 So our first talk this morning is Travelling Plants, creating a volunteer-driven TEI XML project model for making archives accessible during the world pandemic. Today we'd like to share with you our Travelling Plants project, which is a collaboration between the Royal Botanic Gardens Q, the University of Rehampton and the University of the Third Age. My name's Kate Telcher and I'm Emeritus Fellow of the University of Rehampton and an honorary research associate at the Royal Botanic Gardens Q. So today we'd like first to give an outline of the project. And then Kiri Ross Jones, who's a senior archivist at Royal Botanic Gardens Q, will talk about its organization and management. And then Dustin Frazier Wood from the University of Rehampton will talk about the Text Encoding Initiative or TEI element. And finally, Kiri will discuss how our project might be a model for the sector and also end with some comments from our volunteers. We're about halfway through our 12 month National Archives test-sped funded project. Travelling Plants aims to transcribe, research and encode the Q record book, which is the first volume in the goods inwards and outwards registers, which is a series of 155 volumes that record the incoming and outgoing plants at Q. We wanted to create a project that uses freely available materials that draws on standard encoding methods developed in the digital humanities and that could be used as a model for the sector. We're now at the midpoint in our project and we want to report on some of the approaches and materials that we've adopted to keep the volunteers engaged in the challenging work of transcription and introduce them to new encoding skills remotely. We've created a website and this is an image of our homepage and designed a staged project with clear protocols. Throughout, we sought to enthuse and also reassure our U3A volunteers and create a supportive network of small groups which encourages the volunteers to work together and importantly to answer each other's questions. The Travelling Plants project grew out of an existing relationship between RBGQ and the University of Rehampton. Some years ago, I started research in the archives for a cultural history of Q's palm house and the association between the two institutions developed further over the years when we've been jointly supervising a collaborative doctoral award. Together, Kiri, Dustin and I identified a research project that would meet two of RBGQ's aims, extend the reach of Q's collections through digitisation and address its colonial past. Kiri informed us of the existence of a complete set of page scans of the Q record book, which is a historically significant manuscript volume in the archives. Running to some 400 pages, this folio size volume details Q's incoming and outgoing plants from years 1793 to 1809. This was the period when the gardens came under the informal directorship of the naturalist Sir Joseph Banks. Unlike later volumes in the series, the Q record book contains copies of letters from plant collectors overseas. As a record of transactions between colonial botanic gardens and major trading bodies such as the East India Company, the volume is a key text in the colonial history of Q. It details the transfer of plants across the world and traces the global origins of plants now naturalised in the horticultural landscape of Britain. For instance, here you can see one of the early entries, which is the list of plants brought home in his majesty ships providence by Captain I in the year 1893. And it itemises plants, which are headed by the breadfruit from Tahiti, New Guinea, St Helena, St Vincent and Jamaica. Now by transcribing and digitising this volume and making it freely available on the biodiversity heritage website. We hope to contribute to Q's ongoing commitment to decolonise its collections. To engage volunteers and communicate the importance of digitisation, I gave a couple of talks on the historical significance of the volume, addressing Q's colonial past and pointing to possible ways that the project might open up future avenues of research. As you can see from these page scans, the entries in the Q record book are in a variety of hands of varying degrees of decipherability. These entries consists of lists of plant names in botanical Latin, and some are annotated with a variety of symbols of uncertain meaning. Now the Latin names pose particular challenges, since volunteer transcribers are unlikely to recognise them, and the spelling is often inconsistent. In addition, current plant names have changed from those in use in the 18th century. Travelling plants was a project born in lockdown. We wanted to create a remote project to counter the effects of pandemic related social isolation and develop the digital capacity of older people who were of course amongst those at highest risk from COVID-19. My colleague Dustin, who we're not lecturing at the University of Rehampton, looks after the library at the Spaulding Gentleman Society, has experience of leading a digitisation project with the University of the Third Age in the East Midlands. And Rehampton University's School of Humanities also has links with the London U3A. So building on these connections, we proposed a shared learning project to the London U3A. And the involvement of the London U3A in publicising and recruiting volunteers for the project has been critical to the project's success. Now I'm going to hand over to Kiri, who'll talk about the management and organisation of the project. Hi everyone, I'm Kiri, senior archivist at Q. So we decided to split the project into three distinct stages for the volunteers, which started after we had recruited them and trained them up. Phase one, which we started in March, involves doing a straight transcription of the volume using our protocols to do that, and also researching the people, place and ship names to create full end nodes that will then be encoded in the second phase of the project. So phase two, which we're just about to move on to, involves TEI XML coding, the transcriptions that have been created, and Dustin is going to tell you a bit more about that phase. Phase three will involve researching and indexing the plant names that appear in the volume. We decided to separate this out because it's a very complex thing to have to do, so we didn't want to overwhelm the volunteers. We'll then publish the images, TEI and transcriptions in the Biodiversity Heritage Library, and also in our own archive catalogue, which is calm. And then finally, we will have a project celebration at Q, hopefully social kind of distance restrictions allowing, and actually get to meet some of our volunteers face