts of their archive!But here on screen I can see that Owen ahs changed his dedication – actually we know that the blue pen is actually Siegfried Sassoon correcting Owen’s work – when they met in hospital in Scotland.
- A last view of the poetry – just to show how much a student can see from looking at the manuscripts themselves – instead of just looking at the text in a book. Here you can see that Isaac Rosenberg (a private not an officer) is writing poetry on whatever scrap of paper he can find – he doesn’t have the officer’s leather bound volume, or a desk to write on. He hasn’t been able to pass this on to his publisher on fancy stationery – indeed he’s had to cart this around in his knapsack till he’s had the chance to send it home.
- Browse the collections of poetry.Another community we worked with are teachers, who helped to enrich the education materials based on the archive.Links to the Education MaterialsCLICKThere is so much there – I recommend looking at our showreel which is available on our YouTube channelAnd Here is the link to The Great War Archive
- Alongside our work on the poetry archive we ran The Great War Archive from March to June 2008.This was a ‘Community Collection’ to harvest digital versions of items originating from the First World War held by the general publicIt was quite innovative – involving the public in all aspects of digitisation and cataloguingIdea of a community collection- Bridge the gap between non-institutional pro-amatuers and institutional collections and their online presence.Creation of digital resources by armatures Digitisation of family history and genealogy is very popular – harnessing this power of amateur digitisation- Democratising in nature – accept everything, not selective
- There was a very simple online submissions process Public enters basic metadataThe trick was to get the most useful information from the contributor but at the same time not making it a laborious task that would dissuade themOffered a large open ‘notes’ field for further information, anecdotes, etc.
- To supplement this we ran a series of 5 submissions days, where we would work with a local organisation – like a public library.We based ourselves in that library for the dayThrough the press we’d invited people to bring their objects along to the roadshow on that particular day. And they were a bit like the “Antiques Roadshow” TV programme, people really did queue up with their plastic bags full of photos and letters.We would then talk to them about their items, get them to fill in a form with further information about themselves and what they had brought (i.e. the basic metadata again), and then we would photograph/scan the item or items.
- This was sent in by the great-nephew of the man seated here – who was killed in 1917. Nothing particularly unusual in this group shot – which had been on the mantle-piece in his widow’s house till she died.When the family took the photo out of it’s frame to scan it, they discovered that the man had written his wife’s name in the mud with his stick. If you still can’t read it I’ve highlighted it in the photo and on this enlargement – CLICK CLICKWhen they submitted it to the Great War Archive nephew wrote “We wonder if Emma ever knew about this, as it is invisible to the eye on the original photo.”The Great War Archive was just a pilot. A proof of concept running for just 4 months – which we reported back on to our funders etc. And made available online what people had sent in. The submission process ended in June 2008. But we continued to receive messages from people who missed our short collection period.So we set up a pool of photos on the Flick photo sharing site.Without the formal submission and metadata process we can study the potential for user-tagging and comments
- And with Flickr you can see what happens when you let the community do what it wants – in terms of user-tags, descriptions etc. What you also see is the amazing lengths some people will go to share their knowledge and help someone else.CLICKYes, you get the silly comments – as you do with any blog, or YouTube video. But you also get responses like this – where someone has added so much information to the hazy details known by the person who first posted the photo.What you also see is the amazing lengths some people will go to share their knowledge and help someone else.
- The spread of submissions for The Great War Archive was from across the UK, and once the Flickr site was opened up we received submissions from a truly global audience.To a certain extent The Great War Archive was a risky venture. What if nobody submitted anything? What if nobody turned up on the submission days? Was our system just going to get spammed by the world’s pornographers? Would we be inundated with material that was fake, or irrelevant?The results were the exact opposite. In 16 weeks we ‘collected’ over 6,500 items. These were all quality assured by two subject experts, (and a technical imaging expert, where appropriate), and only one submission was rejected as it was from a different war. 6,500 items may sound a lot, but numbers are not everything. E.g. hundreds of portrait photos like the one we saw earlier, or only numerous other duplications, then our understanding would not have advanced much. Thankfully this was not the case. 42 unique unpublished diaries by soldiers from a range of battlefields63 memoirs255 unpublished lettersOver 700 photographs, pamphlets, local recruiting posters, images of rare objects (such as the original designs for the tomb of the unknown soldier)Even material saved from the skip! E.g. the scrap album of the Rev. L. T. Pearson, a Chaplain attached to the Royal Army Medical Corps. Was nearly lost – saved by a builder from a skip (Pearson was one of the veteran’s interviewed by the historian Lyn Macdonald for her book The Roses of No Man’s Land, and we now have a further part of his story to add to his recorded recollections. Although this is a key historical source, we should not forget the single individual item, which although it may not add much to our knowledge of the events of the War, does give us an insight into what the people endured: the bullet dented tea tin which saved the life of a soldier; the diary of a stretcher-bearer in Gallipoli who recorded the death of his friends as one-by-one they were killed in action; the muddied belongings returned to a widow
- Ephemera which the rest of the world has chosen to leave undocumentedThe Flickr group continues to collect items (over 2,750 to date)And what may be of interest – is the costs we calculated per item – The publicly contributed material came in at about 10% of the cost of the professionally digitised and catalogued material for the poetry archive.
- Inviting the general public to contribute to academic work itself is a relatively new field. This form of collaboration ultimately means the disruption of daily academic work and how meaning is ascribed to it. The voice of the academic researcher becomes lost as it is merged into a sea of others.Simply, Flickr lets lovers of “dogs in art” or whatever and the curious bring together collections of art and objects. In a world of tagging and Creative Commons, ownership of the images as well as control of the way exhibits, collections and artefacts are represented, is questioned and the role of the institution (and the professional status of curators) is challenged.Share culture, GLAM-WIKI 2010 conference, for the UK and European gallery, library, archive & museum (GLAM) sector and the Wikimedia community
- What about e-inclusion?E.g. The National Library of Wales finds that “heritage is the hook” which draws in schoolchildren, the unemployed, or the elderly to work with computers.
- “Lonely Hearts” adThere must be very few in the UK who realise that the French and the Germans (for example) went through exactly the same experiences as the British ‘Tommy’.
- That funding I mentioned to enrich the Poetry Digital Archive gave us just enough to try something really different.What if we could create a Western Front in the virtual world – Second Life? What if we could show off some of the material from the archive in context – a way to visualise the material, totally different from a normal exhibition or a normal website?And this is what it looks like.This is a group of students – essentially on a site-visit – as one might do in Belgium or France today. I don’t know if anyone is familiar with Second Life? Each of these figures is a student – who can walk around our trenches. They can click on one of these boxes – and they would see an image from the archive, or hear a poem being read, or listen to an interview with one of the veterans.As you move around Second Life you see through the eyes of the avatar. So the woman sitting at the writing tableCLICK
- And this is part of Second Life which you can visit yourself – there are links from the home page of the Poetry Digital Archive which lead you through the process, even if you’ve never used Second Life before.
- Just in case the video didn’t work _ I just wanted to show you these screenshots – you can see that installation which quite artistically represents that Wilfred Owen poem of the gas attack – a gas cloud of words. You can also see those boxes that bring up the images, films and audio from the Archive.