Museums and Heritage awards 2010

We fended offstrong competition from three other cultural institutions across the country,including the Natural History Museum and English Heritage, with our Timeline:Sources from History project.

The www.bl.uk/timeline venture saw us work closelywith the British Library to develop an innovative online timeline, whichincorporates images, audio, video and transcripts into 800 years of history,giving a whole new online audience access to information. In particular, weused our expertise to utilise a full content management system, meaning the newonline facility allows new timeline projects to be added regularly, making thesystem a useful teaching resource.

We aredelighted that our project for the British Library won the Innovation categoryand that we received glowing praise from the judging panel! It was achallenging venture which took over six months to build, refine and test, butthe team at the British Library were a pleasure to work with as they pouredtons of passion and experience into the task at hand.

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Exploring history with The British Library

Events in timelines can be compared against one another to give great insight and answer questions such as ‘who was in government when Queen Victoria came to the throne?’

Although the application is designed to be used by anyone, it will have particular relevance in education. The concept and user interface is designed to help chronological understanding. So users will be able to build their own interactive timeline, before saving and printing out for class lessons or homework.

The application was built using Adobe Flash, a well recognised technology; used widely for delivering highly engaging content such as this. Each event has a date, introduction, large image that can be explored in detail, along with a transcript. Many events also feature audio and video content.

We’re particularly pleased with the reaction from early users, who are enjoying the simple and natural interface which makes it so easy to navigate.

We believe the key to engaging users and helping them learn online is to explore exciting and innovative ways to share content. We’re delighted the British Library chose the Digital Learning Agency as a partner in this groundbreaking application.

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Making the community a part of Leeds Art Galleries

The online project is a place where you can interact with others, a big artwork you can add a bit to yourself. Leeds Art Gallery wanted to encourage people go out into their local areas and take pictures they consider to be thought-provoking and an interpretation of what’s on show within the gallery.

The website gives everyone the freedom to upload their photos and images to the interactive community gallery and write adescription of what their picture means to them. Anyone can access the website and images are displayed in the gallery on a 50′ plasma screen.

Articles by the gallery on gallery works are being added on a regular bases with users leaveing comments on each. The vision is for the project is that it continues to grow organically reaching out further into the surrounding area.

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Creating an interactive timeline through history for the British Library

The project in its purest form is an interactive timeline, which is built and designed by our experienced team to give visitors to the website a chronological understanding of world history.

We’re delighted to be the Agency chosen to develop this exciting project and are confident that it will meet the needs of the History National Curriculum and be a major resource for key stage 3 & 4 students and history teachers.

The finished application will be built using Adobe Flash technology featuring a visually rich 3D environment and look more televisual rather than web based. It will be easy to use and give people access to content they would usually have to spend hours searching for.

The library will have complete control over the content and the flexibility to add, edit and remove timelines as the need to using their existing content management system.

The potential for this interactive timeline model to be used to house information for many other subjects is enormous and one the British Library is keen to explore in time.

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BAFTA Nomination

We were all very excited to hear that the project we developed with Manchester Art Gallery had been selected as a finalist in this year’s Children’s BAFTAs. The project titled ‘Work’ was based on a painting from 1840 by an artist called Ford Madox Brown and was entered into the Primary Learning Category. Apparently it by-passed the first round of member’s voting and the microsite passed straight through for jury consideration.

The night itself was a very glitzy affair with stars like Geri Halliwell, Tom Chambers, Keith Chegwin, Rachel Stevens and the Chuckle Brothers to name but a few. Although we were not the eventual winner on the night we had a fantastic evening and felt immense pride in the nomination.

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