Community: Creating Community Engagement with Your Collection
Code: HDC019
Presenter: Niall McNulty
Venue: Lecture Theatre
Date: Thursday April 11, 2013
Duration: Quarter day, second session in the afternoon
Style: Lecture
Participants: 30
Prerequisite: None
Cost: R495 (ex VAT)
Niall McNulty is an award-winning digital media consultant who has worked on projects with the eThekwini Municipality, the Goethe Institut, the Luthuli Museum, the Universities of KwaZulu-Natal and Cape Town, and The National Museums of Kenya.
Niall is particularly interested in how digital technologies offer new ways of engaging with communities. In his work with the Ulwazi Programme, an initiative of the eThekwini Municipality’s Libraries and Heritage department that uses the public library infrastructure, the community and Web 2.0 technologies to collect and disseminate indigenous knowledge and local history, he has used these technologies to democratise the collection process, allowing input from a number of diverse sources.
What content will be covered?
Niall will discuss new and emerging mobile, web and social media technologies and explain how they can be used to engage and grow a community around your heritage project or institution. Using examples from the Ulwazi Programme – and other projects he has been involved with – he will explore ways this community can be used to crowdsource content (documents, photographs, audio and video) that can be used in your exhibitions or collections, providing unique perspectives and new ‘histories’.
What will I gain?
You will have a broad knowledge of the digital tools and technologies available to engage with your community and will have strategies in place to use these technologies to collect content for your own heritage project. Niall will also discuss ways of incorporating this content into existing exhibitions and collections, and deal with the issues of standards and verification.