The last in the 2010-2011 series of UKOLN/MLA workshops on Web 2.0 and the social web took place recently, so here’s a quick look back at what happened.

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.

Spotted on the Museums Computer Group email list – sounds an interesting event so here are the details as posted by Alun Edwards, Manager of RunCoCo.

• 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.

The recent CILIP Executive Briefing Days on RDA (at which I was one of the speakers) included one presentation by video from a speaker based in the US.

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.

This is your last chance to sign up for the free one-day workshop entitled ‘An Introduction to Web 2.0 and the Social Web’ sponsored by the MLA. The workshop be looking at what 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:

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

These dates are likely to fill up fast.

I received an announcement a few days ago informing me that the papers presented at the Culture Online 2009 Conference  are now available on the Culture Online 2009 Conference Web site.

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.

Tomorrow I’m giving a talk on “Empowering Users and Institutions: A Risks and Opportunities Framework for Exploiting the Social Web” at the Cultural Heritage Online 2009 Conference .

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

We can now tell you about four more Web 2.0 Workshop dates for 2010.

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.

Two more south east dates have been announced for the touring UKOLN Web2 and the social Web workshop.

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 Council (MLA) have published a new set of Web pages highlighting their policy for the Digital agenda in libraries, archives and museums.

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.

The international conference for culture and heritage on-line has just opened its call for participation. Next year’s event will run from April 13-17 in Denver, Colorado, USA.

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.

Marieke Guy and myself are running a half-day workshop on “Using Blogs, Microblogs and Social Networks Effectively Within Your Library” which will be held on Wednesday 14 October 2009 at the Novotel London West hotel in London, on the day before the start of the Internet Librarian International 2009 conference.

The abstract for the session is given below:

If this is of interest to readers of this blog you’ll need to register on the ILI 2009 conference Web site.

I was pleased to have been invited to speak at the annual conference organised by the Association of Independent Museums (AIM). The AIM 2009 conference was held at the National Waterways Museum, Ellesmere Port with the theme of “Volunteering in the Independent Museum“.

My talk, entitled “Benefits of the Social Web: How Can It Help My Museum?”, fitted in nicely with this theme in exploring ways in which social networking services could be exploiting by museums, in particular small museums with limited resources and technical expertise.

My  slides, which are available on Slideshare and embedded below, provided a number of examples on how the Social Web is being used by a number of cultural heritage organisations.

My talk concluded by mentioning some of the challenges which need to be addressed in order to make effective use of the Social Web. In the afternoon I facilitated two hour-long workshop sessions which provided an opportunity to discuss these challenges in more detail.

One particular challenge which was raised in both sessions was how does one choose which service to engage with, as there are so many options available. :I suggested that one important technology to explore was RSS (Really Simple Syndication) as this would enable content on a small Web site to be made available (syndicated) elsewhere, either on other Web sites or on mobile devices. And a good way of gaining a better understanding of RSS (which many participants appeared to be unaware of) was to make use of a simple RSS reader such as Netvibes or PageFlakes.

Use this, I suggested, to view relevant RSS feeds which might include resources from similar museums which are already providing RSS feeds, resources from funding organisation, blog posts form the msueums sector and even areas of personal interest (the BBC news site provides a range of RSS feeds). And once you have appreciated the benefit of dynamic content coming to your rather than having to visit Web sites to see if anything new is available you should then be motivated to create RSS feeds for your own institution. And if you’re still unclear as to how Netvibes can be used, have a look at the Netvibes page which brings together dynamic content about UKOLN’s cultural heritage resources, which is also illustrated below.

But how would you go about creating RSS feeds? One approach is to make use of Socuial Web applications such as blogs and resources sharing services (e.g. Flickr) as these will normally provide RSS feeds or other syndication mechanisms as standard.

Further information is provided on UKOLN’s Cultural heritage IntroBytes briefing documents, which include documents covering syndication technologies, blogging, micro-blogging and social networks.

