The digitised images of our Mass Observation materials have arrived. We’ve now got 4,000+ images, mostly of hand-written answers to the directives, but there are also a number of typed responses (increasingly so towards the end of the decade).
Here are a couple of example pages taken from the Summer directive in 1987, where correspondents were … Read more
So having selected a variety of ephemera materials from the Documents Collection at the University of Sussex, the latest activities have been focused on getting permission to digitise and make them available openly online. The materials themselves range from a union booklet warning of the dangers of privatising BT to a YWCA booklet … Read more
In early May we held a workshop with three second year undergraduates who studied the Thatcher’s Britain course, to review and select items from the University’s ephemera. Here are their thoughts on the experience:
Samantha Fennessy – ‘In going through and selecting ephemera for the Observing the Eighties project it provided a … Read more
Coming back from the Content and Discovery programme meeting in Birmingham I was thinking about a phrase that was mentioned a few times over the two days – ‘unintended consequences’ or ‘unintended impact’. We were talking about the stuff that comes about as a result of your project, that you might never have imagined, let … Read more
We are looking forward now to involving some of this year’s undergraduates (who have studied the Thatcher’s Britain course on which our OER will be based) in selecting some of the University of Sussex’s ephemera collection to digitise alongside the Mass Observation writings and British Library oral histories. Getting them involved gives us a chance … Read more
At this stage we are deep into selecting material for the OER from both the Mass Observation Archive and the British Library Sound Archive. We’re basing our selections on a set of key themes which underpin the current undergraduate course, and on which the final OER will be broadly based. These include … Read more
We plan to publish material from Mass Observation (MO) correspondents who wrote in the 1980s and interviewees whose oral history records are held at the British Library.
We were initially optimistic about not needing permission for publishing MO material, as the MO Archive already had copyright assigned by some correspondents, while others had signed … Read more
Putting the plan together for a project like this is a critical part of the start-up activities Unsurprisingly JISC requires projects to produce a comprehensive plan in the first few weeks, based on a detailed template, which is undoubtedly the result of their years of experience, and is tailored to cover all pertinent information, … Read more
Welcome to the Observing the 1980s project blog. We are very excited to begin this sixteen month JISC-funded project to create an Open Educational Resource (OER) using material from the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex and Oral History Collections at the British Library. We will be choosing and digitising content from both … Read more