Seven
Seven workshops took place at venues all over England: Birmingham, Exeter, Leicester, London, Manchester, Newcastle and York.

UKOLN/MLA workshops 2010-2011 series

One Hundred and One

The number of delegates who attended. Of these, nearly two-thirds were from libraries, a third from museums and art galleries and the remainder from archives, plus some students on museums and tourism courses. It was great to have a mix of people and everyone enjoyed the networking opportunity.

Ten
We were lucky enough to have 1o case studies given by local practitioners during the workshop series. These talks illustrated a wide range of examples and ideas. Most of their presentations are online and out there for you to use – have a look on the corresponding workshop page listed on past events for 2010 and 2011.

Twenty-eight

The Building a Business case group activity resulted in twenty-eight ideas for using social media to address a particular aim. Notes about each idea were reported on the on the wiki pages for each workshop and have now been brought together on extra wiki page.

One hundred and ten … and counting

To support the workshops a number of complementary materials were created and used. All materials are available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 licence. The workshop materials are available from the individual workshop pages.

Please do use the materials available with your teams and pass on details to any one interested.

Priceless

Delegates were asked to complete an evaluation form after each workshop and most people did. Thank you so much for your constructive comments, we really appreciate the positive feedback and your suggestions will be helpful in future event planning. We hope we helped people feel positive in a practical way about what Web 2.0 can offer them, like this delegate who said “It introduced me to lots of new sites and aspects of the social web. I have got at least 3 ideas for promoting aspects of our service from this.”

What we used – Registration

We used Eventbrite for as our booking system – it’s free to use if your event is free. It also allows you to send emails to everyone registered for the event: we sent out emails to (a) confirm that the event would take place and a link to the final programme, (b) to let them know about the wiki and (c) to thank them for attending and to remind them of the resources available on the event Web page and in the UKOLN Cultural Heritage Web site.

What we used – The Wiki
We set up a wiki for the workshops, with a separate page for each workshop. Delegates were contacted the week before the event and encouraged to add some information about their role and what they hoped to get out of the event. We also used the wiki pages to record the ideas that participants came up with in the group activity.

We used Wikispaces for this – it was easy to set up, the public view was nice and clear and delegates were able to add information easily.

Final thoughts

Thank you to everyone who came along, either as a delegate or as a speaker. You all made the event more than just a series of talks. Hope you are able to take some of the ideas forward back at the workplace.

• Event details: http://projects.oucs.ox.ac.uk/runcoco/events/27July/index.html

• Registration: www.surveymonkey.com/s/runcoco2010july

• Organisers: RunCoCo, University of Oxford and Culturenet Cymru, NLW.

Community collections help to harness the collective resources of a wider community and spread the costs of creating and contributing to a collection across the education and public sectors. These include The Great War Archive and Community Archives Wales. A community can also be harnessed to enrich an existing collection with tags or comments (like Galaxy Zoo). The organisers would like to invite anyone from the education/public sector who is interested in such projects to take part in this free RunCoCo workshop. As a taster, presentations from previous workshops held by RunCoCo are available online.

The RunCoCo workshop has a number of purposes:

• This is a chance for managers and others from community collection projects to share best practice and exchange knowledge

• This will be an opportunity for projects with some shared interests to meet face-to-face. The JISC-funded project, RunCoCo, has also launched an online ‘community of interest’ for those involved in community collection or working to harness a community to enrich an existing collection with tags or comments (http://groups.google.com/group/runcoco – follow the link on the right of that Web page to Join This Group)

• Be an opportunity to hear from a number of projects such as Galaxy Zoo and Community Archives Wales, as well as Culturenet Cymru and new initiatives like Citizen Science and The People’s Collection.

• RunCoCo will disseminate the processes, CoCoCo open-source software and results of the Great War Archive, a pilot community collection.

Places are limited, and similar events in Oxford have been over-subscribed. Please register at www.surveymonkey.com/s/runcoco2010july no later than 1200pm on 12 July 2010. We will confirm your place as soon as possible.

This could have been done in a variety of ways. It could have been a ‘talking head’ with the person simply speaking to camera; initially that may feel more interesting but there is an obvious disadvantage of no slides to refer back to after the event (unless these were supplied either in the delegate pack or made available after the event). Another way is for the speaker to be filmed giving the presentation so you see them and the slides. Thirdly, the speaker could simply do a voice-over narration while we watched the slides. We got a combination with a five-minute introduction of the speaker talking to camera followed by voice narration while viewing the slides. This meant that we got a feel for the person and an image of them we could hold in our heads during the slide section. For me, that worked well.

Why do this? Cost is an obvious factor – paying the travel expenses from the US for a fifteen-minute slot is not realistic, especially if this has to be re-couped via the delegate fee. It can also help provide a balanced programme, especially if it is not possible to get a specific viewpoint from UK-based presenters or the video presenter is particularly known and well-regarded.

