First of five training events will kick off with an in-person session at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh on Tuesday 31 January.

The British Library’s Repository Training Programme for cultural heritage professionals is funded as part of AHRC’s iDAH programme to support cultural heritage organisations in establishing or expanding open scholarship activities and sharing their outputs through research repositories. You can read more about the development of this training programme in this blog post.

What will you learn?

This one-day training session is designed as a starting point to a broader set of knowledge that will help you to:

• Understand research landscape in cultural heritage organizations, benefits of openness for heritage research, basic concepts of open principles and influencing decision makers.
• Lay foundation for repository services including stakeholder engagement, policy development, technical overview and project planning.
• Adopt common principles and frameworks, technical standards and requirements in establishing repository services in a cultural heritage organisation.
• Explore basics of scholarly communications ecosystem in the context of cultural heritage practices.

Who is this training for?

This programme is intended for those who are working in GLAMs (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums), specifically a cultural heritage institution or a collection-holding organisation in roles where they are involved in managing digital collections, supporting research lifecycle from funding to dissemination, providing research infrastructure and developing policies. However, anyone interested in the given topics are welcome to attend.

Prerequisites

No previous knowledge of topics is required. However, an understanding of open access will maximise the benefit of the taught content for attendees. We will provide pre-readings for the basics prior to the event.

Training outline

Trainers will cover topics of following four modules through a mixture of regular presentations, recorded/online content, engaging activities, breakout sessions and self-directed learning materials.

Module 1 Opening up heritage research
This module covers the topics of understanding research landscape in GLAM organizations, benefits of openness for heritage research, basic concepts of open principles and influencing decision makers.

Module 2 Getting started with heritage GLAM repositories
This module covers the topics of stakeholder engagement, policy development, project planning and technical overview of research repositories

Module 3: Realising and expanding the benefits
This module covers the topics of adopting common principles and frameworks, compliance with publisher policies, types of research objects and outputs in cultural heritage, rights management, technical requirements, and engagement with researchers, usage and reporting.

Module 4: Exploring the scholarly communications system
This module provides an overview on the topics of scholarly publishing, research data management, persistent identifiers, rights management and copyright, responsible research, and digital preservation accompanied with a breakout activity to discuss challenges and prioritize topics for an online follow up session.

Duration and programme

This is a one-day programme takes place from 10:30 to 15:30 GMT with a lunch break for an hour. A detailed programme will be provided to the attendees prior to the event.

10:30 – 12:30 Module 1 and 2 with 10 min. break

12:30 – 13:30 Lunch break

13:30 – 15:30 Module 3 and 4 with 10 min. break

Members of Research Infrastructure Services Team at the British Library will be delivering the training programme. The team has over ten years of broad experience and extensive knowledge in supporting open scholarship across the sector and with international partners. They also provide a Shared Research Repository Service for the cultural heritage organisations.    

Book your place

In-person sessions are planned for a maximum of 35 people per event and registrants from cultural heritage institutions will be prioritised. Registration for the event is free. Please fill this form to book your place by 25 January. Confirmation and event details will be sent to the registered email address.

Further face-to-face sessions will be held before July 2023 in York and Wales. We will be providing more information about upcoming events in the coming months. 

Please contact [email protected] if you have any question or comments about this training programme.

Here in Digital Scholarship we are looking forward to the Library’s upcoming exhibitions in 2023, including Digital Storytelling (2 June – 15 October 2023), which we are curating with colleagues in Contemporary British Collections and Digital Preservation. This display will explore the ways technology provides opportunities to transform and enhance the way writers write and readers engage. Drawing on the Library’s collection of contemporary digital publications and emerging formats to highlight the work of innovative and experimental writers. It will feature interactive works that invite and respond to user input, reading experiences influenced by data feeds, and immersive story worlds created using multiple platforms and audience participation.

A number of the selected works for this exhibition have been previous shortlisted and winning entries of the New Media Writing Prize (NMWP). An annual international award, which celebrates exciting and inventive born digital stories and poetry that integrate a variety of formats, platforms, and media. In recent years the Library has been working with the prize organisers to collect and preserve entries in the UK Web Archive (UKWA) New Media Writing Prize collection, which is the topic of this recently published Electronic British Library Journal article:

G.C. Rossi, T. Pyke, J. Pope, R.L. Skains and S. Wisdom, ‘The New Media Writing Prize Special Collection’, Electronic British Library Journal (2022), art. 8, pp. 1-19, https://doi.org/10.23636/kw7j-0274

The NMWP UKWA collection is an ongoing initiative with works added from each year’s prize. To hear more about the 2022 shortlist entries, Library curators will be virtually attending the upcoming Awards Evening on Wednesday 18 January 2023. This online event is free and open to all, if you would like to attend please book a place here. Writer Deena Larsen will give a keynote lecture and winners will be announced for the 2022 Chris Meade Memorial Main Prize, the FIPP Digital Journalism Prize, the Writing Magazine Student Prize and the Wonderbox Opening Up (People's Choice) Prize, which celebrates all eligible entries submitted to the Main and Student Prizes. Opening Up does not affect the shortlist/winners in the other categories, but provides an opportunity for a public vote for a favourite; you can browse entries and vote for your favourite here, the deadline is 11:59pm GMT on Sunday 15 January 2023.  NMWP organisers are also holding a virtual two day Digital Literature for Social Good Unconference on 17-18 January 2023.

Looking ahead to summer, we are collaborating with Bath Spa University to host the MIX 2023 Storytelling in Immersive Media conference at the Library on Friday 7 July 2023. This event will provide an opportunity for scholars and practitioners to share current research and practice in the rapidly developing field of storytelling in immersive environments.

MIX 2023 themes include storytelling with AI, interactive and locative works, digital and film poetry, narrative games, digital preservation, archiving, and enhanced curation. The call for presentations and papers is open until Monday 13 February 2023. Proposals are invited for 15 minute papers or presentations and 6 minute lightning talks from technologists, artists, creative writers and poets working in the digital realm, as well as academic researchers and independent scholars, submissions focused on teaching and pedagogy are also welcome. After the conference there will be an opportunity to publish papers on The Writing Platform, an online magazine for sharing knowledge and expertise around digital innovation in publishing and storytelling. If you have any questions about the MIX 2023 conference please email [email protected] for more information.