New Connections: the BT e-Archive Project

On the 19th April 2012 we had our first New Connections Advisory Group meeting, which took place at the Coventry University London Campus. Our advisory group contains a broad mix of industry experience and expertise from high level personnel within BT, Coventry University, The National Archives, The Institute of Engineering and Technology, Telefonica Europe, The Economist, JISC, The Science Museum, The University of Reading and The University of Salford.

This mix of expertise means that we are able to gain a variety of views on the direction of the project, marketing, technology and sustainability. The advice gained from such an expert panel means that we are more likely to cover areas that we, within the project team, might not otherwise have thought about.

The first meeting was highly successful with in-depth discussion around subjects including the best ways for a diverse range of visitors to access the archive. We had a strong discussion about how we would do this effectively to such a wide ranging audience which will include: academics, HE students, FE students, secondary and primary students, historians and the general public. Some good ideas were shared by the group which we are now looking into, including tapping into networks through the IET and internal programmes such as BT’s education partnership programmes.

One promotional tool that we are looking into using imminently is the use of Flickr for early sharing of photo’s that will be included in the archive. Using Flickr will also allow the general public to tag photos which could increase the level of meaningful metadata for some of the material being included as part of the project. At the very least, using Flickr in this way will test the effectiveness of social tagging on projects such as ours and also promote the archive to the wider public. We will be liaising with BT in the coming weeks to assess which photo’s can be used but we hope to upload photo’s to coincide with upcoming events such as the Olympics and Queens Jubilee as we have some fantastic content that would fit well with these celebrations.

The Group also talked at length about the technical front end of the archive and how this should look. The technical team already have some great ideas on engaging content for the novice user which comes from past experience on other digitisation projects such as Shakespeare Byte size. These ideas include story boards, timelines and pathways into the archive. The technical team are also looking into more advanced crowd sourcing solutions and an innovative learning space. However the advisory group made some other suggestions which our team will be discussing in more depth, such as geo tagging as well as different search functions for different audiences who are likely to use the end product.

Advice was also given on testing and user requirements which will be of great use moving forwards. Sustainability and extensions to the current project were also discussed by the group with some good ideas being offered up on how to extend the content in the archive to cover other communication forms such as mobile telecommunications. Currently this is outside the scope of the project but could be an interesting addition if funding is available in the future.

The group also discussed EU and International opportunities. All of the ideas shared by the group will now be considered by the project team. We now look forward to the next advisory group meeting which is scheduled for the 12th December 2012 at the Coventry University London Campus.

For the past few weeks I have been working very closely with the Coventry University Marketing and Communications team to map out some fundamental changes to the project website, which is currently located at: www.coventry.ac.uk/newconnections. Some of these changes are essential to ensure that visitors are able to access the very latest information on the project including: important news; updates from our partners and academic work package leaders; and also to assess which events we will be attending or organising to promote the project.

Firstly, it was necessary to sit down and logically map out the different sections that we need on the website and after a few meetings with the web team and our marketing co-ordinator – Donna Ferguson, it was agreed that we would have the following sections for our audience to explore:

1. Main Page – Project Overview
2. News Section
3. Project Partner Updates
4. Academic Work Package Updates
5. Events Page with Events Calendar
6. Contact us page – including organisation chart and important project contacts

At present our project webpage is a holding page containing a summary of information on the project, however in the coming months the project site will evolve to become far more informative and interesting to those visiting it. It is hoped that the changes being discussed will come into place by the end of March. When the changes come into place, I will announce this via our social networking channels and of course via the Blog.

After discussions with Mike Short, President of the IET, we decided that we needed a crowd sourcing element to the website where members of our wider community could share their memories of items that are going to be included in the BT Digital Archive as part of the New Connections project. After discussing this with Sian Wynn-Jones from BT it was decided that we would use the Connected Earth website’s “memories” section (www.connected-earth.com/memories) as a pilot.

People who want to share their memories on the Connected Earth site can add “New Connections” to the title of their post, we will then be able to assess how popular “New Connections” memories are and also easily identify memories which need to be transferred to our final project website.

On Monday February 20^th 2012 Keith Lovell and I attended a JISC Usability Workshop in London, with the intention of better understanding how usability and user experience methodologies could benefit the New Connections project. The session was run by Dr Stuart Church, a usability consultant from Pure Usability Ltd (www.pureusability.co.uk).

The workshop gave an overview of the processes that might be involved in implementing a usability strategy and we were also given plenty of time to discuss how we could practically apply the principles to our own project. It was also a good opportunity to share ideas and experiences with colleagues from other JISC digitisation projects.

A recurring theme in the workshop was that User Centred Design should be an evidence based, iterative process that can broadly be broken down into the following stages:

1)      User research and requirements

This involves identifying who the potential users of the website will be with reference to their knowledge, skill, experiences and technical capabilities, and then defining what it is they will do when they use the site. Understanding the requirements of users is clearly fundamental to any usability strategy, not least because these requirements will form the success criteria against which the finished website can be evaluated.

In the context of the New Connections project, identifying users could be difficult because of the diversity of people who may be interested in using the website. The archive is currently accessed extensively by academic researchers and this group is probably the most easily identifiable user type, however it is hoped that the digitisation will open the archive to a much wider audience, including people who come to the site with a general interest but no specific objective.

It is important that we design the structure and layout of the website in a manner that provides efficient and direct access to the archive for academics, whilst also guiding and informing general users. The four research streams will also bring visitors to the site and the requirements of these must also be evaluated.

To identify and address academic users, it was suggested that the technical team use the experience and expertise of the four ‘in house’ New Connection research teams from Coventry University in order to ascertain how they would wish to access the archive effectively. It was also suggested that a simple questionnaire could be sent (subject to appropriate permission) to external researchers who have previously visited the physical archive.

2)      Design and prototyping

In this context, design and prototyping encompasses not only graphical appearance but also the overall structure of the site, the flow of people’s actions, the design of the interface and the structure of the content. To address these issues for the New Connections project it is suggested that the technical team produce some “wireframe” diagrams that outline the structure and functionality of the site, as well as creating some more visual design layouts. These will be created with reference to the user research outlined above and then presented to the project team for discussion and approval.

It should be noted that there will inevitably be some restrictions placed on the choices we can make by the functionality of the 3^rd party website software that will be used to deliver this project (albeit created with maximum flexibility in mind).

An interesting point made by an attendee from another project related to the importance of considering the design and functionality of the website from the bottom up, starting with the page on which an individual archive document or asset is presented. The reasoning behind this relates to the likelihood that many visitors will come to the site via a Google (other search engines are available etc) search that will take them in directly to the item level, without visiting the home page first.

3)      Evaluation

The evaluation stage will mostly occur once the development work has been completed, and will focus on ensuring that the user requirements identified in stage one have been achieved. In addition to asking academic users for feedback, we should also test the new website with a group (probably comprised of University students) who have no prior knowledge in the project. There are a number of possible methodologies for doing this so an evaluation plan will be created to help identify the most appropriate.

In conclusion, I found the workshop both interesting and valuable – I look forward to applying the things we learnt to the project.