Digital Project To Create New Archives

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A couple of projects run by the University of Bristol will help in the creation of new digital archives for the people of the city, with funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Know Your Bristol on the Move – an initiative tracking how people travel in the city and beyond – will now include working with different communities in the city to create mobile digital archives.

That will enable members of the public involved in the project to access information more effectively than before and the funding has been welcomed by Professor Robert Bickers from the department of history. He said: "This is a really exciting opportunity and our team will be working with a diverse range of new and established partners across the city of Bristol. There’s a large critical mass of such projects now at the university and we shall be working with them as well."

A second project will help monitor the experience of people living in care homes and how a sense of community is created there, with a digital database of objects to which people can attach stories being established. With the archives being academic instead of commercial or connected with public services – such as a council or hospital – the developments may demonstrate the diversity of such stores of data and provide organisations of all sizes with an example of how they can use digitisation to make handling the information they hold easier.

Indeed, the two Bristol projects are among 11 sharing in the AHRC's £4 million Capital Funding Call for Digital Transformations in Community research Co-Production in the Arts and Humanities. Speaking to the BBC earlier this week, curator of the Mass Observation archive in Sussex Fiona Courage noted the archive uses both electronic and paper storage for its data.

The social observation project, which began in the 1930s, has had its papers moved into a new purpose-built centre in Sussex. Ms Courage said there has been "a lot of debate" recently about the ways in which the digital lives of people can be recorded electronically. Storetec News/Blogs. "http://www.storetec.net/news-blog/digital-

project-to-create-new-archives". Digital Project To Create New Archives. November 21, 2013. Storetec.