Crowdsourcing World War I and community contributed collections: reappraising World War I Kate Lindsay, Manager for Engagement and Discovery Learning Technologies Group, University of

1.The Memory of World War I 2.Engaging communities to build collections 3.Crowdsourcing, openness and exploring knowledge in new ways 4.New directions in learning and blurring of ‘Academic’

Images Copyright: Imperial War Museum, licensed to the First World War Poetry Digital Archive under the JISC Model Licence.

Images: National Library of Scotland (CC BY-NC-SA), Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain), Wellcome Images (CC BY-NC- SA), Library of Congress (Public Domain).

The commemoration provides the opportunity for museums, galleries, archives, libraries, the creative industries, universities, colleges and schools to work together to provide a user experience made possible through innovative digital technologies that is as personal, rich and vivid as it is focused; an experience that offers the user the ability to contextualise their own understanding and customise resources in line with their own learning and research priorities. – Statement of Intent. JISC WW1 Commemoration Programme.

The Great War Archive In 2008 the University of Oxford used the general public to build on a freely- available, online archive of the manuscripts of many of the British poets from the First World War They contributed to a community collection The Great War Archive In 2008 the University of Oxford asked the general public to build a freely-available, online archive of the manuscripts of many of the British poets from the First World War They contributed to a community collection.

Simple online submissions process Contributors asked to agree to basic terms & conditions of the license Contributors enter basic metadata Offered a large open ‘notes’ field for further information or anecdotes An admin system allowed reviewers to: check items for their validity; correct or add to the metadata; flag items of particular interest/value

Flickr: No formal submission/metadata A future project might enhance metadata? Comments can be facile or funny and can sometimes be incredibly informative

Resource Library Links to existing high quality OER on the World Wide Web Images, Video, Audio, E-Books, Web Sites, Blogs etc. Global OER Widgets Surface ‘Popular’ resources Links to the ‘big’ WW1 OER collections Image: Library of Congress, WW1 Poster Archive. Public Domain.

Scholarly Blog Experts from across a range of disciplines. New ideas, unrefined thoughts, reviews, republish previous work. Surface existing open materials. No style guide and requires no specific referencing format. Image: Library of Congress, WW1 Poster Archive. Public Domain.

Academic writing or writing by an Academic? Who holds the knowledge? Does technology blur the boundaries between the academic author and the knowledgeable amateur?

@Arras95: Contribute, Collaborate, Commemorate Twitter campaign between 9 th April and 16 th May Surface a key, but lesser taught, turning point of the War. Increase the visibility of existing open content around this one focal point Crowdsource an archive of knowledge about the event.

an example of new digital storytelling… temporally structured archival blogging… moving us forward in the way we look at our particular corner of history… Oxford’s precursor to tweeting the WW1 Centenary…

It is now cluttered and confused, not helped by tweets commemorating the fallen; not I feel the purpose of the exercise.

One possible advantage of the brevity imposed by the 140 char limit, and the disjointed nature of things that some people have mentioned: is that it gives some impression of the fragmentary, and sometimes incorrect, nature of the reports being received on the way up the chain of command.

A knitted Battle of Arras Collection 2545 Tweets 9 new articles 132 OERs Image: Library of Congress, WW1 Poster Archive. Public Domain.

@patlockley

Transforming learning, teaching an research via new digital content, open licenses, and critical commentary from within and outside the academy is fundamental to more extensive engagement with World War I. But will it move us beyond the trenches?

@KTDigital