I’ve been managing and directing services and projects at Mimas for nearly fifteen years, but am heartened by the level of support and interest that has been shown in the SCARLET project in such a short space of time. We found out we’d been successful on 15 May, started on 1 June, had our start up meeting (see previous posting) on 15 June, and in that short space of time we’ve had encouraging messages of support from important people in the university including the Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and the new Associate VP for Teaching, Learning and Students at Manchester. We’ve had our first invitation to present at a conference and very positive input from Rob Englebright, our JISC programme manager at JISC.
The SCARLET team is small but very committed and incredibly enthusiastic. Our award-winning academics (Dr Guyda Armstrong and Dr Jerome de Groot) are providing the pedagogic input that will drive the project to success (and we have another academic joining us – information to follow). Staff at John Rylands University Library Special Collections, especially John Hodgson, have enthused us with their passion for special collections (SC) materials, and we know other universities with SCs are interested in the project outputs. This is a very real project – grounded in educational practice – and we’re determined that the learner experience is paramount – with the application of technology being driven by that and not the other way round.
We have a series of bilateral meetings over the next month when we’ll all be contributing to the project plan that our wonderful Project Manager – Laura Shaw – will be compiling. I know that SCARLET is in safe hands. I’m hugely excited about the potential of this project.
Follow us on twitter at @team_scarlet and watch this space.