1. Amazing Archives
8th September 2017
Gillian Johnston – Education Outreach Officer
Kimberley Gaiger – Senior Archives and Education Outreach Assistant
Stephen Harding - Library Systems Developer
@ncllibspeccoll
Special Collections
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2. @ncllibspeccoll
Special Collections
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The Background
• November 2015- May 2016: Newcastle University Special Collections participated in
Culture 24’s Let’s get Real -Young Audiences programme
• We were one of 19 diverse arts and heritage organisations involved in this programme
• Common aim: get better at reaching and engaging children and young people through
developing effective digital content
• Each organisation had to conduct an experiment to reach and engage children and young
people online
3. @ncllibspeccoll
Special Collections
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The Inspiration and the Idea
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York Metkids
website – website made for, with and by kids – uses
colourful, cartoon style illustrations of items in the museum to
enable children to explore the museum without actually
physically being in the building
• Can we get more children aged 9-13 to engage with our
Special Collections by working with a group of children, a
children’s illustrator and a web designer to repackage some
of our existing digital content for a younger audience?
4. @ncllibspeccoll
Special Collections
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The Rationale
• Limited capacity for school visits to
Special Collections
• Web-based resources have the
potential to reach a much wider
audience
• Some of our Collections already
available online- Collections Captured
and Treasure of the Month - but aimed
at an adult audience
5. @ncllibspeccoll
Special Collections
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The Process: a summary
School selected to work
with
Children visited Special
Collections and
selected favourite items
Children’s illustrator
drew the items for
website homepage
Children gave feedback
on draft illustrations
Illustrator added
children's ideas to final
illustrations
Content created for
webpages
Mock up of website
produced
Children gave feedback
back on draft website
Children’s suggestions
included in final version
of website
6. @ncllibspeccoll
Special Collections
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Selecting a School to work with
• We ran our experiment idea by a local Middle School teacher who brings
children each year to our Cracking Cholera workshop
• She was keen for her students to be involved and chose 8 students to take
part
• We provided information for parents about the project and arranged for the
students to visit Special Collections
7. @ncllibspeccoll
Special Collections
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Visiting Special Collections
• A small group of children (2 from each
year group Y5, Y6, Y7, Y8) visited
Newcastle University Library and
selected their favourite items from
Special Collections
• They researched their chosen item
and explained why it appealed to them
8. @ncllibspeccoll
Special Collections
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Creating a visually appealing home page
• We employed a children's’ illustrator to illustrate
the items chosen by the children and some
others chosen by us
• We visited the school and showed the children
draft sketches of their chosen items
• The children provided feedback and suggested
ideas which were included in the final colour
illustrations that went on the website.
The children loved them [the illustrations]. Their faces lit up
when they realised their ideas have been used.
9. @ncllibspeccoll
Special Collections
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Creating the content for the webpages
• We used items that were already available on
our Treasure of the Month pages and Special
Collections blog
• For writing the text, we were inspired by
Horrible Histories
• Language used was simple and complicated
words were explained
• Split up information about an item into different
categories
• We created the content for the webpages using
a separate folder for each item…
10. @ncllibspeccoll
Special Collections
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Creating the content for the webpages
Find out information about the item through questions using
the 5 Ws:
Who? What? When? Where? Why?
Links to short videos on Newcastle University’s Youtube
channel
11. @ncllibspeccoll
Special Collections
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Creating the content for the webpages
Used previous games that linked to the item.
If there were none available, Steve the Student game was
used – user has to answer 5 yes/no questions to get Steve to
graduate
Voice recordings of the school children talking about the item
that they had researched
12. @ncllibspeccoll
Special Collections
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Creating the content for the webpages
Links to other Amazing Archives item pages, any other items
or themes that are relevant from Treasure of the Month or
blog pages
Any unusual or interesting facts that haven’t already been
covered
13. @ncllibspeccoll
Special Collections
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Creating the website
• Illustrations provided basis for design
• Web space – hosted internally – archivesalive.ncl.ac.uk/amazing
• Design and development done in house
• WordPress custom template with various plugins
• Big buttons for interactive whiteboards
• Responsive for smartphones and tablets
14. @ncllibspeccoll
Special Collections
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Creating the website
• jQuery used for quizzes and page animations
• Audio editing in Audacity
• Videos hosted on YouTube
• All free tools / services
• Website can be edited by anyone using a standard web browser
• Documentation
17. @ncllibspeccoll
Special Collections
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Getting feedback on draft website
• The Education Outreach Team and the web designer visited the school
• The children were shown a draft version of the website and gave their
feedback on it
• They came up with ideas/suggestions to improve it further – e.g. adding
some pop up ‘fun facts’ to the Discover page
18. @ncllibspeccoll
Special Collections
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What we’ve learned
• Co-creation of web-based resources can be a rewarding, and enjoyable
experience for everyone involved
• It’s important to listen to and get feedback from your target audience
• You may need to manage people’s expectations
• Good communication is key
• Don’t under estimate the time and resources than you think you’ll need
• Creating digital resources is one thing, marketing and promoting them is
another!
19. @ncllibspeccoll
Special Collections
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What we’d do differently in future
• Keep the initial ‘experiment’ small and manageable
• Plan the project more rigidly to include must have and nice to have
elements
• Have an official, formal launch of the web resource in a school
assembly
• Gather formal student feedback at the end of the project as well as
during it
• Spend more time in advance considering how the digital resource will
be promoted
20. @ncllibspeccoll
Special Collections
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What next?
• Discuss ways to promote our digital resources with Library’s Marketing and
Communications Group and implement these to increase traffic to the website
• Organise content by subject area/topic to make it easier to find relevant items
• Continue to add items to the website