Tag: archives

Museums, Heritage, Archives and Social Media

Today we are in Shrewsbury delivering a workshop for an array of people that work in museums, heritage and tourism from across Shropshire and the West Midlands.  We’re running a session talking about the importance of building social capital and working hyperlocally. The day will be roughly structured as follows:

  • Building Social Capital and making use of it – including time to reflect on how this relates to what you are trying to achieve.
  • Working Hyperlocally, What does this mean and what does this look like? Your examples – are you already doing this? – Show us.
  • Lunch/Social Media Surgery and Networked learning. A practical session with support from Podnosh and learning between yourselves – time to start exploring the tools and concepts we discussed this morning.
  • Where next for you. Group discussion, based on the thing you’ve learnt in this mornings session and started to put together in this afternoons surgery, What is next for you?
These are the notes from the discussions that took place after our presentations

 

Building Social Capital

Nick Booth talked about Social capital – your social capital is the group of people, or the community you build around your cause or organisation.  These are the people you have invested time in and in return they are prepared to invest time in you to get things done/ make a difference / help you out.

Q. But is this bigger than our individual organisations? Social capital can work on a large scale – but also for individuals, and individual groups. Sharing information, being social and useful helps build your social capital and helps you make things better.

Q. But what about the groups what have already – if they are reluctant to use use the internet? It usually only take s one or two people to come on board for others to start seeing the benefits,

To make the best use of your social capital and to see it really work you have to build it in the first place – it’s just like any other relationships – the more effort you put into it, the more you’ll eventually get back out of it.  

Working Hyperlocally 

Hyperlocal is a really messy word to imply something niche and local – this could be a street, a neighbourhood or somewhere larger like a City. WV11.co.uk is a hyperlocal website that covers Wednesfield a neighbourhood in Wolverhampton,  yet Connect Cannock is also a hyperlocal website that covers the entire town and the surrounding areas in Cannock, Staffordshire.

Museums, Tourism and Heritage organisations  are also Hyperlocal – serving areas both big and small, but that are local and niche.

Hyperlocal Blogging

Steph Clarke talked about her Wednesfield Blog =  one of the questions that was asked was around competition – if there are lots of people in an area all talking about that area isn’t that overkill? In short the answer was no. NO because the useful website will outshine the useless ones and on the other hand the more people talking about an issue/cause/place online the more varied and vibrant the conversation about that place will be.

Another question was asked about community and conversation, how long does it take to moderate and how is the community built? Going back to the points that were made about building social capital – in the beginning it took more time as we were building the trust and building the community, Now, on a day to day basis we can keep the facebook page up to date and moderated in around 20 mins a day because we don’t have to moderate conversation – the community help us by managing themselves. Posts to the main website can be scheduled.

Tools

A brief look at some of the tools discussed.

  • Facebook: Pages vs Groups – one is more public than than the other.
  • Twitter: start conversations, join in conversations, look for “local” hashtags ie #oswestry or #shropshirehour
  • Tripadvisor – What are people saying about your venue or attraction?
  • Foursquare – what tips are being left, gamify visits prizes for the mayor?
  • Blogs – talk about what you are doing. Invite others to write for you

Links

Here is a list of links and resources that were mentioned by attendees or discussed in sessions that would be useful to look at and share experience.

 

How museums and arts organisations in the West Midlands are using social media

Wolverhampton Archives
Photo of Wolverhampton Archives by yamahapaul, Midlands Heritage Forum

Last week, we worked with a group of people from museums, archives and arts organisations from across the West Midlands to help them develop their existing social media activity and to think how they can increase the level and impact of their social media work. We met at the Wolverhampton Archives, in the fantastically restored Molineux Hotel Building.

Emma Cook, Museum Development Officer for Birmingham, the Black Country and Telford & Wrekin has posted the discussions:

Data, crown copyright, archives, listening to communities and the "empowerment heist".

I’m rootling through my feed reader catching up.

On Thursday Tom Watson announced that Crown Copyright was to be revised so those wanting to data mash with information from the Office of Public Sector Information will now be automatically granted a license. With a rather neat turn of phrase “They say information is power, but only distributed information is truly empowering” he went on to say:

the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI) has looked again at the restrictions of Crown Copyright, and now a licence will automatically be granted to anyone wanting to use the information rather than having to apply beforehand.  OPSI has also shown how Government can publish in a ‘web-friendly’ way rather than just as PDFs, and I want to see this approach rolled out across Government.  Today I’m pleased to announce that COI is launching new standards on quality to make Government sites as effective and easy to use as possible.”

The COI site on web site clarity was first mention on the Power of Information Blog and is   http://usability.coi.gov.uk/

The Guardian has been continuing it’s Free Our Data reporting, with Charles Arthur a little underwhelmed by the announcements above:

Umm. It’s not quite the revolution that some of us were hoping for. It doesn’t even yet seem to legitimise the re-use and repurposing by sites such as theyworkforyou.com of the contents of Hansard – which is Crown copyright. That’s the trouble with tectonic shifts, though. Nothing seems to happen for a very long time, and then sometimes it happens all at once.

I don’t agree, (and neither does Tim Davies) the shift won’t be seismic in the sense of some sort of overnight social media sensation.  The last 5 years has seen steady change and the groundwork is still going on at government level.  The COI’s social media guidance document (a pdf – tut) says civil servants should:

Help non-governmental bodies to build new services by structuring information so that they can combine public data with private data.  Avoid replicating what is already being undertaken by non-governmental bodies.

Wednesday saw the launch of a 12 week consultation called Archives for the 21st Century, again data, how we capture and share it will be at the heart of this.  The press information mentions one wonderful example of a data set created from digitising the log books of ships going back to the 17th century.  Hour after hour mariners from Britain, Holland, France and Spain would log the time, their position and the weather.  The CLIWOC project is now a database for Climate Change Study.  Another example they use is Birmingham Stories.

Also on Wednesday Downing Street restored the e-mail the Prime Minister service and Hazel Blears announced that one way for councils to save £600 million a year was by listening to their communities.  This riled Julian Dobson who called it an “empowerment heist”:

‘Involving communities are key to unlocking greater savings – when it comes to finding efficiencies, empowering local people is part of the solution, not part of the problem,’ she said.

There is of course some truth in this – councils that listen to local people and provide services that are valued will achieve more for their money. But the crude equation of ’empowerment’ with savings is dangerous nonsense: there’s no rationale for turning what may be a fortunate by-product in some circumstances into the raison d’etre.  Yesterday’s speech might have been excusable were it not for the ten years of rhetoric that had preceded it.

Ofqual’s new Chief Officers report has been made comment-able and Spaghettitesting listed the Government winners of the Webby’s including a non-governmental site from the transparency movement  GovernmentDocs.org.