Do delegates feel cheated by including video presentations? I think that depends on various factors. For example, how many video presentations are there within the programme? In this case there was just the one video presentation alongside four longer face-to-face presentations, which seemed to work well. In the context of a whole day event, I think that two short video presentations would have been acceptable (e.g. one in the morning and one in the afternoon) but for a shorter half-day event better to have just the one. And of course, there can be no face-to-face interaction: delegates cannot ask questions of the speaker or speak to them during the breaks and the speaker cannot join in panel discussion sessions.

Could one have an entire event by video presentation (or video-conferencing)? Yes, but this turns it into a different type of event and delegates would have different expectations. The Collections Trust Museum Development Officers Support Day in Nov. 2009 filmed the presentations on the day and then made these available on YouTube after the event. Have a look at these and you’ll get a feel for how wathcing an entire event via video might feel. So, if you have experienced individual video presentations or virtual events using video presentations or video-conferencing, please add your comments.

The new dates are:

• Bath (Kingston Room) – Monday 8th March 2010
• Cambridge (Central Library) – Monday 22nd March 2010

These dates are likely to fill up fast.

There are quite a number of papers which are likely to be of interest, covering the conference themes of Digital library applications & interactive Web and Sustainable policies for digital culture preservation. In addition to these to these papers, the speakers slidesarealso available, together with the slides for invited presentations.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that these resources are only available on the conference Web site, and only in PDF format.  So that slides haven’t been uploaded to a slide-sharing service such as Slideshare or Authorstream which would enable the resources to be embedded elsewhere (such as in blog posts).  And since the original format for the slides (which was almost universally PowerPoint) is not available, it would be difficult for the slides to be reused.

To have the slides hosted on the conference Web site is sensible – for the slides for a conference which had a strong focus on Web 2.0 not to make use of a service such as Slideshare to enable this content to be more easily reused is, I feel, a mistake.

A blog was also used to support the conference – but despite the calls for speakers and delegates to make use of the blog, only six posts were published.  The blog was used, however, to provide access to abstracts of the papers and speaker details.

The slides for this talk are available on Slideshare and are also embedded below.

The one-day workshop sponsored by the MLA and entitled ‘An Introduction to Web 2.0 and the Social Web’ will be looking at what, if anything, can Web 2.0 and the Social Web offer to museums, libraries and archives, especially small organisations with limited budgets and technical expertise.

The new dates are:

• Newcastle (Discovery Museum) – Monday 8th February 2010
• Birmingham (Central Library) – Monday 22nd February 2010
• Sheffield (Millennium Gallery) – Monday 1st March 2010
• Nottingham (E-Learning Centre) – Wednesday 17th March 2010

These dates are likely to fill up fast.

The one-day workshop sponsored by the MLA and entitled ‘An Introduction to Web 2.0 and the Social Web’ will be looking at what, if anything, can Web 2.0 and the Social Web offer to museums, libraries and archives, especially small organisations with limited budgets and technical expertise.

The new dates are:

• Dulwich (Dulwich Picture Gallery) – Friday 29th January 2010
• Chelmsford, Essex (Goldlay Gardens) – Wednesday 17th February 2010

Places for the London workshops went very quickly and we expect these workshops to be fully booked by the end of the week – so register now!

A few places are still available on the Devizes workshop taking place next Monday (16th November).

More workshops in other locations will be announced in the New Year.

The Museums, Libraries and Archives Sector has an important role to play in using digital technologies to deliver improved access, increased information and more opportunities for participation in its rich diversity of resources and services.

MLA is committed to helping museums, libraries and archives make full use of these opportunities, and to ensuring that the sector is at the heart of government digital policies.

Our role is to provide strategic leadership to the sector in relation to the digital agenda through:

• Developing a vision for the sector’s use of digital technologies
• Supporting and promoting the development of quality standards
• Encouraging innovation to enable inclusion of all communities
• Promoting understanding and skills development

MLA has commissioned digital services from a number of organisations to help to deliver:

• More and better quality information on cultural opportunities to the public
• A coherent portal for cultural resources for teachers and learners
• Greater interaction with individuals and communities through use of Web 2.0 and social networking tools
• High quality standards in the management and preservation of digital resources

UKOLN will be working with MLA on this digital agenda and an overview of the digital services commissioned is now available.

Further information on the social Web workshops we will be running is also now available. More information on venues and dates will follow.

Museums and the Web explores the social, cultural, design, technological, economic, and organizational issues of culture, science and heritage on-line. Taking an international perspective, MW reviews and analyzes the issues and impacts of networked cultural, natural and scientific heritage. Our community has been meeting since 1997, imagining, tracking, analyzing, and influencing the role museums play on the Web.

On-line proposal submission is now open. You can use the form at http://www.archimuse.com/mw2010/papers/mw2010.proposalForm.html. Proposals are due in by September 30th 2009.

To get an idea of what they are after have a look at last year’s Web site.