Case Study UoS
SCARLET+ at University of Sussex
University of Sussex Special Collections has long been interested in how new ideas and technologies can allow our collections to be used in different ways, as our recent projects with linked data and Open Educational Resources demonstrate. In the Scarlet Augmented Reality project we saw the chance to be involved in a developing field which promises to expand teaching and outreach opportunities for archival collections, which by their very nature cannot be used outside a very specific environment. Although there is no experience that can recreate looking at the original documents, not everyone can, will, or knows they can visit an archive. AR and other tablet based digital technologies seem to offer a way to take archives out of the reading room and present them to new audiences in as authentic a way as is possible.
MOP & Observing 1980s – OER and outreach
Scarlet+ focuses on our Mass Observation collections, with particular focus on material digitised as part of the JISC-funded project Observing the 1980s. Mass Observation was established in 1937 as a social observation project in which people around the country were recruited to become what Mass Observation’s founders described as “the cameras with which we are trying to photograph contemporary life”. The move in the 1970s of the Mass Observation Archive (MOA) material to the University of Sussex inspired the establishment of a second phase of collecting which began in 1981, named the Mass Observation Project (MOP), a living archive which continues to this day. Mass Observation provides researchers with a vast collection of qualitative data on many subject themes, and over the past ten years the archive has been involved in various projects to increase their accessibility, both to researchers and to anyone wishing to use it to teach at all levels. The importance of the Observing the 1980s Open Educational Resource (OER) is that it gives easy access to MOP material and allows its free use for educational purposes. The OER will also be embedded in a 2nd year History course, run at Sussex by Dr. Lucy Robinson.
