Amazing Archives

8th September 2017

Gillian Johnston – Education Outreach Officer

Kimberley Gaiger – Senior Archives and Education Outreach Assistant

Stephen Harding - Library Systems Developer

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Special Collections

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Special Collections

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The Background

• November 2015- May 2016: Newcastle University Special Collections participated in Culture 24’s Let’s get Real -Young Audiences programme

• We were one of 19 diverse arts and heritage organisations involved in this programme

• Common aim: get better at reaching and engaging children and young people through developing effective digital content

• Each organisation had to conduct an experiment to reach and engage children and young people online

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Special Collections

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The Inspiration and the Idea

• The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York Metkidswebsite – website made for, with and by kids – uses colourful, cartoon style illustrations of items in the museum to enable children to explore the museum without actually physically being in the building

• Can we get more children aged 9-13 to engage with our Special Collections by working with a group of children, a children’s illustrator and a web designer to repackage some of our existing digital content for a younger audience?

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Special Collections

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The Rationale

• Limited capacity for school visits to Special Collections

• Web-based resources have the potential to reach a much wider audience

• Some of our Collections already available online- Collections Captured and Treasure of the Month - but aimed at an adult audience

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Special Collections

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The Process: a summary

School selected to work with

Children visited Special Collections and

selected favourite items

Children’s illustrator drew the items for website homepage

Children gave feedback on draft illustrations

Illustrator added children's ideas to final

illustrations

Content created for webpages

Mock up of website produced

Children gave feedback back on draft website

Children’s suggestions included in final version

of website

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Special Collections

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Selecting a School to work with

• We ran our experiment idea by a local Middle School teacher who brings children each year to our Cracking Cholera workshop

• She was keen for her students to be involved and chose 8 students to take part

• We provided information for parents about the project and arranged for the students to visit Special Collections

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Special Collections

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Visiting Special Collections

• A small group of children (2 from each year group Y5, Y6, Y7, Y8) visited Newcastle University Library and selected their favourite items from Special Collections

• They researched their chosen item and explained why it appealed to them

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Special Collections

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Creating a visually appealing home page

• We employed a children's’ illustrator to illustrate the items chosen by the children and some others chosen by us

• We visited the school and showed the children draft sketches of their chosen items

• The children provided feedback and suggested ideas which were included in the final colour illustrations that went on the website.

The children loved them [the illustrations]. Their faces lit up

when they realised their ideas have been used.

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Special Collections

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Creating the content for the webpages

• We used items that were already available on our Treasure of the Month pages and Special Collections blog

• For writing the text, we were inspired by Horrible Histories

• Language used was simple and complicated words were explained

• Split up information about an item into different categories

• We created the content for the webpages using a separate folder for each item…

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Special Collections

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Creating the content for the webpages

Find out information about the item through questions using

the 5 Ws:

Who? What? When? Where? Why?

Links to short videos on Newcastle University’s Youtube

channel

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Special Collections

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Creating the content for the webpages

Used previous games that linked to the item.

If there were none available, Steve the Student game was

used – user has to answer 5 yes/no questions to get Steve to

graduate

Voice recordings of the school children talking about the item

that they had researched

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Special Collections

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Creating the content for the webpages

Links to other Amazing Archives item pages, any other items

or themes that are relevant from Treasure of the Month or

blog pages

Any unusual or interesting facts that haven’t already been

covered

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Special Collections

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Creating the website

• Illustrations provided basis for design

• Web space – hosted internally – archivesalive.ncl.ac.uk/amazing

• Design and development done in house

• WordPress custom template with various plugins

• Big buttons for interactive whiteboards

• Responsive for smartphones and tablets

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Special Collections

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Creating the website

• jQuery used for quizzes and page animations

• Audio editing in Audacity

• Videos hosted on YouTube

• All free tools / services

• Website can be edited by anyone using a standard web browser

• Documentation

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Special Collections

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The finished website

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Special Collections

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Special Collections

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Getting feedback on draft website

• The Education Outreach Team and the web designer visited the school

• The children were shown a draft version of the website and gave their feedback on it

• They came up with ideas/suggestions to improve it further – e.g. adding some pop up ‘fun facts’ to the Discover page

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Special Collections

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What we’ve learned

• Co-creation of web-based resources can be a rewarding, and enjoyable experience for everyone involved

• It’s important to listen to and get feedback from your target audience

• You may need to manage people’s expectations

• Good communication is key

• Don’t under estimate the time and resources than you think you’ll need

• Creating digital resources is one thing, marketing and promoting them is another!

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Special Collections

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What we’d do differently in future

• Keep the initial ‘experiment’ small and manageable

• Plan the project more rigidly to include must have and nice to have elements

• Have an official, formal launch of the web resource in a school assembly

• Gather formal student feedback at the end of the project as well as during it

• Spend more time in advance considering how the digital resource will be promoted

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What next?

• Discuss ways to promote our digital resources with Library’s Marketing and Communications Group and implement these to increase traffic to the website

• Organise content by subject area/topic to make it easier to find relevant items

• Continue to add items to the website

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Special Collections

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Any Questions?