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
A Royal Wedding, disturbing unrest and riots in the inner cities, the distressing rise in unemployment, a British Navy destroyer being deployed off the coast of the Falklands Islands with a Prince in attendance…… 1981-2 or 2011-12?
There have been many strange moments for me in the last three months as I have been trawling through … 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
