Each project we do comes with its own challenges and solutions but generally the type of work we are interested in relates in some way or another to the following six categories:
Community Engagement
We aim for the projects we are involved with to engage as fully as possible with the communities they are developed for. We use oral histories, training in media literacy, open-access to data and the circulation of digital materials within these communities, to try and achieve this. Where possible, we generate content in the vernacular, providing local information in local languages, as in the case of the Ulwazi Programme.
Mobile
The mobile phone is ubiquitous in South Africa and is fast becoming the primary means by which people access the Internet. SMS, the mobile web and applications will increasingly play a greater part in any new media project. We have strategised how this could be used in heritage projects and conducted our first experiments with mobile phones and the Ulwazi Programme. See more here and here.
Social Media
We make extensive use of social media tools such as blogs, Facebook and Twitter to extend the reach of projects and generate discussion and interaction. And we’re quite good at it, winning awards in the 2010 and 2011 SA Blog Awards.
Collections Management
Key to the management of digital collections is an integrated system for categorising, searching and presentation in order to facilitate more widespread circulation and use of (textual, audio and visual) digital objects. We use open-source collections management software like Omeka and MediaWiki extensively, but have also developed projects with Drupal and OJS. An example of this is the digital archive we created and maintain for ccrri.
Standards
We believe in standards and adhere to them closely when digitising content, using international Dublin Core metadata terms and ensuring that copies are made available for preservation as well as distribution purposes.
Mapping
Google has mapped the earth and with this comes a lot of opportunities, not only for heritage or cultural tourism but also e-governance. We’ve started using maps with projects like the KZN Literary Tourism, mapping writers and place, and with Map Inanda, a prototype we developed for the area.
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