JISC

The MOSI-ALONG project addresses tensions between digitisation, curation and learning. It directly addresses the empowerment of communities and, ultimately, their contribution to the idea of Manchester as an ‘Ambient Learning City’, raising their digital literacy through engaging in the building of digitised resources using the existing physical collections of the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI).

The gap to bridge here is between the prohibitive cost and exclusionary nature of building bespoke interfaces to the museum’s digital content, which may help curation but limits access and thus their learning potential; and the unmoderated nature of free ‘Web 2.0’ tools which may be more accessible but which limit their usefulness to the curators of the content. Thus, MOSI-ALONG brings in the interface design expertise of Mimas to develop bridges between the STEM-based MOSI content and the community. The outcomes and benefits for the different stakeholders are as follows: for the local communities, improved digital literacy enabling inclusion and an understanding of how local heritage collections can have relevance to problems they face today; for MOSI, refreshing their existing and new digital content, enhanced by crowdsourcing and Web 2.0 software and extending their userbase; for the university and JISC, an understanding of how to lower the cost of producing digital community-based content without giving up the learning benefits of curation and management of the resources.