to face, which we hope will be a nice end to the project. This phase approach seems to have worked well, with no one becoming overwhelmed, and it's allowed the volunteers to fully immerse themselves in this volume and the transcription or transcribing, and to fully understand the volume and also become expert in the handwriting within it. All the technology that we've used has been free or open source, use the WordPress site for the website. We've used platforms such as Zoom and Pasut, and TEI itself is also open source. Project images have been shared and worked tracked by my own OneDrive, which volunteers can access through shared links, but you could also use something like Google Drive. So we have done various training sessions to get our volunteers started. And at the very start of the project, we created some very detailed transcription protocols, a project working methodology document that we shared with the volunteers, and also some example transcription. We had a launch, a Zoom launch for our volunteers in which we introduced the project methodology. And then after they'd had a couple of weeks to kind of spend transcribing the documents, and we ran a drop in Zoom session where we could answer any queries they had about transcription. This was quite challenging, trying to add these kind of things off the top of our head. But it went well and also gave us a chance to kind of develop our protocols in partnership with the volunteers and create guidance that was really useful for them. We've also had another Zoom session in response to volunteer feedback where we had expert searches Kate talk about the research use of the volume, and we also had someone talking about plant names. As Kate mentioned, we split our volunteers into small working groups to do the transcriptions and their groups of about three to four volunteers didn't really know each other already. And we tried to mix up the skills that they brought to the project. And for example, we mixed up people taking skills with people with historical skills, people with horticultural knowledge. So the secret working I think has been really successful and made the project very self supporting, which has been really important to me over the last year. With most of my team at Q on fellow and also trying to kind of spit in homeschooling on and off as well. And we also wanted to create a self supporting project and model for the archive sector, as we know that you know we're not particularly generously resource sector. We asked the volunteers how they work in their groups, but we have said that volunteers have to get another volunteer within that group to check their transcription as something we as the project team don't have capacity to do. We asked the volunteers to set up a forum in which they could kind of ask each other queries and they chose padlet and we've got here a slide of that public discussion. This is quite a nice example and volunteer a right there and this is a close up of the word I can't identify and in the image above that volunteered the rights chiefly volunteer a right thanks it's so obvious now why did I think it was a fly. That's quite quite a nice example of the use of padlet. And I understand that the volunteer groups have also set up WhatsApp groups for their groups, and so they can also check similar query this way and also try to think socialize, get to know each other. And what we think has worked well, and this is kind of group working a self supporting model and we've had huge levels of engagement from the volunteers. And also, I think a very high volunteer retention during the project we haven't really lost any of them. And that would be to try to get your protocols as comprehensive as possible before starting, but be mindful that there should be some input from your volunteers and they will change. Try to manage expectations around the time supports you can give to the volunteers, for example how quickly you might be able to respond to an email. Think about how you might manage volunteers joining the project once it started be families quite difficult. And also think about the technology you're using for example if you're not familiar with it and something like the one drive and one drive links can be quite challenging. Okay, I'm going to hand over to Dustin now. Thanks, Kerry. So as Kerry and Kate have mentioned, the second phase of traveling plants get volunteers to encode the transcriptions that they've completed into a machine readable digital edition. And this slide, and the next we'll put that in visual terms. So here we have the first stage of the transcription phase, where we have the manuscript leaf on the left, which becomes a transcription according to our protocols on the right. In the next image, however, we take the manuscript leaf and its transcription, and we transform it into the kind of text that you see on the right of this slide, which is the same transcript encoded using T E I XML. And it looks a bit intimidating at first. But once you get your eyes around the angle brackets and color changes. It becomes a lot less challenging and I'll show you maybe how that works in a few minutes. But first, I want to try and answer two questions. Why encode these transcripts and why use T I to do it. One of the concerns with any digital project, which many of you will be familiar with our longevity and obsolescence PDFs are notoriously difficult to edit and word files are notoriously easily corrupted. Because XML files are a building block of the internet and all its parts. There's no real unforeseen obsolescence or foreseen obsolescence, and almost any device can display XML files. And also, let's us add hyperlinks embed media, create mouse over text and add all sorts of metadata to our transcript for unlocking manuscripts that's incredibly important. And by creating an addition of the record book that's immediately and automatically networked through all of these links and all this metadata, we start to reintegrate the manuscript into its national and international contexts, in a way that not only brings it to life, but also makes it useful for people who have questions that we ourselves can't anticipate right now. The form of XML that we're using follows the standard set by the text encoding initiative or T I, which is an international network that maintains a standard for XML encoding that works across languages operating systems and platforms. It is very well supported and it is entirely dedicated to open access. So all of the tools and training materials we need to start with are freely available online. For our process where I'm working to tailor some of those T I training materials around