 I'm very much looking forward to hearing from Caroline and Vicky and Jenny this afternoon. As Christina said, I've had the pleasure of being a mentor for the fellowship scheme in the last year or so. So I've seen first hand the creativity and the tenacity and the ethical values that our fellows have been channeling into their research in very challenging times as well. So it's going to be a great session, I'm sure. As Christina said, we're going to take questions at the end after all the three speakers have shared their presentations. So do keep putting your comments into the chat and questions into the Q&A function and then we can pick those up at the end. And just one other thing to say, some of the speakers have asked me to give them a five minute warning towards the end of their presentations. So don't be surprised if you hear me suddenly chip in towards the end. So to our first speaker who is Caroline Bolton. Caroline is an archivist at the Special Collections in the University of Leeds. And she's worked in data and records management for local authorities in Greater Manchester before that for 12 years. So she developed experience in metadata schemers in digital records management systems and open data pilot projects. And so she's transferred these skills to her current role as archivist in Leeds in 2016. And since then she's worked on cataloging projects that involve both digital archives and enhancing catalogs to improve the discovery of non digital archives. And today Caroline's going to talk about her fellowship project, which is on archives catalogs as data reimagining archival practice. So thanks Caroline. OK, thank you for bearing with me. So why catalogs as data? Well today I just want to share some of the experience and learning from the fellowship and how it's already informed the work that we're doing here in Leeds. And particularly to highlight some of the benefits and challenges ahead that I think this approach to cataloging can bring in helping us to navigate the digital shift. So really the fellowship came out of my work in putting the funding bit together and I had to create an overview of the collection. Initially I looked at our online catalog and as I'm sure like most catalogs I don't know if we're doing the large number of items limiting how I could refine the search and then also having to click in and out of each item to be the detail item by item. I could download the results, again that was quite an interesting number, so I couldn't easily get a holistic view of the collection from the front end online catalog. However when I went into the back end collection management system and I checked the metadata for the collection I realised that it could be quickly manipulated by all kinds of insight that wasn't available to research from the front end for navigating our online catalog. So just looking at that metadata about locations, subjects, dates and creators gave me a completely new view on the sampling of the collection in a very short amount of time. So the end of the fellowship was really to look at whether we could do something different. Having previously worked on open data pilot projects working with publication and reuse of local authority data, I wanted to see if there was something like an alternative way to make archive passwords available and accessible and published as an open and licensed dataset so that collection metadata could similarly be reused, analysed, mined, enhanced and visualised. And the aim was to explore the practicalities, benefits and challenges of exploiting that data within archive passwords. We go back to this and researchers with a view of broadening access routes and collections, improving discoverability and facilitating new insights at the support of both digital scholarship and collection development and management. With a basic level of data literacy and no coding skills myself, I was very particularly interested in the accessibility of this approach as a way to bridge the digital skills gap, for those that simply wouldn't consider themselves programmers or digital humanities specialists or digital archivists that could still do some really interesting things with the wealth of intuitive tools analysis. In particular I was interested in how we as archivists might categorise in a way that still provides access in a way that appeals to digital audiences, that can also facilitate and maximise the possibilities for research as well. So we will be smarter in the way that we categorise and offer enhanced legacy categorised descriptions, but also in creating a categorised community, increasingly digital archive collections. So, one of the things I think was a real benefit of the fellowship was that it allowed me to strengthen some time, focus and freedom for what can be on my own organisation and learn from what else is going on. One of the things I did early on was to do a visit to the TNA and I had meetings with many of the teams there to understand their work and challenges, both as a repository themselves and also as a sexual lead to the archive community. Although I discovered that their collections weren't exactly like ours, they had much more government and organisational records than our collections of personal papers. They did have both similar and uniquely different challenges. One of the things I found most useful was learning about two key infrastructure projects. I think they called them project health, which was very much more around user journeys and understanding how those could work. And also project media, which was really the underlying data models and meta-dates that made up their many catalogs and underpinned the ways into these collections. So I was able to speak to other organisations too, such as the Archives Hub, to find out more about their roles and aggregator and discovery platform. And similarly, their challenges around users that bring persistent identifiers out to such people in their main project. I also learned from listening to a number of cases presented at the 2019 DC-DC conference and made use of online tutorials. I've just created quite a number of webinars from organisations such as the British Library, and some similar class sexual challenges to access and passports. And most notably would be, I think, more impactful learning opportunities for myself. We've learned at the part in a pilot training session on a course linguistic tool part of an AHRC funded project, all of this is a platform description and a curatorial voice. And it was here that I was introduced to a tool called Icon as a way to analyse text descriptions, which I will come on to mentioning more. So in addition to all this research and parallel, I was also starting to work with two collections to see how I could apply what I was learning. The first was the Leeds Archive of an African Culture, shot into my ABC here. A wonderfully rich archive of audio recordings, photographs, surveys, research papers. In the 1950s to 1980s, we focused on dialects and book life and feature the survey in which dialects. It was extensively well-capped for nearly 2000s, but it does feature some lengthy narrative descriptions that are less suitable for today's digital audiences. So the aim was really to enhance the catalogue to improve access. The second collection that I worked with was the Digital Archive with Writers and Enemies in Environment, and that featured over 10,000 digital files made up of text, image and multimedia documents. So to start with, it was really a case of extracting the catalogue data or the file metadata and simply playing with it in Excel and on the table, just to see what information could be cleaned, where data could be cleaned up or enhanced with summarisation of technology or references, particularly where there were any gaps. I looked at what we could do to integrate new access points such as people, organisations, place and subject as a way of providing new routes and into collections, and to also make connections across and beyond our own collections. I also started to look at the use of globally recognised persistent identifiers and standards to describe things like people, places or subjects to start to explore the possibilities for the data, but also as a way to overcome the limitations of simple text formats which can be brought to inconsistency and ambiguity. Finally, we came up with tools that we could look to use to help us to do this at scale, so we started to experiment with things like spreadsheet add-ons to match the geocord and its workplace, and also experiment with how to refine the data cleansing, but also to semi-optimate matching identifiers for some of the terms that were reckoned in our catalogue using a feature called reconciliation services. The benefits of recording metadata in a much more structured and where possible standardised way are already becoming evident in our collection, the LABC. Just simply by listing informants, it's been possible to reveal the hidden role of women in the survey in English dialects and challenge the long-held narrative that is a survey that was completed by male informants. We've been able to reconnect items separate across collections by listing their creators and providing insight into their provenance. We've also been able to transform place names of stream reference coordinates to enable items to be ported to a map, again helping with discovering insight. For example, it wasn't very clear from the narrative catalogue that the writings relating to Nigeria, but once we actually ported those onto the map, it became very obvious that we had content that was outside of the RI Kingdom. Finally, we've been able to use the Icon tool in a very basic way to help us identify problematic and potentially offensive language as part of sensitivity review. The main outputs from the fellowship is that we now have a very basic workflow for extracting catalogue data, and already we've been able to