Run a Community Collection Online
Community Collection....where the general public or members of a particular community are invited to contribute to a project by uploading their own content or adding information to existing resources.
Do you want to RunCoCo?
RunCoCo offers advice, training, and support to those looking for new ways of working with the public for impact, outreach, and engagement. Contact us if you want to RunCoCo!
RunCoCo is based at the University of Oxford. It
builds on the success of The
Great War Archive, part of the First
World War Poetry Digital Archive. The Oxford Community Collection Model brings together online collection and face-to-face engagement, and has been successfully used to create digital, user-generated collections since 2008.
We are currently working with Europeana
1914-1918 - a community collection project for memorabilia
and stories from the period of the Great War (1914-1918) from across Europe. Watch this video to learn more about our work (3.12 minutes)
RunCoCo was originally funded under the JISC
Digitisation and e-Content programme - Institutional Skills and Strategies (Strand A).
Resources
RunCoCo has developed free guidelines and work-flows to help you set up, run, and sustain a community collection (see the Resources section).
Our report RunCoCo: How to Run a Community Collection Online (2011) presents a simple A, B, C of advice for projects and groups who aim to 'crowd-source' with sustainable success.
You can also download RunCoCo's open-source software, join a support network and access material from our training events.
Case studies
![photograph of Bombardier William Gaunt [seated] from the Great War Archive](images/illustrations/gwa.jpg)
Examples of how to run a community collection online are offered in the Case studies section. Projects featuring include The Great War Archive (collecting personal items from the First World War) and Project Woruldhord (collecting digital objects related to the teaching, study, or research of Old English and the Anglo-Saxon period of history). We also offer a list of links to many other examples of community collections on the Internet
Events
RunCoCo has held a series of training workshops to help others run their own community collection. Resources from past events are made available online, including presentations, hand-outs, links, and recordings of the talks given.
Contact us if you want help with your community collection training.
