Digital Lives

Memories for Life BBC broadcast

Readers of this blog will be interested to know that yesterday (4th), Nigel Shadbolt and Yorick Wilks were interviewed at length on BBC Radio 4's The Material World about Memories for Life . Memories for Life is an EPSRC funded research network focusing on how memory works and how it can be enhanced by technology. BL staff in the Digital Lives project have been closely involved in M4L and its conference in December last year.

The programme can be heard over the Internet, at http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/thematerialworld.shtml  for another 6 days.

RLG Personal Research Collections Program

This blog will try to highlight other related initiatives worldwide so I am just putting in a link to the RLG Personal Research Collections Program.

A quick summary:

'this program area will engage partner institutions in an exploration of where personal research collections fit in the agendas of libraries, archives, and museums. By the end of calendar year 2007, we and our partner institutions should have a shared understanding of the level of institutional interest in managing personal collections, the range of available tools to support personal collection building, and a short list of partner and other institutions interested in co-development opportunities in this area.'

Month 1

We have now completed the first month of the project: always one of the most frenetic as activity starts up.

We are delighted to have recruited Peter Williams as research assistant to the project and Peter has been working with our curators on finalising survey instruments and our initial individual interviewees. Interviewees are an extremely diverse cross-section (one of our requirements) and should provide fascinating subjects:architect,author,poet, playwright, politician, scientists,bloggers and information specialists, doctoral and post-doctoral students are amongst them.

The project website is also live at www.bl.uk/digital-lives/ and linked from the blog. Further project updates will be posted as the research progresses.

BBC Memoryshare Initiative

I have recently come across the BBC Memoryshare site: an interesting example of an intermediary aggregating personal memories and collections and providing value-added services.

It is a BBC web service providing a platform for accessing and aggregating content relevant to any date since 1st January 1900. Registered users can post their memories and experiences relating to any day since that date, and can also comment on contributions from other people. The BBC is building the service to enable users to:

• write and post memories against dates

• browse existing memories aggregated by date

• view generic context information against dates

Contextual information (links to other content) can be accessed on each day view. These links lead to BBC Content and external content such as wikipedia. The aim is to provide contextual information in the form of News, Music, Sport, Arts, Broadcasting and associated events.

The project also aims to aggregate date-related data from within and outside the BBC and provide an interface for clients to query and request references based on those dates, date patterns and sources.