use this to make data sets available to a number of research projects, such as a recent project to look at the correspondence and network analysis in the bounding collection, which has already started to generate a number of new research enquiries. More recently, we've worked with some of the basic scholars as part of a national archives from the testbed project to look at tools and methodologies for identifying historic bias and problematic language and catalogue descriptions. We're starting to get a growing understanding of how catalogue descriptions might be enhanced through metadata being more structured and standardized, whether that's to disambiguate or link, and the options that we might have for doing this, looking at different standards such as VR, Library of Congress, and look at data just to name a few. We also have a better understanding of options for resources in this type of catalogue, with both new collections and in-pounds in our legacy collections and descriptions, and this includes whether it's a role really for the app, whether it's an opportunity for diverse voices or specialists to help create catalogue spire, remote research, crowd-torting, voluntary, especially in the COVID-19 course for the world. Lastly, we have a growing awareness of the affordable, open source and intuitive tools, such as OpenStym that seems to be constantly evolving to help us do this. All of this has been shared in the blog series as my main output from the hardship, but I think what the fellowship represents really is the testing of it of an accessible but very micro approach to using catalogs as data. We already know from the fellowship that there are benefits to adopting a more diverse approach to catalogue, and it certainly has offered opportunities to reduce and overcome the narrative in some of our catalogue descriptions, and that's provided an efficient way to enhance discovery for digital audiences as well as reduce the risk of unintentional bias that narrative descriptions can sometimes invite as well. It's offered us opportunities to support new research and engagement through visualisations and data analysis, and it's offered opportunities to provide context by linking out to make connections within the collections and organisations. I think it also offers a realistic way to make sense of the high volume digital archives and then massive item level metadata that we're going to have to contend with. But I think with the kind of limitations of the fellowship, I think to notice that really to really kind of realise the benefits, I think it is that kind of scaling up and looking at something on a much more bigger scale than that micro approach. So one of the things that I think came out of the fellowship was really kind of learning more about, you know, there are also barriers to adopting catalogs as data is an approach, which I think present issues for us doing this at scale, but also present wider challenges to optimising the types of digital access that technology now enables us to do and that increasingly audiences are going to expect. I just wanted to quickly summarise what I think some of the key issues here are. The first is the technical structure to do this at both the local organisation level with our own collection management systems, but also at a national level in terms of the aggregators, the discovery and publication platforms and the licensing frameworks that we do in the windows. I'm certainly watching with interest the development of projects such as those that have had towards national collection really because it's those kind of cross-sectoral collaborations that will help us to kind of work out what these kind of things might look like. But I'm also keenly aware that to feed into these types of initiatives and fill in from our own experience, we do feel like we are pushing the limits of the collection management systems in terms of managing access points and holding metadare associated with digital objects and being able to hold things like consistent identity that can make use of local access services. Most of our systems I suspect are like ours. I've had James on some of archival description that this standard was obviously written 30 years ago, probably more designed in mind for handlers that ran top to bottom and general to specific. I think we've been lucky that our system has the flexibility that we've been able to tweak our system to accommodate the increasing amounts of data that we need to hold. But we do require, you know, resources for these exploits, customisations and increasingly we need to do this more often. Which brings me on to the next point and that's really around the importance of standards. Records in context is an emerging data standard or model and possibly a successor to ISFG but I think with fewer exceptions I've come across very few examples of the kind of, you know, moves towards this and it doesn't seem to be a lot of conversation about what actually that would entail in terms of how we would kind of move towards that. And more broadly there's a number of standards to describe in linking entities such as place, person, subject and organisations but these only have value as well if there's some consensus on what's not just across the archive sector but also the wide economy sector. And I think fortunately there doesn't appear to be a lot of increasing discussion and work around this with initiatives such as towards a national collection and the work of people like OCLC. And lastly, just to note on the digital or data skills gap, I think data literacy is still a very specific requirement because we have been digitally looked at and having at least a basic understanding of how to organise and implement the data that we need. We train the spreadsheet applications. It's kind of quite limited in terms of using the text data as they're obviously financial tools. That's despite the fact that so many of us are using for cataloging and for imports and such and other kinds of systems. I think free and intuitive tools such as software and finer tools like to do more in terms of cleansing and classifying. And modernly I found that there is a wealth of applications and open source software that can help to manipulate and visualise data and these potentially offer a breach in that skills gap in that there's less need for high level technical skills as long as we have maybe the time and the confidence to play an experiment with these types of tools. And lastly, I think, I just wanted to leave you with the kind of question that I've kind of come away with from fellowship. And that's really where does the digital shift start and that impetus for change come from and what comes first. So if we or our audience don't understand what's possible, then why ask for more and if you don't ask for more of our systems and articulate our findings and how will Bender's responsible systems differently and similarly if our systems remain the same then our professional practices can't change to what they could become. And I think it's just kind of that front circle then if our practices don't change them, what would that mean in terms of education? And now we continue to train the next generation of athletes in the same ways as our courses and the standard we have to prepare them for working systems that they will encounter and if they're not changing, then because that, you know, I could probably get reflected. So I just wanted to end with a thank you to my mentor Andrew James and his colleagues at the National Archives, as well as others who gave their time to talk to me and finally colleagues at the University of Leith for their support and obviously, RLEU, KMT and A4 fellowship. I think it's been an invaluable learning experience for myself professionally. I've certainly learnt a lot all under way and also the organisation I work for in terms of the continued work that we're doing is definitely set us off on a certain track to try and find out more. Thank you. Thank you so much Caroline. It's really interesting to hear the possibilities that you've uncovered and also the challenges which are not small, are they? So I can see that your research has really opened up a lot of questions as they always do. So our next speaker is going to be Vicky, Iglosgy Broad, who is principal diverse histories record specialist at the National Archives. And in this role, Vicky promotes traditionally marginalised historical narratives within the State Archive and strives to creatively engage new audiences with the collections. And her developing research interests include the history of gender and sexuality, LGBTQ plus spaces and 20th century social change and protest. And I have a special interest because Vicky and I worked, I was Vicky's mentor so it's really great to hear more about the piece of work that Vicky did. And today Vicky is going to share with us a project which is on sex workers in the State and collaboration ethics and challenging histories. So yeah, take it away Vicky. Thank you. So just quickly can I check that you can hear me okay? And I'm going to try and get my slides up so you can bear with me. Okay, hopefully the slides are up okay. Someone do interrupt please if they're not because I won't be able to see the chat. They're fine Vicky. So hello everyone. So I'm Vicky and I work at the National Archives as principal diverse histories record specialist. And my work essentially focuses on diverse voices in our records that have been... Oh perfect, thank you. In our records have been traditionally historically marginalised. So through 2019 to 2021 I explored the subject of collaboration, ethics and challenging histories through the fellowship opportunity that we're hearing about today. And that was with Research Libraries UK, the National Archives and the Wellcome Collection who were a brilliant help through this work. So to take forward this piece of work I focus in on the sample theme of