9 reasons to love the BL's Mechanical Curator

At heart this is a post about discoverability, access, and bringing things to the surface that might otherwise not be seen. The Mechanical Curator of the title is one way of the ways the BL has done this with their digitised images, but only one of many - the point is we all have collections which WOULD engage people if they knew about it, so why not invest some time in getting the message out there in innovative ways?

I ran some workshops for the British Library at the end of last year, aimed at social media 'improvers' (people already using it as part of their professional role, who want to get more engagement and measure their impact etc), during which I talked about Tumblr. I showed various examples and confessed my favourite Tumblr of all was from the BL themselves, the Mechanical Curator.

The Mechanical Curator is Tumblr blog which regularly (and automatically) posts images from 1,000,000+ the BL have scanned from out-of-copyright books from previous centuries. It has been programmed with some Artificial Intelligence - or as far as I can see, more like Artificial Whimsy - and becomes taken with certain shapes, symmetries, and themes, and posts these more often and in clusters. After its set up and tweaking, there's no human intervention - it just gets on with it.

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continue reading on ned-potter.com

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Alison Cullingford's Top 5 Tips for Marketing Special Collections & Archives

The Toolkit book has 27 case-studies from around the world. In many cases, the amazing contributors gave me more than I could use within the word-limits of the book itself, so over the next few posts I'll be publishing self-contained additional materials from the case-studies. The idea is that they're both useful in and of themselves, and will also provide a richer pool of information for those reading the original case studies in the book itself. 


The first of these comes from Alison Cullingford of the University of Bradford. 

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What are your 5 top tips for using modern tools to take Special Collections & Archives marketing to the next level?

1. Marketing internally is vital, especially now, and especially for services like Special Collections and archives which may not be well understood. Social media offers ways to build friendly relationships with the movers and shakers/thought leaders in your organisation and move out of silos. 
2. Look for ways to use time and collections to build resources that will last and continue to attract attention. This helps get round the problem that besets one off events and news stories: people just don’t catch them because so much else is going on. 100 Objects will last two years for that reason. Social media offers powerful ways to bring collections to people in real time and make an impact.
3. Social media works best if you have interesting things to say and say them in a fun, human way. Special Collections staff are lucky because there is so much interest, narrative and visual appeal in the collections and so much scope.
4. Picture and video sites (especially Flickr) contain communities hungry for great content, notably local history, which Special Collections may be able to provide. Sharing such images will not necessarily hurt income from publication permissions, but can act as a showcase bringing in more requests. 
5. Special Collections services may fear marketing because it will attract more users, which they do not have the resources to handle. However, effective marketing and use of new technology (traditional web, social media, digitisation etc) can result in better informed users often getting what they need remotely.

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Alison Cullingford is the Special Collections Librarian at the University of Bradford, as well as RLUK Unique and Distinctive Collections Project Manager. Her blog can be found at Collections in a Cold Climate and her authored volume The Special Collections Handbook was published last year, also by Facet. In the Library Marketing Toolkit book, her case study focuses on Bradford's successful 100 Objects marketing campaign.