Developing community content
The suite of projects funded under the JISC's Community Content call are aimed firstly at creating and enhance digital content collections by developing the engagement between content owners in the universities and specific, or general, groups of the external public. Secondly, they are intended to develop more strategic co-ordination within the universities, focusing on the relationship between digital collection curators and business and community engagement teams.
Community content - The background
A significant point of overlap between JISC Business and Community Engagement and eContent programmes is in the development of community collections, where digital content is created, co-created or enhanced by audiences from outside traditional tertiary education boundaries
There have been two major impetuses that have contributed to the growth of such collections. Firstly, the development of web2.0 technologies, which has offered content publishers a flexible system for interacting with a wide range of users, who evolve as both consumers and creators of digital data.
Secondly, institutions are actively developing their external engagement mission, and seeing the advantages in developing meaningful relationships with businesses, public sector partners and community groups.
JISC projects
In response to this JISC issued the Developing Community Call with two strands. The first strand is Rapid User Innovation – Enhancing existing digital resources with mechanisms and features designed to engage new external audiences, and to secure their active involvement online. Five projects, running from April 2010 to October 2010, are funded under this strand.
Digitising data for disparate communities : Naval history and climate science
Dr Chris Lintott, University of Oxford
This project will publish images of Royal Navy logbooks from 1914 to 1923, and allow the general public to transcribe the meteorological data included within them. The resultant data will be invaluable evidence for those studying climate change.
Galeri cymru
Tudur Evans, Coleg Harlech
The existing GaleriCymru website which houses creations by those studying art and design, will be expanded to allow for contribution and self-evaluation from a variety of extra mural groups studying art courses from Coleg Harlech
Mass observation communities online (MOCO)
Jenna Bailey, University of Sussex
Based on the Mass Observation Archive, this project will create an online resource that will inspire and assist people to record the changing history of their communities. This demonstrator project will work with at least 10 identified community heritage organisations, with a view to rolling out the resource throughout the national network of Community Archive and Heritage groups.
Community flood archive enhancement through storytelling (Co-FAST)
Professor Lindsey McEwen, University of Gloucestershire
Enhancing and building on an existing digital archive resource focused on community flood histories – the Lower Severn Community Flood Information Network, this project will engaging communities in the middle / lower Severn with their local flood histories and learning about flood risk and climate change
Addressing history
Stuart MacDonald, EDINA, University of Edinburgh
The Addressing History project is creating an online tool which will enable users (particularly local history groups and genealogists), to combine data from digitised historical Scottish Post Office Directories with contemporaneous historical maps and allow individuals to plot the location on a map of any address, street name, advert, or listing from the directories onto an appropriate map.
Strandlines
Torsten Reimer, Kings College, London
Bringing together the academic community of King's College London and members of diverse local groups, Strandlines will initiate engagement around a place in the heart of London, the major thoroughfare 'the Strand', which has at present little active sense of community.
Welsh Voices of the Great War online
Gethin Matthews, Cardiff University
The project will work with the families of those in Wales who fought, or otherwise served, in the First World War in order to collect and make available online the range of artefacts that are held in private hands.
OurWikiBooks
Alexandria Walker, University of Manchester OurWikiBooks will undertake
co-development, with teachers and GCSE and A-level students, of a new digital collection of key concerns and knowledge in computing education.
My Leicestershire
Ben Wynne, University of LeicesterThe project will create a base
digital archive comprised of historical texts from the University of Leicester Library’s Special Collections complemented by video recordings from MACE, oral history recordings from EMOHA and private collections of historical photographs of “ghost signs”, buildings, bridges, and other architecturally significant sites from across the county.
Media and Memory in Wales, 1950-2000
Dr Iwan MorusThis project aims to
collect and archive oral testimony relating to the age of television in Wales. It will solicit memories of significant televisual moments in politics and culture.
Community Cafes
Alison Dickens, University of SouthamptonThe project will address a particular problem: the scarcity of up-to-date, online resources for community languages. The aim of the project is to work together to
co-create a community collection of online language and cultural materials which will significantly enhance existing materials to support community languages.