sex work and the state. So in this kind of brief 20 minutes I'll just be taking you through some of the findings from this work, particularly discussing setting the groundwork, the ethical collaborations and some of the associated records work to kind of underpin this kind of potential collaborative work. So I'll first just detail some background then reflect on how this work developed particularly through the pandemic, how it kind of changed and evolved and then just focus in on some of the intersectional records research that kind of developed out of this as the kind of groundwork to potential collaborations. So for some context my fellowship originally sought to address the challenges and rewards of working collaboratively to enrich our understanding and interpretation of what I termed challenging histories and I'll delve into that a bit more in a moment. Due to the pandemic the focus shifted to particularly look at excluded voices in the records and how to address these excluded voices as a foundation piece of work to future potential collaborations with audiences. And this gave me space really to think in-depth about the important groundwork that needed to be done to facilitate truly collaborative and ethical partnerships. So I've kind of got this idea of what I termed challenging histories and I felt that while collaboration is valuable in many other areas and disciplines many of the challenges and rewards are particularly heightened in kind of relation to particularly challenging areas of the records. For institutions grappling with historical archival absences because of past collections biases the benefits of collaboration can be at their most valuable but sometimes also their most kind of difficult and sensitive. So the reason I kind of used this term challenging history was to think about histories that were historically and or currently sensitive. So particularly in relation to sex work not only was it a historically sensitive issue but there are ongoing debates and current sensitivities. I also used this term challenging histories because it often they are histories that represent collection weaknesses, biases and silences so they present a challenge in that way. And then I think predominantly I use the term challenging histories because actually many of these marginalised histories present a challenge to ourselves our own practice and conscious and unconscious bias as individuals and institutions. So it's more about the challenge they present to us rather than kind of stigmatising certain histories. So I found that it was very interesting to focus in on sex work in the state as a category to kind of challenge some of these ideas and test them particularly in the context of a state archive which is a really unique context I think. So hopefully you're aware to some extent of the National Archives collections and what we hold but to kind of recap and set the scene. Our collection is one of the largest in the world containing over 11 million historical documents and public records from Doomsday to modern government papers and files to Twitter feeds there's a real range of materials. Fundamentally our records were created and collected by UK central government departments and major courts of law primarily and in relation to sex work the state has had a long and complex and largely negative relationship with sex workers throughout its history. And our records naturally reflect these biases. So this is a sensitive subject as women, men and non binary people involved in sex work have historically been marginalised by individual society in the state. The state's attempts to regulate sex and sexuality has paradoxically left us with many potential sources often through policy, criminal police and legislation records. Ultimately it's often through the policing of sex work in the past that we're left with so many rich and insightful records and that in itself presents a contradiction and a difficulty sometimes attention. So this can lead to certain challenges in the records especially when working with collaborators with lived experience of the subject such as current sex workers and these challenges can become significant barriers. So just to briefly highlight some of the challenges in the records the records around sex work in the National Archives collections are generally framed by a state perspective. They often come through a legal, medical or moral lens. There's problematic historical language in the records and subsequent cataloging that we might now consider to be problematic and that can be a barrier. There's a lack of obvious sex worker agency in the archives it can be found but it's challenging. There's a lack of intersectional sex worker experiences although I'll then reflect on that a little bit more in a bit. Women in particular are often either seen as perpetrators of crimes in relation to their sex work or as victims so really kind of polarised viewpoints and there's a lot around things that are still really sensitive issues such as police regulation of sex work which is we see a lot in ongoing contemporary debates. Despite this there's huge value in the material held in archives and libraries relating to contentious histories despite the emissions biases and limitations I would argue that it is completely possible to reframe, contextualise and essentially reclaim the narrative in the individual in such records that come from these state perspectives. So I've highlighted on screen just some of the ways that it's possible to challenge this, reading records to raise the grain, for some collections they're able to accession items we're not able to do that at the National Archives to kind of accession missing voices as such our records just come from Government and then one of the ways again we can mitigate that is potentially by collaborating with people who have lived experience of the experiences that you're historically discussing to kind of build connections through the records. So this wasn't something I was able to explore fully as much as I wanted to and that really brings me to how I guess the work kind of evolved through the time that I was working on the fellowship. So this idea of working with people with lived experience was really key and it's still something I want to take forward further but really the Covid context I think was hugely important particularly in relation to sex workers and their experiences. So the effect of a heritage project in collaboration with any marginalised groups affected by the current pandemic would potentially be unethical and exploitative. This isn't a collaboration that was time sensitive, it wasn't about capturing sex workers experiences of Covid for example which would be more time critical and so it kind of seemed like it wasn't the key priority and it wasn't the right priority for sex workers lives. Many sex workers are fighting for day-to-day survival. Sex worker charities are running emergency appeals for funds illustrating the urgency of the impact of the pandemic on sex workers lives. So there's a quote on screen that actually was a kind of pre Covid quote but I think it's still very applicable here. It's from Maggie's, the sex worker led organisation in Toronto. And this quote from their website says, our priority is to meet the immediate and long-term needs of sex workers and our effects and efforts to live and work with safety and dignity. We are vastly under resourced organisation with limited capacity to do this. And so in terms of the ethics that kind of already underlined the fellowship this was really key that it just wasn't the right moment in time to do this but it did lead me to think about the ethics of collaboration and what needs to really underline any collaborations that go forward. So I had lots of conversations with Helen and her team and many other people to think about the foundation work that needed to be done to make sure that collaborations were ethical from the outset. I looked to develop some kind of ethical principles to underline any work that might happen after the pandemic to take things forward. And I also worked on some records-based kind of foundation work to mitigate any kind of barriers that I could see coming up from the archival side of things as well. So one of the outcomes that I wanted to share today was some kind of common sense principles for ethical collaborations. There's still a work in progress and indeed will always be part of a working set of principles that may evolve over time. Each principle has been much more fully defined but this is just the high level stuff just to give you an idea of what it covers. So they're simple things like building trust and being transparent and particularly with a government organisation. I think that's really, really key. Making sure that in the principles there is support for wellbeing, time-space resource and money ideally for that in any projects that happen. So these were some of the core underlying principles. And if anyone is interested I'd be happy to share the more in-depth iterations of these principles and the context that they kind of developed out of. So do get in contact if that is of interest. But what I really wanted to focus on today is the record side of collaborative practice. And this is the element that's kind of developed relatively recently out of the fellowship. So some of it was developed at the time and then there's kind of been extra bits that have developed since I guess. So I was looking at developing essentially an intersectional framework of questions to try and interrogate archival records further and find voices that even within the sex worker records that we hold were even more marginalised. To try and ensure essentially an intersectional foundation for any collaborative projects that did happen. So this research in part explored how it's possible to read items against the grain of their original purpose and kind of read into the