Digital Community Workspaces: Delivering Impact through Public Library and Archive networks

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The current problems created by the diminishing funding of libraries and museums increasingly limit engagement with communities and inhibits collaborative partnerships. The problem is particularly acute in relation to the use and reuse of digital assets- both at an archival and community level- and this project seeks to provide one solution through the provision of the digital resources created as part of the AHRC funded Pararchive project (www.pararchive.com). Those resources have been branded as YARN (http://yarncommunity.com) and are now freely available. YARN provides a collaborative platform on which communities and public sector organisations can work together to help them establish effective digital community workspaces to deliver a range of co-designed impacts that respond to community needs and institutional aspirations. Thus the aim of this application is to work with a range of communities and public library and archive organisations to help them address a series of difficult self-identified issues relating to local history work, genealogy, co-working, publishing, working with disadvantaged and hard to reach audiences, and the use of 'hidden' or degraded digital resources. The project is based on the desire to build on the unintended consequences of our research and broaden community engagement. Follow-on funding would allow us to do this and act on a range of community requests, develop expanding networks and deliver broad social benefit. We are keen to work with new partners to further disseminate our digital platform and expand its application; to that end we have engaged in conversations with a range of providers about how they might use our resources and have sought to understand the nature of their ongoing problems and digital requirements to determine mutually reinforcing outcomes. Consequently, our focus will be on the development of impact through public networks to produce scalable strategies and demonstrate the value of our tools in a range of public facing contexts. We have been delighted by the responses to the prototype of YARN and the inclusion of the platform within a number of recently funded research projects and several ongoing applications that have developed in parallel with our own research. For example, YARN has been included on the recently successful Junction Arts HLF JA40 application for community history (http://junctionarts.org/2015/10/ja40/), as part of the AHRC funded Cultural Value Project Digital Tools in the Service of Difficult Heritage: How Recent Research Can Benefit Museums and their Audiences (http://www.leeds.ac.uk/arts/news/article/4365/new_ahrc-funded_project_digital_tools_in_the_service_of_difficult_heritage_how_recent_research_can_benefit_museums_and_their_audiences ) and the British Academy-funded Leeds Voices- Communicating Superdiversity project(http://www.leeds.ac.uk/arts/info/20045/leeds_humanities_research_institute/2718/leeds_voices_communicating_superdiversity). The follow-on funding would allow us to develop new collaborative partnerships that will ensure maximum benefits for users and allow them to achieve goals that they would not be in a position to realise for themselves. The four partnerships at the heart of the project allow us to co-develop new impacts directly related to pressing community and institutional need. We want our new partners and user communities to take ownership of the resource and shape it for use within their own contexts and allow them to produce scalable models and proof of concept for its application within their own spheres of practice and creative activity. We believe that this will both stimulate innovative practices and allow us to disseminate new approaches to collaborative working. We also want to facilitate inter-project mentoring and the sharing of best practice so that YARN can act as a means of building cross sector capacity and the basis for sharing impact potential amongst users.