Here are a selection of resources that we have found particularly useful, which we hope will be able to support anyone who wants to engage in Citizen Scholarship and Heritage.
Generating Ideas
VisitorBox is a structured card-playing activity which is used to generate ideas for new visitor experiences. The tool ensures that a team of people can generate ideas in a way that is informed by real-world opportunities and constraints, and is purposeful rather than aimless. We used VisitorBox in a workshop to generate a set of […]
Finding Resources
While it may seem obvious, YouTube is a simple service to use for finding and uploading video content. You can create your own channel which people can subscribe to and it also offers services such as live streaming and subtitles, which can improve the accessibility of your content. The service is stable, easy to use […]
The National Library of Scotland has a range of UK maps online. These are useful resources for identifying the historical location of buildings and features in the landscape. The library also has tools which enable you to compare and overlay maps. Many of the maps on the website can be used for commercial, non-commercial, educational […]
While search engines might seem a simple way to get find resources, it is often helpful to use a specific image search. On Google Images, it is easy to scroll through lots of images to quickly find content. See: https://www.google.com/imghp You can also search for free to use images via following the instructions here https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/29508?hl=en
As well as using Flickr for hosting and sharing your own images, you can also search Flickr for images available for reuse under Creative Commons or public domain licenses. See: https://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/
The British Library holds an extensive archive that covers many different areas that you may want to research or use in developing your stories and content. The online catalogue is widely accessible and is particularly useful as it generates a rich collection of images and texts. There are also a number of copyright-free images that […]
As its name makes clear, the Internet Archive is an archive on the web. This is not just about the Internet, although you can use one of their services ‘the Wayback Machine’ to view historical versions of websites. The Internet Archive is a useful place to find out things that you might not always appear […]
Capturing Content
Cameras like the Ricoh Theta or GoPro MAX capture panoramic photos of entire rooms and landscapes in one image. These are great for quickly creating digital copies of buildings, e.g. to preserve a moment in time, or can be turned interactive using some of the other tools on this list. We used the Ricoh Theta […]
Microsoft Image Composite Editor and PTGui are two tools that do the same job: they both stitch lots of photos together into one panoramic image (photogrammetry). This allows you to do what a 360 degree camera does, but using a mobile phone or standard digital camera. We used PTGui to create a very high resolution […]
Turning Content into Stories
Historypin allows you and others to add images, videos and text to Google maps.
Yarn is a community storytelling application designed to allow users to create and share stories online, using material from the web and from archive partners such as the BBC, National Media Museum and the Science Museum. Designed with communities across the UK in the Pararchive project led by the University of Leeds, Yarn provides a […]
Echoes is a tool that enables you to create a GPS-linked audio tour that can be used on a smartphone. It offers a simple way of creating an audio tour which allows you to use audio, images and text, making content ‘come alive’ when you are in a certain location. Echoes is therefore a useful […]
Artcodes is an app which links physical things to digital content. The tool can trace and recognise visual patterns via a smartphone camera and launch a related webpage. We used Artcodes with Bromley House to explore ways in which volunteers could digitally curate the items and books “in-place”, encouraging visitors to physically explore the library […]
We often forget how important audio is. Speech, music and other collected sounds can all tell us about about a moment in time and memory. SoundCloud is straightforward to use, you simply create and upload your audio files. Once you have uploaded the audio, you can share it on social media, and even link to […]
While it may seem obvious, YouTube is a simple service to use for finding and uploading video content. You can create your own channel which people can subscribe to and it also offers services such as live streaming and subtitles, which can improve the accessibility of your content. The service is stable, easy to use […]
Marzipano is a web-based tool that allows the user to create complex virtual environments, which can be experienced in a web browser. If you want to share these virtual environments with others then you do need to a) have web-hosting somewhere and b) be able to upload files to it, but if you have both […]
As well as using Flickr for hosting and sharing your own images, you can also search Flickr for images available for reuse under Creative Commons or public domain licenses. See: https://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/