Author Archives: Jill Kirby

Tuesday, March 12th, 2013

Feedback video

Find out what students and other users have said about the Observing the 1980s collection in our video.

Friday, November 30th, 2012

Poofters, Pop and Pandemics

On the 28th November Dr Lucy Robinson was invited to speak at the Lesbian and Gay Newsmedia Archive (LAGNA) event Poofters, Pop and Pandemics at Bishopsgate Institute.  The evening began with an introduction to the LAGNA archive by Robert Thompson who demonstrated how useful the newsmedia archives could be in understanding gay experience and … Read more

Wednesday, October 24th, 2012

Dissemination, repositories and social media

While final work is going on to put all of the many links to the digitised materials  into our OER, we’re also now focusing on how we’re going to get our resources seen and used.  As well as the university’s own research repository, Sussex Research Online,  where we hope eventually to place all of … Read more

Friday, September 21st, 2012

Observing Tattoos and Textiles with Davison High

Here’s Dr Lucy Robinson’s report on a great visit from students from Davison High:

On Friday 14th September a group of 14 Year 10 students taking the BTEC in Fashion from Davison High School came to the archive to explore attitudes to body adornment (particularly tattooing).  Their teacher Ms Jane Green had arranged the visit to … Read more

Wednesday, August 29th, 2012

Information architecture or what will the OER look like?

Although our OER is broadly based on an existing taught course at Sussex, materials for which sit on the University’s Virtual Learning Environment, the addition of a huge quantity of primary sources means we need to rethink its structure.  Like many of the apparently ‘simple’ steps in this project, this turns out to be a … Read more

Monday, July 30th, 2012

Managing the unexpected

One of the important elements of using Mass Observation materials is ensuring the correspondents’ anonymity.  Although some are perfectly happy to be identifiable, many are not.  For that reason their contributions are listed under a unique identifier code consisting of a letter and number eg A883.

What we have found recently, however, is that many people, … Read more

Monday, July 16th, 2012

Mass Observation 75th Anniversary Conference

What better place for some project publicity than the MO 75th anniversary conference last week?    Thanks to our banners and leaflets and the very marvellous project necklaces (modelled by Jessica above and in detail below!)  we garnered some really useful interest in the project.  Academics running courses at various UK and overseas … Read more