records. Or what biases are in the records, whose perspective they represent, any ways that they're framed that kind of changes the nuance of the material. Kind of re-asking certain questions whose voices are unrepresented. Is there any way of mitigating that? Are there any alternative research methods or phrases that could be used to interrogate the records? I'm really re-asking these questions very thoroughly to try and get the best research, the strongest intersectional kind of experiences out of the records. So using this framework which was developed really to support this idea of research to do with sex work, the framework can now be used to interrogate wider archival collections which may hold records relating to other complex histories. And this seems particularly important when approaching a collaborative project to ensure that any record scoping captures the full diversity of a subject in the hope of better reflecting the audiences that we would potentially work with. So the results were an intersectional approach to examine the voices that are missing from the mainstream narratives around sex work, particularly using the archives to highlight the experiences of male sex workers soliciting other men. Sex workers we might now consider to be transgender or gender non-conforming and also the experiences of migrant sex workers. And I've just got a few examples on the screen for you. As a state archive, the National Archives holds many items relating to the experiences of migration and citizenship. These records intercept in a surprising way with past sex workers stories amounting to essentially a rich collection of records of workers seeking to work in the UK. And it was only through interrogating the collections in unexpected areas using the framework that I was able to uncover this potential. In some ways this actually means that we have more details about these sex workers than those who didn't travel from abroad because there was an extra level of interest in their lives and kind of scrutiny by the government. These sex workers were often looked out for at borders, had passport details gathered and were also looked out for in case they'd had marriages of convenience which sometimes means we have things like marriage certificates as well. In some of these files in-depth statements were provided from multiple perspectives giving a sense of individuals' livelihoods and life stories. However this research process and words were essentially different from the same sex worker narratives. So the first kind of image on screen is the image of a woman who on the catalogue is described as well the file is described as marriages of foreign prostitutes to British subjects to evade the operations of the Aliens Act and order. So that individual was within this file that covers the 1920s and 30s in a Metropolitan Police record and we also have associated passport information for her as well. Alternatively the middle image relates to a kind of different area that I interrogated in the records. Archival records are complex regarding gender identity so rarely do we know exactly how someone would identify in their own words with their own choice of pronouns. However there are surprisingly clear stories regarding trans workers in the National Archives records again because of the potential police scrutiny. While it was never illegal to be transgender essentially although it was difficult in terms of passports you can see that in terms of sex workers there was certainly an extra level of policing and the picture in the middle is an assortment of rubberware, whips and a vibro machine used by a sex worker who when questions said I'm not a woman I'm a male person undergoing a sex change. Now it's a really explicit example of someone we would now potentially be considered to be trans although the language didn't exist in those terms at the time and it's really rare to get such an explicit example. You've got five minutes left. Lovely, thank you Helen. And then finally just another example the majority of cases involving sex work in the archives appear to be about female sex workers which correlates essentially with the historiography relating to the sex industry. However there have also always been men who have sold sex predominantly to other men. As with so many other things historically it seems like the societal assumptions about sex work were really speculative but some of the archival material sheds light on some of the lesser known histories here. So on screen are a selection of calling cards from the late 1880s which were seized as part of the Cleveland Street scandal where a male brothel was discovered by police and the government was accused of covering up the scandal to protect the names of wealthy and powerful patrons. So the calling cards belong to the so-called professional Mary Ann's essentially male sex workers so they used this term Mary Ann's to signify in the hope that it would suggest that they were seeing a woman not a man and these sex workers would be soliciting male clients. In times where sex work between men was criminalised there's often confusing confusion in the archival records about when sex was paid for and when it was not because to some extent all of it was criminalised in the eyes of the law. But this example from the 1880s is an incredible insight and we also have some fascinating examples of men soliciting other men in the 1920s and 30s describing how they would meet other men and wear makeup and things like that through our metropolitan police files. So some of this work has led to some recent things a blog on the National Archives website about men soliciting other men and also a blog for the Women's History Network about finding the fragments of sex workers' lives in the archives. So yeah just some examples of what that has uncovered. So I'm now using this framework in the development of departmental training the idea is to get everyone in my department to be interrogating records in an intersectional way questioning whose voices are framing our records and whose voices are most prominent asking whose voices are absent and are there any ways to try and mitigate this or locate similar voices and then ultimately where there are archival silences trying to get people to acknowledge them and to interrogate why this is. So this will hopefully be applied to subject areas as varied as our visual collections team our military records teams and our medieval archive materials at the National Archives. So just some concluding thoughts this fellowship was a really great experience it gave me the time to focus on the ethical foundations of collaboration which I've kind of focused on slightly less today but also how to ensure an intersectional approach to the research and records. The research has helped surface ways of framing the archive to reclaim voices that have been traditionally marginalised within it by using a methodology to examine different historical experiences within the sex worker community. It's very much a work in progress and I plan to do more to surface these excluded voices and take forward collaborations and as part of this I'd hope really to test more of these ideas and practice which was kind of what I originally hoped to do but was obviously very tricky with the pandemic context. I'm particularly keen to work on collaborative projects with current sex workers to reflect on the National Archives powerful but at times problematic records around historic sex work. So I hope that this short presentation has highlighted the potential stories as possible to find within a Government archive and to show how against the odds sex worker agency and experiences can still be found. So many thanks to the Wellcome Collection the National Archives and Research Libraries UK for making this work possible and I'll obviously be happy to take questions later. Thank you. Thanks so much Vicky. It's really good to hear again about the work you're doing and all those critical questions that your research raised and I know that you've got lots in your head to work on in the future so it'd be really good to keep track and not only think about the collaborations that you hope to develop but also that work you're doing internally with your staff. That's really interesting to see how that works as well. So yeah lots to build on. Over now to our final speaker last but not least who is Jenny Aspinall and Jenny is the Assistant Learning Officer in the Library and Heritage Collections at the University of Durham and Jenny has been there I think for eight years in customer service. Very long time. Yeah customer service. Yeah lots of experience and much of that time spent delivering learning activities and outreach to schools and communities and you describe your teaching practice as evidence based and results driven which sounds fantastic. Thank you. So today Jenny is going to talk about how to use archival and special collections materials in an innovative way to develop resources for secondary schools and I think Jenny's main aim was to think about encouraging greater participation in higher education from low participating neighbourhoods and communities. Yeah. Thank you so much. I'm going to share slides in a moment that I'm going to just talk to you I'm afraid for the first bit so I hope you can deal with my face. Hello. Yes I have been here at Durham for eight years and I'm not going to lie to you the majority of that experience was museum based and was also with primary schools and my fellowship as you've heard a couple of times now was mainly about adaptation and that theme is going to come up again and again to the absolute wild ride that was 2020 but when I originally conceived this fellowship it was a reaction to 2019 and we had new targets from the office to students looking at widening participation in higher education and whilst the research was saying that you had to start at primary our bread and