our project. T I is that anybody can tailor the guidance for to make it as specific or as general as they needed to be. We decided to make the transcription that the encoding phase discrete from the transcription phase, primarily because the manuscripts are quite complex and T I we thought would just be too much at the start of the project. You could transcribe straight into T I XML, depending on the nature of your material. So my main role is creating four types of training material, as I said, and I'm assuming in all of these that our volunteers have no knowledge or experience of T I or XML encoding. The training has the four main components that you can see here detailed written instructions, a series of 10 to 15 minute YouTube videos that take volunteers step by step through using T I working with examples from the record from the record book. A set of finished encoded pages that the trickier ones to give volunteers guidance and visual cues when maybe we're not easily accessible. And finally, a series of zoom Q&A sessions to answer their questions. Traveling plants as a test bed project will be reviewing the training materials, all the way through gathering feedback, revising them, hopefully improving them, and then making them available for any other collection to use just by visiting our website. So what's most important, I think in all of the training and for me, as the, I guess the T I person on this project is taking the fear out of encoding. And I found actually the archivists and archive volunteers tend to find T I XML pretty straightforward, because it's essentially just structured metadata, both about the text as an object, and about the content of the text. To give you a taste of what I mean. Here's the start of that long extract you saw a few slides ago. So basically at the structural markers right at the top. You see what we call elements jump out. The first one is a div or division of our manuscript. And that's called a folio. The folio starts with a head or heading. Number 157. So we're identifying our structural components down to the bottom. We've linked a place name. We've linked place names to geographic coordinates that translate to pins on Google Maps. When we get to the reference to the gardens at Calcutta three lines up from the bottom. We have a ref or reference that links those words to the web page of the modern botanic garden in Calcutta. So linking the text out. What's great is that all these standard elements in angle brackets, like headers. It encoded text, both machine readable and machine queryable. So now we've encoded the record book, anyone could almost instantly generate a list of all the people, all the ships or all the plants it contains. It could, we could generate a list of every instance of a particular plant name. We could even begin to query where particular plant names show up near particular geographic locations and start really building up maps and and really understanding this text. So although TEI XML can be intimidating at first, it is a lot like manuscript in that it's just natural language arranged in a slightly unfamiliar way. And that basis in common language makes it fairly easy for volunteers to pick up and easy to work through and build on in bite sized chunks. Once you work out the conventions, it actually becomes pretty straight straightforward and in previous projects volunteers have said they actually quite enjoy it it becomes almost a game. Basically it asks us to think about our texts in structural orderly and hierarchical ways and to organize the information we have about them. For traveling plants in particular and for archive projects more generally that gives us the potential to make our collections more accessible and interactive, while also building the capacity not only of ourselves but also of our volunteers. I'm going to hand back over to Kiri to share what our volunteers have said. Thanks Dustin. Looking to the future a little bit. We're hoping that this project and project and methodology will feed into a larger HRC project which we've just applied funding. This will include further work on the rest of the series of 155 volumes. And we'll look at the networks and the origins of plants and develop new inclusive frameworks reinterpret historic green spaces. So that's all very exciting. Beyond that though, we've made the information in this volume much more accessible the first time it's 220 years of life, you can actually search this volume by plant name now thanks to our volunteers work. We also developed a methodology we can use to transcribe and make accessible the rest of the volumes in the series. And also we're very much hoping that we've created a model for sector that can just be picked up and reused. We still have work to do. And for example we need to find somewhere to host and read the tea tea I filed. And so you know we still do have stuff to do. From my perspective, one of the most rewarding aspects has been working with volunteers and how successful this has been. We did surveyed volunteers to ask them for what they found the most challenging regards to the project and what they enjoyed the most. And amongst the challenges. And you can see some of these challenges and things they enjoy on the word cloud here. The challenges almost all of the respondents said deciphering the handwriting, which is very understandable, and also Latin plant names. One wrote my biggest challenge is not spending too long on my screen. It is truly addictive. And so we've created a new generation screen edit. What they enjoyed and their answers were mostly focused around working in a small groups, the kind of social side and researching the names they found in the volumes and also interestingly deciphering the handwriting. We also had comments about making previously unavailable history accessible worldwide and developing their understanding of this period of Britain's colonial history, which shows the success of the historical element of this project. And a few final volunteer comments I'd like to read to you and one volunteer commented. It was a gift and lockdown to have something else to focus on other than the virus masks and social distancing. And you know, this is great. This is one of the aims of our project. And finally, a final comment was, first of all, I've enjoyed being part of Q Gardens. It is such a special place. It's been part of my life for over 50 years. I'm so glad to be able to give something back in return. And which, you know, it's just lovely to hear, you know, our volunteers are all great. Okay, so finally, thank you for listening. Here are all our contact details. If you want to talk about it, get in touch