Gill Ridgley writes about developing and managing a British Library website and resource which examine the 2012 Games from a social science perspective.

This time last year doesn’t seem so long ago, and yet a lot happened in those 12 months - a truism, but particularly ‘true’ for the two curators working on the Social Science Department’s Sport and Society website: Gill Ridgley and Simone Bacchini.

Work started on this site in 2008 when a London 2012-related Departmental project was first mooted. The Olympics and Paralympics looked set to provide an ideal opportunity to debate the social science aspects of sport and the Games itself, and more particularly to showcase the wonderful resources of the British Library in this area. The medium of choice was the Internet, which would make the content we planned to include more widely accessible.

Designing the website was a complex process. It had to appeal to a wide audience, from those with a basic interest in the subject to those doing advanced research. We hoped to have something for everyone: bibliographies of the BL sport collections; original research produced by staff and external contributors, links to relevant materials on the web; and details of new events and publications. A great deal was learned in the process, not least the mechanics of site architecture and the editing and creation of pages in the Dreamweaver software. This was also where our training as librarians came in handy: what topics would we divide the subject up into and where would we fit the different contributions we received within this framework? Subject classification began to reveal itself as a very inexact science!

However, perhaps the most rewarding part of creating and maintaining the website was the opportunity it gave us to make new acquaintances outside the Library. Keeping a watchful eye on people researching in the field from undergraduates to university professors; blogging and tweeting information about the progress of the website and the Games; commissioning articles and researching the BL collections; liaising with publishers: all these aspects of Sport and Society improved our knowledge of the wider sports research environment and the needs of those working in it, and also revealed the often untrodden pathways in the Library’s sports collections. This combination of factors proved very fruitful for all concerned, as we discovered what types of material interested researchers the most, and identified gaps in the collections. Wonderful images began to emerge from obscure books and journals, like this one:

Don't Ride Horses

One of the indirect outcomes of our concentration on the London Games and sporting resources more generally in 2012 was a number of events in the Library which really raised the profile of the collections. The first was our conference, Sourcing sport in May 2012 which looked at the Library’s sports collections across the range of the social sciences and humanities, and which shone a spotlight on such topics as Dutch canal pole vaulting & mass sports and physical education in the USSR. This event was soon followed by the Olympex exhibition – an IOC-sponsored philatelic exhibition centering on the Olympics & Paralympics which showed numerous philatelic items and artefacts owned by collectors from around the world. The Library was able to fly the official Olympic flag while the exhibition was on, and was presented afterwards with its own London 2012 torch.

So it’s win-win for all concerned when it comes to engaging with what’s going on in the wider non-library environment, not least because all our hard work won’t be going to waste. Sport and Society will soon be archived in the UK Web Archive, along with other sites about the London Olympics and Paralympics, and will therefore continue to be available to the researchers of the future.