Finally I should add that a video of my talk is available on the Blip.TV video sharing service and embedded below. The file is also available from the UKOLN Web site.

Last week I attended the CILIP Scotland 2009 conference which was held at the Peebles Hydro, Peebles. This conference built on the experiences gained from the ‘amplification’ of the recent CILIP Wales conference. The tag for the event (#cilips09) was used to aggregate tweets about the conference. In addition the Coveritelive live-blogging service (illustrated) was used to complement use of Twitter – this has the potential to allow comments to be made by people who do not have (or wish to have) a Twitter account.

Following the positive feedback I received from making available a video recording of my talk at the CILIP Wales conference I repeated this at the Scottish event. In addition as I was able to make use of Skype at the conference I asked my Twitter followers if anyone was interested in participating remotely. Ian Edelman responded and, as described in his blog post, found that being able to listen to a talk from afar had benefits, although there were a couple of areas in which improvements could be made.

Once again, for those who could not attend the conference or for those who were at the conference but attending the parallel session, my slides for the talk on  ”From eLib to NOF-digi and Beyond“ are available on Slideshare (and embedded below).

In addition the video recording of my talk is available on Vimeo and embedded below. The video resources are also available on the UKOLN Web site.

From eLib to NOF-digi and Beyond from Brian Kelly on Vimeo.

Last week I attended the CILIP Wales, Welsh Libraries, Archives and Museums Conference 2009 which was held at the Metropole Hotel, Llandrindod Wells. A recording of a rehearsal of my talk, which was entitled “Virtual Space for All: The Opportunities and Challenges Provided By The Social Web“ has been made available on Slideshare (and is embedded below). At the conference itself I took a video recording of my talk, which is available on Blip.TV.

I suggested that the ease of creating and sharing videos may be particularly relevant to Welsh cultural heritage organisations, in light of the difficulties in travelling around Wales. I have made a start by ensuring that my talk can be viewed by people who might not have been able to travel to the conference. I hope this proves useful – and your feedback would be welcomed.

Yesterday I attended the MCG Spring Meeting 2009 which was held at the Guildhall, Bath. I had been invited to give a talk on “Engaging With The Social Web: A Risks and Opportunities Framework“, which was intended to provide a response to the first set of talks in the morning which described a variety of developments taking place in the Bath Cultural Services department. As I didn’t know in any details what those developments might entail this provided quite a challenge, especially as my talk was given immediately before the lunch break! In my talk I described the risks and opportunities framework which I had outlined in a paper I presented at the recent Museums and the Web 2009 conference. I was pleased that immediately before my talk I heard about plans to make use of Twitter and Facebook to promote Bath’s rich cultural heritage, including the Roman Baths and the Victoria Art Gallery. This particular example was one I had described previously, arguing the need to consider the intended purpose of the services (Twitter as an organisational one-way marketing channel or a two-way communications channel for peer-to-peer support and learning, for example), the perceived risks and benefits, the missed opportunities of failing to use the services and the associated costs.

Due to the lack of time I wasn’t able to describe this approach in any detail. I will remedy this in a forthcoming post in this blog. For now, however, I am providing access to a video of my talk (which is available in .avi format) via the Vimeo service.

I should also add that I have also uploaded this video to my Facebook account – and shortly after doing this I received a message from Caroline Moore saying “Thanks for posting this Brian I was unable to attend yesterday as I was at an engaging users event at the London Metropolitan Archives“. As I suggested to Ross Parry during the talk, shouldn’t we be making greater use of video to record talks at events such as the MCG Spring meeting?

I’m pleased to have been invited to give the opening plenary talk on the second day of the Welsh Libraries Archives and Museum’s annual conference which this year has the theme “Space For All”.  The conference will take place on 21-22^nd May 2009 at the Metropole Hotel, Llandrindod Wells.