with like to have some of our protocols or training materials. Please do get in touch with us. Okay, thank you very much for that talk. I just a reminder that Q&A button in the bottom of zoom if you would like to ask some questions. I'll start with a question. What challenges have you found in setting up and running a project remotely? Sorry, I take that one. The three of us haven't met in person for over the last, you know, 18 months, I think it's been really. So, you know, everything's had to be conducted via zoom or teams, you know, and that has challenges. I think with regard to the project and the volunteers, it's more about engagement, you know, how do we engage with these volunteers who've never met us. They're not able to come to Q to the organization for which they're going to be working. They can't see our collections, you know, and it's kind of finding ways around that is keeping them engaged. And also, you know, understanding volume that they're working on, you know, to them it's just a bunch of pages, you know, images of pages, kind of one or someone on the computer. You know, how do we get across to them what this these pages are from and what the volume is. And I think, you know, everything mentioned in the talk kind of the talks that Kate has done kind of about the significance of the volume was showing lots of images of it. You know, we spoke about Q history and all of that kind of stuff we've used to try and kind of overcome these issues of engagement and you know, I think it's worked quite well so far. Okay, so Dustin wants to add anything. I think we, we did think quite hard about engaging and enthusing and supporting and as Kiri said in the presentation that the small group work has been, I think, great at the volunteers supporting each other and forming little friendship groups and sustaining each other and and they've really, you know, enjoyed this activity. And, you know, that's great. Perhaps nothing greater and better to hear in the feedback. Well, thank you very much for your response. We have a question from the audience. But what was the input from you three a part from volunteers. Yeah, which muscle will start with this. I think there are a couple of things that they're giving us back particularly because this is a sort of a test bed project. We're actually asking them to refine the project protocols along with us. And when we were just on the cusp of beginning that the encoding phase, and we'll be asking them actually to pilot the protocols that we put in place for that so it's a very discursive process. And they're giving us back a lot of information and they're also. Sorry, a lot of information about the process. I think they're also giving us insights into how these, how this resource might be used by researchers because they're flagging up questions they're beginning the research themselves. And they're starting to draw our attention to things that I certainly was unlikely to have noticed on my own. So yeah, thinking forward, we're actually benefiting a lot from having those 30 plus pairs of eyes and minds working. Thank you. And another question that's coming. How many volunteers were involved, any issues with dropping out or difficulty with skill development. Yeah, I can ask that one. We've currently got 32 volunteers. At the very start we had one or two more who quickly realized it wasn't the project for them and did drop out but you've actually had I think really high volunteer retention compared to other volunteer projects I've managed with that core group of 32 and you know being involved from the very start. Yeah, so you know that that side has gone really well. You know we have, we have done quite a lot of training with them and develop quite a few protocols to help them, both with the you know the difficult task of transcribing the body and but also, you know, working how to work in groups, and a little bit kind of on using just basic things around the technology kind of how to use one drive links that kind of thing. So it's going to provide a lot more support around the encoding part of the project, which you know I'll be learning along with the volunteers so that you know that'll be really, really nice to do. We may be the retention levels might be due to the fact that that you know from Archer this time there wasn't much else going on. So, I mean, and, and, you know that's, that's worth bearing in mind but you know that's how we also think of this as an important project that this was giving people, you know, a worthwhile activity to be engaged on and I think we did want to stress how important and worthwhile it is. And I think, you know, perhaps the kind of historical significance of the volume helps that you know this is a unique and interesting text and that sense that they were engaged on something important was also helpful. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see when we come on to the encoding phase if any do start dropping out then so that's quite different dealing with the historic handwriting. But we with the group where can we try to mix up the skills within the group so we've got people and you know we've got former kind of software developers and programmers and who are amongst the volunteers. So we've got to go by, you know, really strong IT skills throughout the groups, as well as people with historical expertise and both of botanical knowledge, and we're hoping that they will be able to support each other within the group with this aspect of work and hopefully keep them engaged. Thank you. Just a quick question over Dustin I was curious, like, how many XML files that you kind of end up generating in the end and what are you doing with them all. This is the great question. So we're working because the structure of the project asked the volunteers to work page by page so what I'm doing is creating all of the header and kind of background information for that for one master XML file, they're working in page templates that I've designed and then as those come in, they're checked and just kind of carried over into one master file for the one master XML file. And we're still exploring where it lives at the minute this is this is always a big question. We've got a couple of options, including a possibility that we'll actually publish it using using one of the publishers but that's TBD. Thanks very much for your talk and we're going to move now on to our second talk today. So that talk is entitled starting with solutions, how we made our collection systems and assets work harder. Hopefully, everyone can see the slides just get the technology working. So I'm Guy Baxter, I'm head of archive services at the University of