JISC

‘RunCoCo: how to Run a Community Collection online’ offers free training and open-source software to help collect and catalogue digital photos, films and interviews from the general public, and to enrich the metadata of existing digital collections by harnessing the enthusiasm and knowledge of a community.

RunCoCo exchanges knowledge about digitising and curating a ‘community collection’ and is building a support network to facilitate this two-way communication. These collections can be organised by small institutions in the education and public sectors, because they cost comparatively less than traditionally-funded digitisation projects. RunCoCo is a project based at the University of Oxford, funded by JISC. RunCoCo builds on the success of The Great War Archive, part of the First World War Poetry Digital Archive.

Aims and objectives

• Disseminate key software tools (e.g. CoCoCo), methodologies (e.g. a communication strategy), and work-flows (e.g. how to run a digitisation 'road-show') by e.g.:
  • Publish online materials;
  • Host four training workshops;
  • Exchange knowledge using social media etc.

  Anticipated outputs and outcomes

  • Open-source software (CoCoCo) for other projects to run community collections;
  • Documentation and material passing on best practices for community collections;
  • Training workshops;
  • Support exemplar project to collect items (early English Medieval/Anglo-Saxon period) through community collection;
    • Formative feedback and evaluation from the exemplar project about the CoCoCo software, the documentation and training;
  • Help for projects funded under the JISC Grant 13/09: BCE, e-Content & Digitisation programmes: Developing community content;
  • Final summative evaluation of the RunCoCo deliverables will feed into the decisions being made about the processes adopted to create a community collection as an alternative to costly digitisation projects.

• Oversee an exemplar project in a teaching and learning context as a baseline study;
• Reflect on the possibilities and future developments of community collection digitisation initiatives in a final report.