Digital Collaboration Colloquium

On Tuesday I attended the Digital Collaboration Colloquium event in Sheffield organised to mark the end of the White Rose Libraries LIFE-SHARE Project.

The day included a number of talks about how institutions can collaborate including an interesting account of the Wales Higher Education Libraries Forum (WHELF) and experiences from the Victoria & Albert Museum. Although the majority of examples focussed on digitisation the principles and lessons learnt were all equally appropriate to a born-digital context.

As part of the day I presented a Pecha Kucha session on the AIMS project and some of the digital collaboration tools that we have found to be effective including Skype and GoogleDocs. In you are not familiar with this format it involves a presentation of 20 slides, changing automatically every 20 seconds and despite cutting the content quite heavily I still found myself chasing to keep-up with the changes. Other sessions looked at digitisation in-situ in a public setting – bringing behind the scenes in-front of the curtain, and other sessions on the Knitting patterns project at Southampton, the Addressing History project based at EDINA and the Yorkshire Playbills project.

The afternoon included a presentation form our hosts on the LIFE-SHARE project and their experiences of the collaboration continuum and a roundtable session that led to a good discussion between panel and audience. With alot covered in a relaxed and friendly atmosphere there was plenty of networking and I’m sure everybody took something from the day.

The presentations are available via slideshare