Reading, joined today by my colleague, Joe Vaughan who's the digital editor. And although she can't be here today, we're grateful to Sharon Maxwell who supported us, certainly with the work and with the preparation for this. And we're from the university's museums and special collection services which includes the special collections of red books and archives and the art collections and also the Museum of English rural life. So, some of you may have been at DCDC 19 and heard us talk about particularly about our social media engagement with the Museum of English rural life. And you'll be thinking, well, these guys must be absolutely great digital access. And, you know, we in many ways, we are very good at that we, you know, we have 100, nearly 160,000 followers on Twitter 12,000 Instagram we must be doing something right. And for those of you who don't know what that's all about. And then you may you encourage you to follow us on Twitter and have a have a look at the the impact that this particular, this particular large Ram had it went viral we've had several other tweets since then went viral and have established ourselves as as as I think amusing and also hopefully informative presence on Twitter about about about rural life and the countryside and its heritage. But actually, if you look back to the start of 2020 we were struggling to make content accessible online despite that that social media reach despite having a really large pool of digitized content. It's a really enthusiastic team and we've got 100 nearly 170,000 digital assets on our system so you'd wonder why we'd be struggling with that but actually, a lot of that was was down to something that that Kiri actually referred to in that in that previous fabulous previous talk when she said that that our sector tends to be somewhat under resourced I think she said it's under resourced in terms of this kind of thing. And that certainly certainly always true for us. So, when COVID when COVID struck we knew we had a problem about providing digital access. But we also knew that we had some of the solution we had some of the building blocks to create a solution and quite quickly. I think we probably also realized that in building that solution for the immediate crisis we'd probably solve some of the long term issues as well. But I wanted to say a little bit about give you a little bit of context in terms of how digital access works for us a little bit about us. So, the Museum of English rural life is the University's read of readings largest and most high profile museum, and much of our digital engagement does center around around the museum, and at that level. As I said, our department does manage other collections as well, rare books, archives and artworks on other subjects. So we have quite a few channels quite a few different sort of brands, I suppose. What's our digital activity do it supports, not just public engagement, but also research, university teaching and learning. And the reason I chose this image is because I wanted to say that also a lot of the work and when I when I hand over to Jonah in a bit he may he may mention some of this, because it particularly relates to his work is in the context of Museums partnership reading which is us working with Reading Museum, and the local authority run museum as well. I think most museums, libraries and archives, and especially those which have a strong research focus will recognize that there's a disconnect between access to collections information that's for researchers and access to digital content for a wider audience. And strategies that try and bridge that divide come up against this kind of fundamental problem, which is you've got all these distinct audiences, perhaps with their own preferences. But we can't particularly smaller institutions but even larger institutions can't maintain separate platforms for all of them. So I suppose we might think of this as a spectrum of access at one end, we've optimized you've optimized it for the audience. At the other end it's optimized for the collections system the efficient and effective operation of a collections information system. So audience optimized access, meeting people where they are, and that's likely to be more labor intensive that involves writing blogs using social curating online exhibitions, loading content into gateways and aggregators that kind of work. At the other end, perhaps it's it's it's simpler in that you perhaps we're just putting digital content and attaching it into our catalog. And that's great if for people who already know about the content want lots of it, they can find the catalog, they know how to use the catalog. But but not so good for people who perhaps don't have who don't have those skills or those approaches or that sort of background. Like most institutions we'd like to do both to reach multiple platforms from a single source of truth. But we're aware that new audience possibilities and new access platforms are appearing all the time. Whereas in most museums library and archive institutions, the underlying systems development is working on a very different timescale and probably with a pretty limited budget. And sometimes it's different people are responsible for different things as well. So this is fraught with with with danger. I mean, if we if we develop or adapt our systems for multiple audiences, there's a danger we'll end up not meeting anyone's needs. So the kind of one size fits all approach, but we find that one size actually doesn't fit all. And then of course there's also a danger that you end up with shadow it systems building up where people just are doing their own thing and it becomes unregulated and kind of patchy and hard to manage. So how did we get a handle on this. Well, our approach was to is based around three kind of key decisions that we made. First is to have a digital working group that covers all aspects of what we do digitally with senior management participation. And the second I think is to take an approach which makes our existing systems work quite hard and only to add sort of new developments where that's absolutely necessary. Thirdly, we tried to think about our audiences a lot and in the in the widest sense. And I think this is best exemplified by a conceptual diagram that I did. And quite a while ago, I think it was in 2018 for a presentation to a university wide group. And we were looking at digital technologies more generally. And I wanted to say what we were doing and to some extent planning to do because some of this was theoretical on digital asset management. So at the center you'll see that there's a digital asset management system that we have and I've mentioned