The title of my talk is “Virtual Space for All: The Opportunities and Challenges provided by the social Web 2.0“. I’m intending to give some examples of how cultural heritage organisations in Wales are making use of Social Web services. Anyone who can provide suitable examples is welcome to give their suggestions, either as a comment to this blog post or by sending an email message to <b.kelly@ukoln.ac.uk>.

Amanda Hill gave a talk on “Archives on a Micro Scale” at the “Archives 2.0: Shifting Dialogues between Users and Archivists” conference which was held in Manchester on 19-20^th March 2009. This talk will, I feel, be of particular interest to those working in archives and similar cultural heritage organisations with limited budgets and effort, describing, as it does, a small archive in Canada which has a total annual budget of $11,000 (£6,000) and 1 member of staff who works for 1 day per week. The total cost of the software purchased (for a 2 year licence) was $47.99 (£26)! This was the cost, I think, of a licence for a Flickr Pro account.

Amanda’s slides are available on Slideshare. They are also embedded in this blog post.

With Amanda’s permission I also videoed her talk, which is available in  .avi and .flv formats. In addition the video is also available on the Google Video service. This video recording is also embedded in this blog post for Web browsers which can render .flv files:

I’m pleased that Amanda’s talk on “Archives on a Micro Scale” can now be viewed on a global scale

I previously announced my talk on “A Risks And Opportunities Framework For Archives 2.0” which I presented at the “Archives 2.0: Shifting Dialogues between Users and Archivists” conference which was held in Manchester on 19-20th March 2009.

My previous post included an embedded screencast of a rehearsal of the talk, with an audio track being played together with the slides.

For the talk itself I removed a number of the slides. And a video recording of the talk was taken which is available in .avi and .flv formats. In addition the video is also available on the Vimeo video service. This video recording is also embedded in this blog post for Web browsers which can render .flv files:

The video of the talk, the accompanying PowerPoint file and the slidecast of the rehearsal of the talk are all available under a Creative Commons licence which permits reused by others for non-commercial purposes. These resources may be particularly useful for the participants at the conference, who may find them useful for jogging their memory about talks given at the conference, whether in the short term (for writing a trip report) or over a longer period.  But how useful are such resources for others, I wonder? And should I try to synchronise the video with the slides in order to provide a richer experience?

I’m pleased that a proposal for a talk entitled “A Risks And Opportunities Framework For Archives 2.0” has been accepted by the organisers of the “Archives 2.0: Shifting Dialogues between Users and Archivists” conference which will be held in Manchester on 19-20^th March 2009.

I’m in the process of finalising my slides for my talk.  In order to estimate how long the talk would take I decided last night to record the talk. As the talk took over the 30 minutes which I have for the slot I will have to remove some of the slides. But it did occur to me that the recording of the rehearsal may be of interest to others, including those who can’t attend the conference.  So I have synched the audio with the slides and made the talk available on Slideshare. This is also embedded in this blog post (for browsers with appropriate plugin support).

I am conscious of the umms and errs in the audio. I also find it difficult to communicate my enthusiasm when I recording the talk in my office without the adrenaline buzz which a live talk gives. However as someone who seeks to embrace the Web 2.0 culture of ‘always beta’ and ‘trusting the audience’ I have decided to share this resource.  And I’d welcome feedback on both the content and also the approach I’ve taken.

I’m pleased to report that UKOLN will be running two sessions at this year’s AIM Conference, the annual conference organised by the Association of Independent Museums.

Brian Kelly will present a 30 minute plenary talk on “Benefits Of The Social Web” from 11.45-12.15 on Friday 5^th June 2009. After lunch, from 14.00-15.00 Brian will facilitate an interactive workshop session on “Exploiting The Potential Of The Social Web” which will provide an opportunity for participants to discuss in more details the opportunities which the Social Web has to offer independent museums and to explore barriers to such opportunities and ways in which such barriers can be addressed.

The conference itself will last from 4-6^th June. The conference programme is available (in PDF format).