butter sessions were primary the targets meant that we had to move to secondary because we needed basically to get the end point a lot, lot quicker. This was something that was entirely new to me and we have some incredible collections here at Durham but the strongest for the secondary curriculum was ASC so Archive and Special Collections material which was new to me it was not something that I had extensive experience in I'd done a little bit with Rosie Morris who had done her fellowship before me, she'd actually come to visit us at Durham, she'd done some amazing resources with some Tudor and with some Tudor I think it was inventories that we did Rosie and I was completely inspired by her work so sort of as a footnote I said that I was going to have a look at some of the things that Rosie was doing and we were going to look at digital resources and the first quarter of the fellowship sort of went as expected we started working with secondary school groups we were using Archive and Special Collections which for me was an entirely new process so things such as research and catalogs the difference between getting students to engage with a physical artifact that you might find in a museum and then something that was written and also a physical artifact that you might find in our kind of special collections was a completely new skill for me and something which was both translated but was terribly, terribly interesting my plan was to go to the TNA we had several so we'd done some test groups we'd done some learning and we had some more schools booked in, we had a whole project we were going to use something called heat tracking data which I'm imagining some people from university may be familiar with so that is data taken from younger students that basically tracks their achievement and whether they enter further education higher education jobs, things like that so we were going to look at that data and then it was March 2020 and in March 2020 a midway through about you would have found me with my forehead on the desk of the Bill Bryson Library here at Durham having just received an email saying my job, as I knew it had temporarily at the time I thought come basically to a standstill and this was the point where a person who a few of you may know appeared almost magically I think that's Liz Waller who is our department head and an incredible woman I'm assured by Liz that we had a full like 10 minute conversation where she shared her expertise and her experience but I was in such shock at the situation that I honestly don't remember any of it and the only thing I remember was a piece of advice she gave me which she said fail fast Jen, I need you to fail fast and she is a complete believer in the fellowship and wanted me to try things out and innovate as we said earlier and my reaction to fail fast was completely not to rejection absolute rejection of the idea I've recently finished a Caitlin Moran book, her latest book and she puts forward a piece of research that says as a woman or a person of colour or a member of the LGBT community you are five times more likely to be fired on your first mistake than if you aren't a member of one of those groups so I was absolutely determined to succeed slowly and I very quickly and actually the value of failing fast both to me as part of this fellowship and also to my students as well which has been a really really surprising turn so in the middle of 2020 I went to lockdown I turned up at my boyfriend's house with the immortal words of it will be three weeks max ed it will be three weeks max turned on teams which was a terribly novel thing at the time I had to come up with a plan luckily at this point as part of the fellowship you fill in the sheets which make you reflect on your practice and that has been invaluable to this process and one of the things that I got to do and it's been mentioned by both Vicki and Caroline was I got time the fellowship gave me time to innovate to a crisis in that situation my plan to go to the TNA was not going to work my plan to go into schools or schools come to me was not going to work so rather than it being something I was mildly interested in digital learning became a driver of what we needed to do to go forward and I'll show you a couple of things now but I'm very quickly going to talk about that time that I got and very much like Vicki we were approaching communities and the answer was this is the wrong moment which gave me even more time to look at pedagogy so digital learning isn't new it might have been new to me but it wasn't new it's not a new concept or even field and Rosie has an incredible amount of experience and was so kind to me with the amount of times I called her as my mentor going I have new information and she was like yeah, yup, yup and then gave me some incredible solutions to problems that had been figured out this was the setup that Durham super, super kind of gave me and I was given all of the tips and tricks and gadgets and this is partly the setup as you can see so we had a DSLR camera and this was very much about this fellowship was about me learning things as I went and accepting failure and adapting and going with it and one of the things I learned within five minutes was that if you plug in a DSLR camera to a laptop those two things don't talk to each other unless you have a tiny bit of kit called a cam link how to use a visualiser the best ways to use a visualiser and actually get students to interact so there it is all set out with all the lovely different labels as to what on earth things are and here it is in action so that's my amazing colleague Emily who is in charge of the tech and there I am I assume teaching but who knows maybe just pointing to the setup that we went forward with and we basically developed an entirely new session for us an entirely new way of working which was digital school sessions these were basically our long live sessions so people called in just like you are now I was on the end and I could talk to them live we thought that was really important as well as having the asynchronous resources for them to go to either before or after and have a look at really wanted that live element they were aimed at key stage 3 and 4 and particularly sixth form students this is really interesting they were all topics linked to the curriculum although that's changing we're getting teachers more and more asking for things that are not linked to the curriculum that are actually expanding their students knowledge and one of them actually is again to echo some of the things Vicki said is LGBT history I'm looking at getting students interested in histories that may not be on the curriculum per se all of them and we come back to that widening participation idea were based around skills you would need to university and we were very very strong and I was very strong at both signposting these skills we found that with this age group we very much had to sell the session to them not just to their teacher but to them and to say that this is why this is important signposting the skills and knowledge in a way in which it would help them if they were interested in university so we set these up almost as seminars and I mentioned earlier about the importance of failure and the session itself has that in it so we set them pre-work just as you would have in many higher education institutions and if they don't do it the first 10 minutes of the session is a little bit awkward I'm not going to lie obviously there's a plan B for if they haven't done it but one of the really important skills that we got and the feedback we got from both the students and the teacher was they really loved the idea that if you didn't do it we had to spend 10 minutes doing it which means you missed out on something else and that these students really wanted to learn that now before they headed to university the idea of independent learning and obviously all of this had collections at its core so these as I've said it was very much skills based and what we found with the students which in a museum is slightly different was that we had students who were struggling to engage with the ASC material almost as an artifact they wanted to know because often in school they had been either given a transcript or questions related to an item and they wanted to know how this was relevant to their studies now and we often had to kind of reverse them a little bit and get them to look at these items as physical items so the game that you can see is literally a spot the difference which is fun but also it teaches you an importance for example the importance of damage the fact that this item has things missing means you're going to miss information these two items are actually different additions as well so the idea of there being different information in different additions and this was some of the feedback we got which was overwhelmingly positive they were so passed with it that actually I'm going to stop sharing now Miss had a she ran into a little bit of a problem where her students kept putting the session in UCAS applications and she kept being like can someone write about something else but actually working with tech as well on a personal level for me was an entirely new thing and imposter syndrome hit fast so I was very much it kind of got out that oh Jen's doing digital learning ask her questions and I became very quickly aware that being good at tech is a complete myth it's a skill like anything else like playing an instrument like a language the more you practice it the better you get at it anyone can do it and Rosie was extraordinary in the many phone calls there were with me going but anyone can do this I'm just YouTubing stuff and telling people what I learned part of this reflective process was very kindly Rosie was saying to me you're taking the initiative to look at this information you're taking the initiative to then spread it and use it and the