before that has tens of thousands of assets within it. And if you look at the circle at the top it actually does link to at least the ad lib part of our collections information, our cataloging system. And then we were looking at what are the other possibilities what else do we need to use these assets for and how do those link up. So for instance, how do we how do we use assets within the website? How do we use them in e-commerce? How do we give users direct access to them whether that's online or whether that's whether that's when they're on site? How do we manage the preservation and storage of those assets as well? So this in some ways has become although it was a model for thinking it sort of became a model for action because of what happened in 2020. And we ended up really taking actions against every aspect of our digital asset management and the things that surround it as the kind of audience needs and the audience expectations shifted as we may recall very rapidly. So one of the first things we did was we gave direct off campus access for staff. So we were only able to access the system when we were on on campus before before the pandemic and that was rapidly changed. And I think but I think the most important thing we did was to identify that there was an urgent need for a better public interface onto all of this to enable users to access and to explore digitized content. And in particular, we were very keen to have the reassurance of a registration process before users could access high resolution versions. And one of the reasons for wanting that was because we wanted to open up the possibility of third party rights holders enabling content to go on to that platform, knowing that it wouldn't just spread and be downloaded absolutely everywhere. So and actually to some extent that that worked. And we were able to manage the access process quite quite well so we can limit it to for instance particular teaching sessions where people need the high resolution content. Our existing systems just couldn't deliver what we needed. We did manage to enhance our opac quite quickly to enable that to show multiple images and that was that was good to be able to do. But in the end, we knew we needed a different solution. And what that moved us towards was something that we called the virtual reading room which I'm going to talk about a bit more in a minute. And the solution we use for that was a PECCO by metadata, which was the basis for this kind of front end on our digital assets to enable public access. But before I do that, I want to just hand hand across to Joe to talk about some of the other things that were going on in terms of our digital engagement and our kind of response to COVID. Hi everyone. Yeah, thank you very much. And also thank you to the brilliant talk from Q just now. That's amazing. Yeah, so I think we don't want to pick up on just two things. One was the amazing comment. I think from one of the volunteers at Q about, you know, how people were, you know, as kind of all parts of, you know, recreation and society closed down, people really were looking for things to do beyond the virus and then beyond masks. And also, Guy's point about our emphasis on, you know, meeting people where they are. And I think a major part of our thinking straight away in the pandemic was thinking about where people aren't and that was in museums, you know, everything closed down so suddenly and straight away I think we recognize that there was brought up more than an opportunity, I think kind of a real, a real need for museum libraries and archives kind of use the digital platforms available to them to bring people collections and try and, you know, keep people at home entertained and informed and, you know, all of the brilliant experiences that people can have in museums to transmit those into online, you know, campaigns and content. Yeah, very quickly, thanks to the digital asset management system that Guy's referred to, we were able to carry on with sharing collection images from home. And the image on the right just there is a mock-up Zoom meeting featuring lots of the fabulous sheep in our collection which did very well very quickly. And I think, I mean, that was the 23rd of March. I can't quite remember the date that we closed but it was very, that was very soon after that date. And then two days later we had, I think one of our most viable posts on Twitter after last year which was an experiment with the then extremely popular video game Animal Crossing where we basically, I think it might have been the morning or the day after the game came out. We recognized that there was a feature in game where people could create their own dresses and clothing. And so what we did is we invited our Twitter audience and in fact all web users who saw the posts to go on to our online collections view our incredible photographs of heritage smocks and then try and recreate them in the game. And the posts immediately kind of went viral. They got picked up by museum press but also incredibly video game press. I did an interview with Polygon magazine which I never quite expected I'd do in this role. But I think straight away it was what was so remarkable for me about this about the campaign and the, I don't think we have a picture in these slides but just the extent of the engagement with it which we've got in an online exhibition on our website was the way in which people were able to participate in the, in the life of the museum, you know, despite the doors being closed, everyone being stuck in their homes. It really cemented for us so quickly that, you know, the opportunity of digital media during this period of closure which back then we had no idea would last possibly, you know, 15 months or more. The sense that digital media really could help us bring the museum into people's homes. And we've been experimenting that with that ever since really in lots of different ways. Guy, if you'd go on to the next slide please. Yeah, and together with, you know, being basically a hub for all of our digital engagement and I suppose also just to clarify that. So I'm the digital editor which means I kind of produce and manage all of our web content, but also all of our social media content. And because all of our engagement became digital engagement has been a year of wearing lots of hats, but it's been a good year and I'm very proud of what we've accomplished. But one other thing that we've been able to do using the online audience we've created is really just build on the resilience of the of the museum. We've long had demand and interest for merchandise, bearing particularly lots of our very stocky sheep. And yeah, absolute