The main goal of PhoneBooth is to repackage the Charles Booth Maps, Descriptive of London Poverty and selected notebooks from contemporary police observations for delivery to mobile devices. These materials are already available digitally through the Charles Booth Online Archive.
We will pilot the use of the mobilised maps and notebooks in a taught undergraduate course at LSE: London’s Geographies.
Project Outputs
The main objectives of the project are:
- To enhance the existing Booth data to enable mobile delivery
- To produce a model and technical capacity for the mobile delivery of Library-owned content
- To engage with LSE academics and students involved in the London’s Geographies course to inform the development of mobile Library content
- To evaluate the impact of mobilised content on teaching
- To enhance the student experience of the course
- To facilitate knowledge transfer within the professional community
The outputs from the project will be:
- User/functional requirements for mobile content delivery
- A revised course syllabus to include assesment of students’ use of the mobile content
- Booth maps and notebooks in georeferenced preservation and delivery formats
- Fedora/Hydra content models for geodata
- Ingest of the Booth maps/notebooks into LSE Digital Library and an API for spatial query
- A prototype web application for the delivery of Booth maps and notebooks to mobile devices
- Knowledge transfer between EDINA and LSE
- Report on the development of mobile content and its impact on teaching
Success measures:
- A working prototype mobile web application that is used successfully by this year’s student cohort taking London’s Geographies
- Increased knowledge of mobile and spatial technologies in the LSE Digital Library team
- A positive impact on the teaching methodology of London’s geographies and a demonstrated engagement between the Library and academic community
Project Team
The project partners are LSE and EDINA. LSE own the collection and are responsible for gathering user requirements and project management/direction. EDINA are responsible for developing the technical prototype and sharing knowledge of the implementation with the LSE Digital Library Team
Project board (LSE)
- Nicola Wright (deputy director of library service)
- Sue Donnelly (head of archives)
- Sharad Chari (lecturer, London’s geographies)
LSE staff
- Ed Fay [@digitalfay] (digital library manager) – project management
- Andrea Gibbons [@changita] (GTA, London’s Geographies) – gathering requirments from students and co-ordinating the piloting work
- Andrew Amato (digital library developer) – ingesting the content into our digital library infrastructure and providing it out through APIs
- Peter Spring (metadata technical officer, LSE) – providing support for the metadata aspects of the project
EDINA staff
- James Reid [@sixfootdestiny] (geoservices manager) – project co-ordination and technical architecture
- George Hamilton (software engineer) – technical prototyping of the application
- John Pinto (software engineer) – technical prototyping of the application
- Lasma Sietinsone (gi analyst) – providing support for the geographic aspects of the project
Timeline and work packages
Workpackage | Owner | Deliverables | Timescale |
0 – Project management | LSE |
|
November 2011 – July 2012 |
1 – User requirements analysis | LSE |
|
November 2011 – December 2011 |
2 – Data preparation | EDINA |
|
January 2012 – March 2012 |
3 – Development: Digital Library | LSE |
|
February 2012 – April 2012 |
4 – Development: delivery prototype | EDINA |
|
February 2012 – June 2012 |
5 – Piloting | LSE |
|
April 2012 – May 2012 |
6 – Reporting on findings | LSE |
|
May 2012 – July 2012 |
Risk analysis
Risk | Probability (1-5) | Severity (1-5) | Impact (Probability x Severity) | Action |
Project staff become unavailable | 3 | 2 | 6 |
|
Mobile prototype is not useful in course context | 4 | 1 | 4 |
|
Booth content does not lend itself to geographic discovery or mobile delivery | 5 | 1 | 5 |
|
The taught course does not run after the 2011/12 academic year | 1 | 2 | 2 |
|
The technical prototype and mobile access points are not maintained following project closure | 1 | 3 | 3 |
|
Smartphone ownership in the pilot cohort is not sufficient for use of content in teaching | 4 | 2 | 8 |
|
Budget
The total project budget is £85,659 (£43,206 from JISC). Most of the LSE staff time and nearly all of the indirect and estates costs are institutional contributions.