Coventry Digital
Coventry Digital is a repository of Coventry-related images, documents and videos. Its purpose is to collect these assets to enable evidencing the many stories of the city. Coventry Digital holds assets belonging to archives including Culture Coventry, MirrorPix, Historic England and various local archives, including photographers and community groups. In total, we have approx., 70,000 assets collected over the past two years, including about 25,000 from the City of Culture years.
The Coventry Digital model principally looks to drive assets out of Coventry Digital, rather than drive traffic to the website. Assets are shared socially and embedded by users via software called SmartFrames, which protects copyright but allows for sharing. Assets are therefore ‘out there’, working: a single asset shared from Coventry Digital can be shared many times onwards, creating impressions that are trackable. Over the last 90 day period, approx. 85,000 individual people engaged with a Coventry Digital asset, which is not just people browsing the site, but sharing out to Facebook, email, WhatsApp, LinkedIn and Twitter, and embedding in websites such as Historic Coventry Forum. The most popular asset during this snapshot is Stoke Pool, circa 1910, with 215 impressions from one share out of Coventry Digital.
Current projects aim to deepen the city story, including with:
· Coventry Caribbean Centre on Windrush stories,
· Coventry Muslim Forum on post-war life,
· Friends of Coventry Cathedral on the many stories of the new and old cathedral,
· Reach PLC on the Arthur Cooper story, a crowdsourcing project.
Coventry Digital wants to support the story of your research with public engagement in Coventry, driving your research assets out into communities, offering a route to new audiences and new uses with impact from the same research outputs. You might share photographs from an event or an output from research. Coventry Digital can provide information on usage of your assets, letting you know where and how many times your assets are viewed, and add a link to your research page at Warwick. We’re also exploring keywording with academic terms, allowing for assets to be associated with specific research areas.
We are inviting interested Warwick researchers to join the Director of Coventry Digital (Benjamin Kyneswood) at a short online workshop for a walkthrough tour, to hear about the benefits of joining and how to create an account and upload your assets.
Workshop: Wednesday 10th May on MS TEAMS - 12:30-13:30
Please email India.Holme@warwick.ac.uk to register and receive a teams invite. If you cant attend but would like to know more please contact both India and Ben - benjamin.kyneswood@coventry.ac.uk