Difference between revisions of "Model emails to potential volunteers"

Latest revision as of 11:55, August 10, 2012

Model emails to potential volunteers

Editorial history

10/08/12: CSG, created page

Purpose of this page

This page has been created to provide project team members with model emails (which they are welcome to modify) to use in adverting volunteer opportunities.

See Margaret Schotte's request for such models in Latest news: project volunteer candidates

Call for Volunteers: Short form

Dear [INSERT NAME]

MarineLives - Call for Project Volunteers

We are recruiting volunteer project experts, project facilitators and project associates for MarineLives, a project using collaborative transcription, linkage and enrichment of High Court of Admiralty primary manuscripts, 1650-1669.

MarineLives is an innovative academic project for the collaborative transcription, linkage and enrichment of primary manuscripts, which were originated in the High Court of Admiralty, London, 1650-1669. The end product will be a publicly and freely available online academic edition.

The project is being conducted with the support of The National Archives, Kew, and will work collaboratively on high quality digital images for a complete volume of the court's records, selected from the period 1650-1669.

Please contact the project team (collaborate@marinelives.org), if you would like further information, or access the project website (http://www.marinelives.org).

Very best wishes

[INSERT NAME]

[INSERT YOUR CONTACT DETAILS]

Web: http://www.marinelives.org
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/MarineLives
Twitter: @marinelivesorg

Call for Volunteers: Long form

Dear [INSERT NAME]

MarineLives - Call for Project Volunteers

We are recruiting volunteer project experts, project facilitators and project associates for MarineLives, a project using collaborative transcription, linkage and enrichment of High Court of Admiralty primary manuscripts, 1650-1669.

MarineLives is an innovative academic project for the collaborative transcription, linkage and enrichment of primary manuscripts, which were originated in the High Court of Admiralty, London, 1650-1669. The end product will be a publicly and freely available online academic edition.

The project is being conducted with the support of The National Archives, Kew, and will work collaboratively on high quality digital images for a complete volume of the court's records, selected from the period 1650-1669.

The C17th High Court of Admiralty in London dealt with a range of maritime and commercial issues, including ship seizures during times of war, and wage disputes involving ships' crews, captains, owners, and freighters. The court's records provide a rich source of commercial, material and social history, as well as a source of maritime detail. They cover English, Scottish, Irish, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Flemish, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Genoese, Tuscan, Venetian, and Ottoman merchants, mariners, ships and trade.

We are now seeking academics to join us as part-time volunteer project advisors and project facilitators (twenty to fifty hours commitment between August and December 2012). Project induction and training will be provided in August 2012, with full project kick-off in early September 2012.

Project associates, who are asked to volunteer fifty hours of research time between September and December 2012, will be drawn from interested postgraduates, graduates, school students, and amateur local and maritime historians, both within and outside the United Kingdom.

Volunteers for all three roles (project expert, project facilitator, and project associate) are welcome from both within and outside the United Kingdom. We have a particular interest in recruiting English speaking project volunteers from Barbados, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey. Current team members include public historians, postgraduates, and academics in London, Cambridge, Oxford, Nottingham, Princeton, Virginia, and Brussels.

This project offers participants an opportunity to acquire and deepen their digital editorial, project management, semantic markup and data mining skills.

Please contact the project team (collaborate@marinelives.org), if you would like further information, or access the project website (http://www.marinelives.org)

Very best wishes

[INSERT NAME]

[INSERT YOUR CONTACT DETAILS]

Web: http://www.marinelives.org
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/MarineLives
Twitter: @marinelivesorg

Followup email to a responder expressing interest: Long form

Dear [INSERT NAME]

Many thanks for interest in MarineLives and your enquiry about volunteering opportunities. My name is [INSERT NAME], and I am [INSERT ROLE] on the MarineLives project.

Below I have included more information about the project, with an explanation of the project structure, way of working, and timing. The spirit of the project is collaborative and respectful of the different skills and experience which we all bring when we volunteer our time.

It would be great to learn a bit more about you and your interests. May I also ask how you heard about the project?

I look forward to hearing from you again once you have had a chance to read the material.