unit t-shirts arrived on the scene. I think last winter, no, last autumn, and including lots of merchandise that we produce in partnership with our UK. Our merchandise launch was the most popular launch in our UK history. And I think, you know, the fact that we've been able to use digital engagement one as a as a way of truly kind of creating these museum experiences but also supporting our organizational work and you know the helping support our colleagues throughout the throughout the last year and beyond has been has been incredible really and remains and remains the case. Thanks Joe. So I wanted to just, I wanted to just go back to thinking about the virtual reading room and talk about that because it does actually draw some of the strands together. So as I've said, it's essentially its content behind a registration wall, although most users, even without registering will be able to see low resolution images. It's obviously not everything in our collections because not everything is digitized and also not everything. It has the copyright status that enables us to put it on there. But it is a way of exploring we developed it pretty quickly and we're pleased with it. It works and it certainly relieves relieves pressure is relieve pressure on our inquiry service it relieves pressure on researchers who you literally cannot travel. And even now, you know, with international travel being so difficult, it gives us some options that we're comfortable with in terms of in terms of security, etc. But that also, you know, is relatively easy to use and and to access. So so that was just a quick snapshot of that. But what I wanted to talk about quickly was just the the next steps of how we're building on it if we go think if we think about that circle that those circles you know those other things that we were trying to do with digital asset management. And there's action happening on almost all of those. And the one that we're working on at the moment in particular is about a licensing. So you can imagine with such a large image collection. Most of a lot of which is is photo journalistic images. And there is, there is demand for use of those editorially and also on things like advertising and merchandising. And that's an important revenue stream for us. But we also want people to be able to use that content in a whole range of non commercial ways as well. So, so what we've done is we're extending the virtual reading room to incorporate a licensing and ordering of prints and that type of activity, which is a project we're working on at the moment. Also in the early stages of looking at using essentially the same the same platform, but with slightly different functionality to enable some of our digital preservation actions to happen. And this is really just building on the fact that we've got a system that that has the necessary connectivity that has has the necessary security clearances etc to be able to to do that so rather than from starting from scratch we're building on the work that we've already done. We have already enabled the virtual reading room to support our dedicated terminals. Unfortunately, we haven't actually been able to put those in physically yet but so dedicated terminals in our reading room, which would I think have been one of our really big headline digital engagements for 2020 had the pandemic not happened. And will will happen once we get up and running and that that's going to be really, really useful for us. And then generally we've been doing a lot of work thinking about website integration with our digital asset management system, and directly and indirectly. And some of that involves thinking some really interesting think I think around making the interfaces on our website much more generous in terms of people who don't know what they're looking for, being able to come across interesting, individual content that enables them to, to, to get a view of the museum, which is, which is not not fully curated, but is also not not a catalog system. It's, it's an interface that's easy for people access, but has has large quantities of uncurated or semi semi curated content. And that's then into the into the future. I mean, I think as our digital engagement sort of increased in intensity. One of the things we did was you moved to a Moscow model must do should do could do would like to do for for our digital content. Otherwise, we needed to improve just just to just to keep to stop Joe from from having to help him to manage his inbox. We needed a workflow that maintained quality without creating kind of bottlenecks and and so the prioritization became very, very important. And that's now really being extended to our plans to for improving the website we need a reliable pipeline of content. And we need a reliable pipeline of assets that enables us to present things to the user and that relates really closely to user journeys. I could just jump in very quickly actually. Yeah, I think one, one thing really throughout the pandemic that's been so important, as well as our digital engagement with our audience, it's been our digital engagement with ourselves. You know, because there is simply in the way that, you know, you used to be able to walk around the museum see things that were going on, you'd hear things in passing. That vanished when everyone started with home in a way that really I don't think many workplaces in the world were prepared for. So things like, you know, having having a solid and a solid workflow that everyone was buying into in a very collaborative sense has been just just an enormous factor in everything to do. Yeah, thanks, Joe. Yeah, no, that's really, that's a really interesting point. I think there's there's a lot that we've that we've learned about how we work with each other as well as with our audiences. And I think one of the things that we've been very keen to develop as well is to get our audiences to the point where there's a call to action that might be buying a bit of merchandise or might be booking for an event. It might be planning a visit or it might whatever it is, we want to make sure that the audiences don't just see content. That's not that's not that's not the point of it that we want them to have the opportunity to do something to with that. And so for that, I think that for those transactions to happen between collections and audiences, whether they're simple transactions or whether they're more complex longer term transactions. You know, we need our systems that are behind the scenes to be to be ready for that. And we need those systems to be able to empower those interactions as well. And so that's been really the focus of what we've been we've