fellowship was the thing that really really super supported me in doing that of allowing me to be reflective of allowing me to mess up the first sessions that I did were fairly experimental and I was continually surprised by both the schools who allowed my relationship with them basically means that they allowed for certain things they allowed for the tech not to work or for me to try things out the first time we did the seminar and I said to the teacher what if they don't do the pre-work and she had the confidence of going I trust you that you can adapt and talk to them about why that might be important and why that might be an important skill and I was continually surprised so I suppose I come back to that idea of fail fast and how working within this crisis has actually taught me the value of adapting and the ability to look at a problem and then adapt look at a problem then adapt so what are we doing next as well as continuing with the live sessions which we're doing at the moment and they are becoming more and more popular I will say that primary school particularly has hit we found this term particularly has hit a digital fatigue particularly primary school sessions we found was with the secondary school sessions there is still an absolute appetite for those and one of the things that we found is that it's not just within our local area that people want to do sessions I know I've spoken to Rosie about this and she has a similar experience of it being because it's a digital session you can dial in from anywhere but yeah it's been an extraordinary extraordinary experience and I'm so grateful and I want to say thank you to everybody who's helped me, Rosie particularly who's been brilliant but the way in which the fellowship is set up is an extraordinary opportunity and if any of you are thinking about it I'd absolutely encourage you to do it so I'm going to stop rambling I think I may have run out of time have I Helen or can I keep you going no if you want you've got another five minutes another five minutes incredible I was going I think on the old timings that we had okay so I will talk you through some of the videography stuff that we have she says so another thing that I've got to do is as well as the live sessions is to look at a thing kind of the courses so video editing became a massive part of what I now do and pedagogy that backed that up so things such as 12 12 the 12 multimedia principles of mayor you want to say that fast don't you which brilliant framework the creating videos that help students to learn in every way possible both through audio and visual the best video I did was meant to be a 20 minute lecture and we recorded loads and loads of stuff and in the end there were five usable minutes of items and I learnt a lot about the skills of presenting to camera about the amount of material that you need to prepare and yeah again the idea of kind of having the opportunity to fail and then adapt and also it then turned out that there is some recent research that's come out of China which says that the average or the like optimum length for a video for you to learn from is seven minutes long and this research has really guided kind of the asynchronous resources that we've made and also the live sessions as well where we started very much breaking them up into seven minute chunks and also adding interactive elements in there as well so one of the things I got from Rosie was we started doing actions games as well so literally yesterday I was teaching a pre-history class it was year three and we were learning about paleography not paleography I've got the wrong word haven't I paleography there we go no paleolithic there we go blimey my brain if not I don't have enough coffee and in the paleolithic you obviously get modern humans so we go us and then we have the mesolithic where you get the melting of ice water so that students are going blub blub blub to show you the rising sea levels and then in the neolithic you get farming so you get them pretending to farm and by using these interactive elements one of the things I came to Rosie with was that due to digital poverty throughout the northeast but more generally as well sometimes the internet connections were so dodgy I couldn't see the students always doing the actions or if I needed them to answer something I couldn't always see if they got their hand up so it was all about developing that relationship with the teacher to feed back to you and being very clear with the teachers to kind of what the expectations are for me to say hi Jen James has got a question for you all as Rosie taught me just to make the actions bigger so for yes putting two hands up for no putting arms right out so that I can really see those exaggerated movements and kind of all sorts of interactive ways in which we could do learning so we started doing quizzes where you could do one two or three as an answering obviously you could just hold up or do a sign to show which one you wanted to pick and yeah it's been a real real challenge working in digital learning in 2020 and we are still waiting for the opportunity to kind of have students back in the archive and I think one of the things that I'm going to end on is that there is a real real value to the physical all the physicality of these documents as well which is something that you struggle to get across digitally working with kind of the archivists around me as well and the issue of copyright can I photograph an item from the archive and send it to a student like what are the copyright implications of that how does that work what wording could we use and these were things that the TNA absolutely kind of already had in place and their help was invaluable in going hi this problem I've just discovered you probably already have a solution and Rosie was absolutely completely invaluable in the kind of answers and the things that she gave me so thank you so much for listening I'm really looking forward to the different questions that you're going to come up with so Helen can I pass back to you please yeah thanks very much Jenny I have to admit that my laptop crashed right in the middle of your talk I'll do it again I'll do it again please I'll catch up separately I did hear the beginning and the end thankfully and it was so soon to hear you talk about reflective practice as well because that's something that we're thinking a lot about welcome and I'm thinking about and that idea of failing fast it's scary to be willing to say it's absolutely terrifying and also it's the thing that I learnt was that it wasn't just terrifying for me it was terrifying for my students I think it is terribly hard to be a young person right now particularly a young person in kind of looking towards education and the ability to experiment with something the ability to just risk not knowing I think it's something that's being able to learn earlier I think it's a real and also that there's a question which became notorious on the form which is are you on track and if ever there was a question you didn't want to be asked in 2020 it was are you on track right that kind of having to go through periodically and say okay so am I on track well the answers no but how am I going to adapt how am I going to keep going what is possible what isn't I think really really valuable even kind of going forward and kind of yeah and I think that's something that comes out from all our speakers today it's like yeah the way all of you had to reflect switch tack be really creative yeah so thank you so much for everybody speaking it was really brilliant to hear you and thanks to everyone putting questions in the Q&A as well I see there's things building up in there and there's some nice comments in the track function as well I've got to head off now but I'm going to hand over to Christina who is then going to introduce the next session and enjoy the discussion yes thank you very much Helen for chairing and thank you to everyone for serving your fantastic work and your experiences the experiences through your fellowships now I would like to welcome Rosie Morris who is the education web officer at the National Archives and she's going to turn the discussion session Rosie I'm handing over to you thank you Christina and also thank you Jenny you're very very good for my ego so yes I'm very very happy to be chairing this next section of this session which is a Q&A with all of our speakers today so Caroline and Vicky if you'd like to turn your cameras back on and my friends on and we can start this discussion there are quite a few questions in the chat and in the Q&A already so if you do have any questions for our speakers please do feel free to type them away in there and hopefully we'll try and cover as many of them as possible I'm probably just going to ask them in the order that they came in so we'll be starting off with some questions for you Vicky so the first one says would you define this form of collaborative ethics as a way to practice public history what would you say about that yeah so I've been reflecting on some of the questions which are great so yeah I definitely see it as a potential approach for public history I guess I should say I'm not an archivist I work in an archive but a lot of my work is around engaging people in the materials so I would say I practice public history a lot day to day whether it's in our reading rooms talking to members of the public or trying to come up with events or blogs or things like that so this framework is now something that I think about all the time to inform my work to make sure it's ethical and in terms of the record stuff in sectional so from my personal experience I definitely say it can be used as a way a form of a way of approaching public history I guess ethically and that's something I do day to day so yeah from my perspective certainly but really interested to hear other people's opinions on that as well yeah I think it's a