Background

This project is a public/academic initiative. It is organised on a not for profit basis and aims to make freely and publicly available a high quality edition of one year's worth of High Court of Admiralty primary manuscripts (that's about 1000 pages). It is a Proof of Concept, and as such has been supported by the National Archives (TNA), who have agreed to allow the project team to digitise the chosen volume and make available the images to the project team, and who are taking an interest in the project. TNA is not providing funding. Our budget is minimal, since the project is a volunteer based project, and is making use of foundation supported hosted servers and opensource SW.

The Proof of Concept will hopefully assist TNA as it thinks about its digital strategy, about crowdsourcing, and about maximising the benefits from the capabilities of the new Discovery search engine which TNA is now rolling out.

We are in the process of forming a core team to drive this project. The small core team team will consist of academics and public historians, and is not yet complete. We have a need, for example, for an individual with strong GIS skills and interest as a project expert, since we are hoping to integrate the transcription process and semantic markup to the mapping and display of data and subsets of the data, ideally on the fly, as seen in www.oldweather.org.

Core project team members in London, Cambridge, Oxford, Princeton and Virginia Tech are working on structuring the team and setting the planned processes. In addition to the core team we plan to take content and functional advice from a broader range of academics, and would welcome input and comment generally. But it is important to stress that the project is conceived from the start as a combined academic and public history initiative, and that we welcome public local and marine historians, and history students, of all ages to work on the project.

This project is a Proof of Concept, for which we will set targets in terms of recruitment, productivity, and quality, and then evaluate ourselves against those targets. It could be that it is unsuccessful, but we will strive to learn from the project as we go, and refine our approach to improve the processes and results.

The reason for setting indicative numbers for time to be committed to the project lies in the nature of the process we wish to pursue. We have described the process as collaborative transcription, linkage and enrichment, rather than "crowd sourcing." This is deliberate. We will be providing one online facilitator to every three or four project associates, and it is the role of that facilitator to assist both with content and process, helping with palaeography when needed, answering technical queries over inputting and editing a wiki, helping broaden the thinking of the project associates who are working on all three aspects of the project - transcription, linkage, and enrichment. This is a significant investment of time in the associates, who we are seeking out amongst postgrads, undergrads, year twelve and thirteen school students, and amateur ("public") local historians and marine historians. One of the decisions we still have to make is whether to mix types of project associate under one facilitator, or to group those of one kind under a facilitator. That will be for our team to decide, and perhaps we will experiment.

Once the team is properly formed and has engaged in the project as a team we will expand our public website to be as transparent as possible.

MarineLives project organisation

We plan to run the project as follows:

Project leader and facilitator: Colin Greenstreet
Project facilitators: Between four and six volunteer facilitators to be recruited & trained (plus project director)
Project associates: Between twenty and twenty-four volunteer project associates to be recruited & trained
Project advisors: Five to six volunteer project advisors to be recruited & trained (technology + functional content)
Ratios: Facilitators/Associates (ca. 1:3, max of 1:4)
Rarios: Advisors/total project members (ca. 3-4 out of ca. 30-40)
Kickoff with advisors & facilitators: 20th 2012 at the National Archives, Kew (with remote attendees by phone or web)
Kick off with project associates: September 3rd 2012 (probably a web conference call)
End of project: December 14th

Time commitment: Project advisors: 10-20 hours over 14 weeks
Time commitment: Project facilitators: 50 hours over 14 weeks
Time commitment: Project associates: 50 hours over 14 weeks

Immediate next steps

July 9th to July 31st

• Finalize choice of facilitators (ideally some mix of academic teachers, post-docs & post-grads, high school teachers, local historians, and a marine historians)
• Recruit as many as possible of the project associates, but also use signed up facilitators to reach out to individuals they know

August 1st to August 31st

• Train facilitators online
• Work with facilitators to prepare online training material for associates
• Face-to face one day meeting at TNA to look and feel the documents we will be working on, to meet TNA staff, and to practice technical and palaeographical skills. This meeting to consist of project facilitators & project advisors (August 20th)
• Project leaders & facilitators to create a digital backbone for the project, with all images checked for quality and readability, and meta data created and input into wiki

September 3rd to December 14th

• Allocation of facilitators to project associates
• Training of project associates directed and supported by facilitators
• Kick off transcription (plus linkage and enrichment) work
• Monthly on line review conferences using e-conferencing

Project expert and project facilitator roles

These two roles are best understood in the context of the project plan above The project experts and project facilitators will together form the core project team.

