LTUX - UX in Cultural Heritage
With weather warnings in place I was not sure I would get to this months LTUX event, but the snow held off and I managed to get up in good time for their UX in cultural heritage event.
It was a fascinating evening which focused on the archiving of the web - both how to do this and its importance.
Our first speaker was George Oates speaking on how to make digital collections accessible in the same way a physical collection is. Her thoughts were very much about how you are likely to wander through a museum, but this is hard to do digitally and so she has created a way of doing this.
She is also working on a project called Museum In A Box which allows you not only to touch the items, but also hear about them.
Next up was Nicola Bingham from the British Library.
Apparently the British Library is a legal deposit, meaning UK publishers have to supply them with copies of all their printed material.
But now that so much content is online they have started to ask the question of how they can keep archives of this material for researchers of the future interested in contemporary UK life.
The UK Web Archive is the result, with 2+ billion individual items and 70TB of data saved per year. This includes viruses that they might have come across while archiving a site.
You can request your site is archived on their site.
Last up Anisa Hawes and Losana Rossenova spoke about a project to archive digital posters. We have all seen these posters - the memes you see on social media. Although the posters are interesting it is really the context of the posters which is most important. By using Webrecorder they can follow the context that a poster is seen in and so give better understanding to future researchers.
It was a very interesting if cold event. I found it comforting to know that others have already started to think about these things, things that I have wondered myself. Mainly how will researchers of the future understand life in 2018.