Creating a collaborative digital archive

By Rebecca Bartlett

SUMMARY

Discover how a group of cultural organisations across Manchester created a collaborative digital archive, and used it to tell stories about the city's experiences of the First World War through an app and website. Led by Imperial War Museum North, 26 galleries, libraries, archives and museums combined their collections and archives into one cohesive digital resource. Institutions involved included Manchester Art Gallery, Whitworth Art Gallery, National Football Museum, Salford Museum and Art Gallery, Greater Manchester Archives and The Lowry.

There are of course challenges to a project of this kind. Each organisation needs to be an administrator of the app, with the ability to update and upload new content as it emerges. We built the CMS so that it is intuitive and straightforward - and hopefully unbreakable – but with so many users, issues inevitably arise.

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Apps Collaboration Digital Galleries Mapping Museums

Resource type: Case studies | Published: 2014