Crime in the Community: Enhancing User Engagement for Teaching & Research with the Old Bailey Online

Funder: JISC e-Content & Digitisation programmes: Impact & embedding of digitised resources

Project Team

• Professor Tim Hitchcock (Univ. of Hertfordshire)
• Professor Robert Shoemaker (Univ. of Sheffield)
• Project Manager: Sharon Howard

Crime in the Community will assess the ways in which the Old Bailey Proceedings Online website is currently used, and generate a series of new tools and online facilities that will allow educationalists and researchers to make more effective use of the 120,000,000 words of highly tagged and accurately transcribed historical text available through the site.

The project has two phases. First, the project is conducting user analysis of the website. It is collecting and analysing statistical data relating to site usage (using weblogs, Google Analytics and an online survey), and conducting an interview-based investigation of how the site is currently used (or not used) in undergraduate and postgraduate teaching and academic research. The outcome of this investigation will inform the second phase of the project, the creation of new online facilities, tutorials, and study guides. These are projected to include the creation of a registration and workspace facility, enabling both individuals and groups to collect trials and other resources into study collections that can be annotated and tagged with keywords. Additionally, the project plans to generate a series of tutorials to facilitate use of the site with externally available online reference managers and social bookmarking sites; teaching guides to help academics use it in their teaching; and study guides to support the site's use as a free standing historical resource.

All the features added to the Old Bailey website will be designed to make them easily transferable to other online resources. The final project report will include evaluations of these features by student, teacher, and research users, and explanations of how the new features can be adapted for other resources. Other deliverables include an in-depth analysis of user engagement; and a functioning registration and workspace.