“The value to education at all levels will be in their unprocessed nature and the potential for use across subject areas such as politics, sociology, oral history, cultural/media studies. linguistics, gender studies, narrative and memory studies, migration studies, folklore studies, anthropology and contemporary history”
This demonstrates how we saw the value of the “Observing the 1980s” … Read more
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
On 5th October I made by way to JISC’s London office for a workshop on communication and dissemination. The agenda for the day can be found here, along with the presentation slides by Rosemary Stamp, who facilitated the day.
The workshop was an excellent introduction to the practical challenges of publicising a project in a … Read more
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
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
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
Yesterday, 19th July we welcomed Laura Skilton, Matt Ramirez and Dr Guyda Armstrong from Mimas and the University of Manchester to the Library at Sussex. We ran a workshop that marked the start of our invovlement with the JISC-funded augmented reality SCARLET+ project – which is led by Mimas. The aim is to embed … Read more
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
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