really interesting aspect of the professional fellowship scheme both this year's cohort and the previous cohort that I was actually part of a lot of us haven't been kind of archivists or actually a lot of us didn't even do kind of research as our kind of main part of our jobs so the fellowship allows as you all have said today some time and some focus to be able to develop our professional practice in a different area or to do that research that will help us progress in our careers and in our handling of the collection in a way that benefits the public which your project certainly has so I'm going to move on to the next question which says how do you balance representing complex histories in archives and making records accessible to researchers through things like subject indexing which in essence can be quite restricting as you have to essentially attach labels to records in order to aid that discoverability yeah I think this is a really really tricky one so again that's part of the reason I want to say that I'm not an archivist in the background so it's not something I necessarily work with today although we're all kind of thinking about the ways of making our items more findable and I think there's a huge tension between the ethics and the language we might use now and what we use in the collections to catalogue the collections potentially and there is this tension between findability and what are the most logical words people are going to use to come to our collections and then what are the right and ethical ones and I think there needs to be a kind of bridging somehow between the two so it's not something I particularly focused in on this piece of work but it's something that we're definitely working on all the time so I don't really have answers but I think the welcome collection is actually doing really innovative work in this area so it's a shame Helen had to dash off but they're doing a lot of work I believe kind of consulting with groups about the cataloging of their library collections and the terminology that should be used there but I think it's just a continual debate for all of us and discussion it's one of the most significant things and certainly in terms of our collections at the National Archives we tend to catalogue with the language at the time because language is always evolving we don't know if our language will necessarily be acceptable in 20 years time or whatever the case may be and that's I guess the most authentic way because we don't know necessarily when it comes to things like particularly LGBT history what pronouns someone would use how they would identify before the language actually existed so yeah I think there's a lot of interesting work to be done there and I guess my work was kind of on the fringes of some of those discussions but it's a difficult one and I think it will keep us all occupied for some time Absolutely and you shared with us your 12 principles that you came up with as kind of a result of the research that you have done do you have any plans to kind of share those principles with the kind of wider archive sector to really try and spread those kind of those ethical ideas with other organisations beyond TNA and the welcome collection Yes I'd be really keen to although I am conscious that they're so constantly evolving that I don't really want to put something kind of static out there and even since the kind of deadline I guess of the fellowship the final piece of work they're still evolving and I've had more meetings since so yeah I think it's for me to think about the best way to share them while kind of making them kind of a changeable document maybe so if anyone has any ideas I'd be very grateful to receive them but yeah I'm definitely keen to get them out there Caroline I'm moving on to you now with this next question can you say anything more about the methods the test spread project to locate problematic descriptions will employ it sounds really interesting Yes it's just kind of come to an end actually is the test spread project so they are open to share the resources but I think a lot of it is around scale and applying computational methods to look at legacy descriptions because obviously you know we've got hundreds of thousands of legacy descriptions and obviously the text within them as well can be quite dense so I think there were kind of two strands to it partly it was about building a glossary of terms and that was obviously very much contingent on what the collections yet that you were coming with because obviously in different context different works and different things so from a linguistic point of view I know there was a lot of then research into how those could be used and how they may kind of you know flag up and then the second part of it was then how we could build those glossaries into a tool such as the conference of the sick tool I mentioned for which is an prompt to identify as I say kind of like raise those flags to say these words have been mentioned here and I think what it was in terms of scalability I think what it was in terms of the things you could look at the count and you're going from 12,000 words that you might need to check down to maybe 8 it may be that those are false positives but it's just about that scalability of the results it takes for us to kind of check those power descriptions it makes it much more manageable so as I say I think they're hoping they'll too really be exposed that we're involved with that so they're hoping to share those results I think that's the main question and do you see the idea of yeah kind of data mining these these catalogs as something that should be I guess research led or is it something that organisations and archives and research libraries can really build into their kind of the UX their digital versions of their catalogs can they learn from this kind of cataloging project in order to develop their public facing side to make those tools easier and more accessible to the general public at large? I think it's both I think when we kind of wrote the bed we were very much kind of keen on it being a tool for archivists to be able to use but also to engage researchers and I think really it's about still engaging with different stakeholders that may know more about those collections or those communities that are represented in there so I think that's where you get the opportunity to kind of work with communities or researchers outside kind of the archive community so I think it's both really like I think it's the reality is that for small archives where it's just an archivist on their own perhaps they're not going to have that resource to be able to go through their collections it's something that they can perhaps engage other people to help them do. Yeah and on a similar night there's a question here that says would it be useful to have collaboration between glam professional bodies with Wikimedia UK to develop things like online lessons to help us create share and enrich collections and item data with linked data and attempt to level the playing field and share cost of development for a mutual benefit kind of creating a set of standards across the organisations. Yeah I think Wikidate is something that our organisation has been looking into I've got some colleagues that have been working a lot more closely with Wikidate and I think it definitely presents opportunities for us to link different collections and I think probably as well I suppose it's kind of it's demanding dependent it's not any kind of library museum and I think we need to kind of understand the role that Wikimedia it's linked to Wikimedia as a you know most people when we're going to do their research they'll pop and start at Wikimedia later and we've discovered a point of view for us not to link him to something as big as Wikimedia or Wikidata it seems strange so I think it's yeah I think it's definitely potential for collaborations to understand how we can kind of hook into all that kind of architecture. Great thank you and Jenny over to you now. So this comment says just to say your discussion was superb I'm wondering wondering in terms of making connections with the schools and how this was done was it through a schools liaison team or did the schools get in touch directly also do you have a video team within the library or is this a central university resource? Okay so I'll do them in two different parts because my dyslexia otherwise will just mean that we end up on some magical mystery tools so Rosie please jump in if I start to go off on the magical mystery tour of wonder. So the first bit how are we contacting schools? So it isn't through a liaison team although Durham is currently trying to take all of these different outreach groups that are in different departments and kind of centralise us more and having us talking more so I'm hoping that that's going to feed in with more schools it's from basically long working relationships so working with local school teachers both secondary knowing who to contact is really important so we do do marketing but knowing exactly who your history department lead is what they're interested in what their timetable is that is an incredibly important thing because we've often found that if things are sent to the schools centrally that's where they stop so actually having a personal relationship with your history leads sociology leads, politics leads I'll stop naming subjects I promise that's really important what has become incredibly surprising for you and I'm going to be very sorry to that person this is an unsatisfactory answer is that it's growing beyond that we're having schools contact us and we think it's through basically web optimisation that's how we think it is but one of our processes of working with these new schools is being like hi how did you hear about us in Kent, like how and also I think I'm super lucky for the institution that I work for has a really good reputation and