By Rose Lock March 26, 2013
Dissemination, Project Outputs, SCARLET+
Augmented Reality, dissemination, Observing the 1980s, Rose Lock, SCARLET, Team SCARLET, University of Sussex

Momentum is always a problem when a project like SCARLET+ moves from having staff dedicated to it to being a part of everyday work life. Today is my last day as Project Co-ordinator for the University of Sussex SCARLET+ project and I am determined to keep promoting the use of Augmented Reality with archival collections. We have a plan…

At the end of the last University of Sussex SCARLET+ workshop the staff present from across the university passed on the names of anyone at Sussex they thought might be interested in using or supporting the use of AR. Armed with this list I am going to be sending out emails inviting these possibly interested parties for one to one discussion to investigate whether they would like to take advantage of what we have been developing.

http://teamscarlet.wordpress.com/2013/03/25/and-now-the-end-is-near-and-so-we-faced-the-final-workshop/

16^th of April sees many of the SCARLET team coming together for a lunchtime Webinar to inform and inspire others to use AR at their institutions; follow the link for more information.  http://teamscarlet.wordpress.com/2013/03/15/free-webinar-augmented-reality-in-education-the-scarlet-experience/

24^th April takes me to Manchester for a showcase event with SCARLET, University of Manchester, and Mimas designed to engage University of Manchester’s Senior Stakeholders.

We are hoping to raise the profile of SCARLET’s work within the university itself. It is a strange anomaly that exciting projects such as SCARLET are often better known outside of the institution that has been instrumental in creating them, one that we are well aware of at University of Sussex. It will be interesting to see what level of increased involvement comes from this event; perhaps we could do something similar at Sussex?

On 25^th April I will be visiting the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew to speak about SCARLET to the European Botanical and Horticultural Group as part of their 20^th Annual meeting for their day on ‘Space and Cyberspace : the challenges of managing physical and digital collections‘. http://www.kew.org/ebhl/meetings.htm

With support from Team SCARLET in the form of their marvelous presentation I am looking forward to speaking to archive staff who are in the same position as I was a year ago; having no experience of AR what so ever! I hope I can give them the confidence to explore this avenue AR really could be put to some wonderful uses with Botanical and Horticultural archives. Triggers placed in a garden, linking plants themselves to the archives could be both entertaining and educationally interesting.

I have been asked to write a blog post for ITS concentrating on SCARLET+’s pedagogical approach to AR. There are a huge number of University of Sussex departmental, project and staff blogs which are each read by a very different section of the university’s population. SCARLET+ has featured on the Observing 1980s project blog and has been re-blogged by the Teaching, Learning and Development Unit blog. These cross-blog posts are hugely important in keeping the rest of the university informed of what we are doing.

A double-sided postcard featuring the QR code and trigger for Voices In Your Pocket is being produced as an example of what Sussex can do with AR. This can be handed out both internally and externally at conferences or meetings, or left in public spaces for anyone to find and discover a little about Augmented Reality, Observing the 1980s and University of Sussex Special Collections.