been trying to do. So thank you very much everybody. If you've got any feedback or questions, those are our contact details. Thank you very much for your talk. I'll start with another question first. So do you have any advice for smaller institutions looking to make better use of the digital assets? Shall I take that, Joe? So I think it's I mean, I think I think it's really interesting. You often look at the larger institutions. We look at we look at people who are bigger than us all the time. And I think you want to use that as your perhaps as your inspiration, but but not necessarily as your guide. Because, you know, everyone has different budgets, different priorities, different audiences. And you want to, you know, you need to develop essentially solutions that work for you and that work for you in the long term and that can be built upon. I mean, one of the things I think that we've tried to do is to is to allow a certain amount of what we might call leapfrogging in terms of how we develop. So, you know, for instance, I mentioned that we have several different brands or kind of approach it, you know, subject areas really to our collections. But we're trying to make sure that things are on the same platform. So for instance, if we develop something for our website for our WordPress websites for the Museum of English real life. We're trying to make sure that technology that technological technological development is also applicable to the university art collections to the to the other university museums to the special collections. So they can then do that and then maybe they will be the next people to get a project or get a bit of money that enables them to do something that might come through through a different channel. And that enables us to but that then benefits back to them else. So I think this we've been trying to do that kind of thing trying to sort of box clever, I suppose, because and I think small smaller institutions need to do that. There's no opportunity really to even the larger institutions. There's not much opportunity to just throw money at these sorts of things. I think just just one other very quick thing. I think with with no matter the size of the organization, I think these things all require like buy in and participation from like lots more people than you might think. I think that's kind of a misconception in in lots of I think in lots about lots of places that they're all falls or maybe one person who's responsible for this content. I know that's obviously possibly unlikely to even exist in a small institution. But I think just having, you know, this focus on digital be a collaborative thing across across an organization is really important. Thank you. Just to remind if you'd like to ask a question the Q&A button in zoom at the bottom there. I'm going to ask a question around technology. So were there any key technologies or standards that were great enablers for you when you're building your solutions? I think I think one of the things about how we work is that you have to you have to keep an eye on the fact that our source standards are always are varied because we've got bibliographic archival and museum content coming in. So you automatically got a situation where where you're having to think about about different standards and you're automatically I suppose within our digital asset system we do. We do try to pull in collections information I suppose that's a effectively a modified Dublin core. But I think from from that point, from that point onwards, I think what we were really thinking about much more was actually about compliance. I think that's and that's compliance from from the point of view of accessibility but also compliance from the point of view of copyright. I think that's in fact that's actually probably been one of the big lessons from this is that you set out on what you think is a sense of that the virtual reading room project for instance you set out on something which you think is a technical project. Actually technologically it was pretty pretty simple. The developers may not agree with me on that but it was yeah it wasn't it wasn't doing anything particularly outrageous on that but I spent weeks and weeks just just going back and forth with the copyright advisors. And I think that's one of the things that I think is is interesting but I think the other thing that's been really interesting is we didn't know what the standards were people weren't doing, you know, for instance, we had we we thought at first that we needed to develop certain things to support university teaching. We then got into a situation where we thought perhaps we didn't but then it came back and it became very the virtual reading room has been really useful in supporting university teaching but in a way that perhaps we hadn't quite expected. So I think, you know, we didn't know what the standards were because we didn't quite know what the demand was in March, April, May 2020. But I don't know if you wanted to add anything Joe about about that as well. I mean I suppose on the subject of copyright the fact that we have really clearly within our digital asset management system labels for images that are copyright free or that we're able to use is hugely helpful in, you know, the kind of delivery and creation of content because isn't that kind of middle stage you know when we're looking to create things on social media or on the website where we're thinking is this image okay for us to use because part of the archiving process or the kind of digitalization is marking whether it's it's fine or not. Which yes it's kind of not quite technology but a huge step in terms of the infrastructure we have. Thanks a couple of questions came in around infrastructure and and dams and could you just talk a little bit more about dams, but we're conscious of time so. Yeah. Okay, so our dams is using the off the shelf solution called asset bank used by a lot of public authorities. We're actually hosting it on our own it's infrastructure, rather than the hosted solution. And then the virtual reading room is using a pexio by by metadata is which is essentially a kind of a catalog discovery front end to it. And that's just taking a feed of the assets not all the assets but some of the assets via via an API. So effectively what it's doing I mean our first and just to say thinking about how we approach things. Our first thing was to say can we make asset bank work as a public front end and the answer to that in the end was no it didn't have enough to be able to do that job it works very well internally but it doesn't work for the public audience that we need in the way that we needed it to work.