that helps teachers be like oh it's Durham I know what I'm going to get the sort of quality and the way in which we're going to engage so we do our own marketing schools contact us directly which can be really really helpful sometimes in just being able to really understand what you can offer a teacher and also being able to answer questions almost immediately to say okay well this is what the session entails here's the content how do we tailor it to your students do we have students who have like send and here are the things we often find that if we do have send students it's easier for us to offer a solution rather than say for a teacher to say this might be helpful if we offer solutions we get better answers and better basically access and what was the second bit Rosie before I start? It was do you have a video team within the library or is this a central university resource? But we do not have a video team we definitely do not and Rosie will be able to tell you that from the panic teams calls so we do have a central commons department and we do have a framework and we do have certain things we have to use and search some guidelines but it has been trial and error very much in terms of producing stuff so in terms of writing scripts in terms of directing the material in terms of filming the material and editing it that is in-house which has been an explosion of skills for us that we simply to be honest didn't have before we are extremely lucky in that Durham has given us a lot of the software that we need as well as the hardware say things I'm currently using Camtasia mixed emotions about Camtasia so we are not going to lie but that is what we are using and kind of audacity for podcasting and things like that so we have been doing audio guides as well in-house so yeah it is in-house whilst we do have guidelines it has been us making things and very much us keeping ourselves to a high standard and reaching out to people such as Rosie being like hi jump cuts look awful and make them look less rubbish and the idea of kind of zooming in a bit maybe doing multiple angles to things copyrighted music understanding where you can get music that isn't copyrighted from and it also depends on the platform that you want to put things in Durham has very different rules for different platforms it's strictest rules apply to YouTube I think we need to explain that do I it's going to reach the most amount of people so therefore it needs to have you know be really high quality and it has slightly less higher standards for kind of the internal things so if we were going to experiment with something that's maybe where we'd start but yeah I hope that answers your question if you want more information please thank you great thank you and yeah I think something that's really come out through all of the discussions has been the help and support you guys have found from your partner institutions collaboratively and all the discussions that have happened throughout the scheme a questions come in that says it seems like really productive new networks and connections are being developed through these fellowships and are there any ways that these could be supported beyond the fellowship timeline but I'd also just like to kind of expand on that slightly more and asking you yeah how did working with your partnership organisation age your project in the first place and that's kind of open to all three of you so whoever wants to jump in first I can go yeah so working with Wellcome was just incredible because they're so forward thinking in their inclusion team so it kind of constantly had me on my toes and challenging my own thinking and practice so they were really helpful they were also really just generally kind of supported and open minded and we are now working on kind of having a group kind of network where we continue to discuss inclusion practice going forward so we can share our best practice between TNA, Wellcome and maybe some other institutions so there's something kind of longer term that's come out of that as well but yeah it just from the second I kind of started the fellowship they just got me thinking in bigger and bigger ways and that was incredibly helpful because you know I'm sure most institutions we can kind of get stuck in our own little bubbles and kind of forget about the bigger picture and all those things so yeah just the challenge it presented I think to some of my own ideas was really really enriching if nothing else Caroline how about you I think I said a little bit about that initial visit for me at National Archives and meeting all those different people in different groups I think naturally the National Archives is that sexual lead so you know they are actually quite innovative and research focused and I think for me it was really useful having all those ideas in one place you know there were people I could talk to about AI and different things around data models and where they're going and things so it was yeah to me it was it was really good to kind of work with that kind of you know organisation where they are so kind of far ahead of the curve because of their role as a sexual lead and we do then kind of reflect that back into our organisation Jenny So I think my answer is going to be slightly more informal for me and the project that's going learning is one of those things that evolves by the second digital learning evolves probably even faster and it is evolving immensely I was reading a report that says in terms of digital learning they believe in the last one year we've advanced five years into what we were expected and it's going fast and it's evolving with teachers as well who as I've mentioned earlier primary school particularly have hit digital fatigue in the experience that I'm having at the moment whereas secondary are really embracing it so it's kind of a little bit more informal a lot of the time it's me just emailing Rosie and Rosie emailing me and being like hey do you want to get a coffee and zoom and see how you're doing but also I think that is particularly with digital learning is that there are certain people who are doing things talking about them and the ability to kind of know who that is to kind of email them and say hi I'm stuck on this chances are you've already done it or what are you doing so in the moment I think it's kind of for me been a more informal relationship but also I think of talking to people around me and saying hey have you considered doing a fellowship as well and kind of being almost annoyingly evangelical about the opportunities that's afforded me and the amazing people I've got to meet because both the TNA and my dyslexia can never cope with this RLUK have so many connections and like Christina literally knows the amount of times I've emailed her and she was like yes I know exactly the person you need incredible so despite the fact I think it's fairly informal in terms of my project I think that these things have a way of kind of almost organically growing particularly in terms of learning and the way in which teachers and educators talk to each other sometimes ramboli and for ages so I'll pass back to you Rosie it leads me nicely on to my last question actually which was what advice would you have for anyone considering taking on the professional fellowship scheme and becoming one of the next cohorts to give it a go again that's to all of you so whoever wants to jump in first shall I so I'd probably give two pieces of advice one maybe don't do it in a pandemic maybe pick another time don't like I know that that's hard and that you can't see that coming but like maybe don't do it then but I think seriously it would be don't be afraid to when it says are you on track right no I'm not on track like I know it's been a theme but actually the ability to adapt embrace that like this is an incredible opportunity to learn and sometimes learning means failing and adapting and pick your mentor so that they have like similar interests really make sure that they are super interested in what you're interested in that they have time to do this as well so I think those are kind of my two three pieces of advice one maybe avoid a pandemic two do not be scared of adapting and failing and going with it and three really build that relationship with your mentor they will be invaluable in providing Harry Potter quotes to make sure you feel better thank you Rosie you're very welcome Vicky on to you yeah very similar advice just I think embrace having some time kind of to do this stuff permission to have some time to focus in on fellowship stuff because I don't know about other people but you know life can be busy and often you don't have that moment to really pause really reflect on your practice so I really recommend doing it so you do have that time where you don't feel guilty focusing on this stuff and you can yeah kind of really delve deep I guess into some of the more theoretical things so yeah I'd say that's the biggest plus of doing it and that's the reason I'd recommend it also the first thing that came to mind was yeah don't do it in a pandemic and Caroline I would agree with both Jenny and Victoria I think it's very you know a few and five between opportunities where you get to really kind of indulge your interest in something and really have the opportunity to kind of dig deeper with it the reality is that you know getting to that safe role isn't it you know there's always something else to be doing where this actually gave you that focus and that like say that freedom I think for me to really kind of dig deep and in a very short amount of time to my own professional development I think it was that you know a massive learning curve that I don't think I would have done in my ordinary work I think you know you can still work in innovative organisations and you can learn a lot along the way but I think it really did fast track how much I learned in a quite short amount of time