Examples of academics at different stages in their careers, who have joined MarineLives as volunteer project advisors:

• Richard Blakemore, a doctoral candidate at Selwyn, is a project advisor on HCA documentation on the MarineLives project as well as contributing insight into mid-C17th marine matters (http://cambridge.academia.edu/RichardBlakemore). He will be working next year on a European Research Council grant on a two year cross-European project on mariners' wages run by a principal investigator at the University of Exeter, and has four years of experience dealing with HCA and other marine records from the early C17th

• Dr Stuart Dunn, a lecturer in digital humanities and a landscape archaeologist at King's College, London, is a project advisor on virtual collaboration (http://www.kcl.ac.uk/innovation/groups/cerch/people/dunn/index.aspx). He is currently co-investigator for an ongoing AHRC funded study of crowd sourcing, and has a strong academic interest in virtual collaboration.

We are in discussion with several more academics about joining as project advisors. As remarked above, we have a particular need for an individual with strong GIS skills and interest. The aim is to have complementary skills amongst both experts and facilitators.

The role of facilitator is if anything more important than that of project advisor. Facilitators may be post docs, graduate students, public local historians, or indeed more experienced academics. Key to this role will be people skills, an interest in supporting and training and developing project associates as some of them struggle with palaeography for the first time. As a core team we are building online training material in August to provide as much online help for the basics as possible. One of the big value adds from the facilitators will be at the linkage and enrichment stage. At this stage, the experience of public local and marine historians, of museum based educationalits, and other experienced people, is likely to be invaluable in suggesting other secondary and primary sources to attempt to link people, places, events, etc in the transcriptions.

Recruitment of project associates

We are hoping that at least two schools may participate in the MarineLives project

Dr Gareth Mann, head of history at the highly academic Westminster School in London, has expressed an interest in the project and is offering four ambitious year twelve (soon to be year thirteen) history students as project associates. These students plan to apply to demanding academic history departments for undergraduate study.

We are also exploring possible participation in the same project by a teacher and students at a state academy school in the West Midlands, and a London comprehensive school.

The above is in addition to approaching local and marine historical societies, and using digital humanities mailing groups and other mailing lists in UK and overseas, to publicise the project and to recruit for all three types of role. See, for example, the announcement on the IHR website (http://www.history.ac.uk/news/2012-07-12/marinelives-call-project-volunteers).

We have established a project website (http://www.marinelives.org) to facilitate recruitment and also a project Twitter account (@marinelivesorg), again to facilitate recruitment, and later to maintain interest and cohesiveness amongst project members.

Very best wishes

[INSERT NAME]

[INSERT YOUR CONTACT DETAILS]

Web: http://www.marinelives.org
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/MarineLives
Twitter: @marinelivesorg

Chaseup email to a responder who has not followed up on long form background email

Dear [INSERT NAME]

You expressed an interest in the MarineLives project some time ago, and I would like to let you know how the project has developed since I first responded to your enquiry.

We have moved the project on considerably in terms of building the project team, and in our preparations to launch the project.

We now have five project advisors (Dr Stuart Dunn (Lecturer, digital humanities - KCL); Richard Blakemore (PhD candidate, C17th marine history - Selwyn, Cambridge); Dr Charlene Eska (assistant professor, linguistics/palaeography - Virginia Tech, US); Margaret Schotte (PhD candidate, C17th & C18th history of marine science - Princeton); and Jo Pugh (National Archives, Kew).

In addition to me as project advisor/facilitator [MODIFY AS APPROPRIATE], we have three further facilitators - a graduate student at KCL (formerly at Mansfield College, Oxford, 1st class history degree), a graduate student at LMH, Oxford (formerly at Groningen), and a secondary school teacher, who is an experienced local historian and palaeographer. We are looking for one, possibly two, further project facilitators, and are keen to have one based in North America.

We have ten project associates, and are looking for a further ten to fifteen such associates, as well as a further two project facilitators. Our project associates are drawn from a wide variety of backgrounds, including an archivist at the National Maritime Museum, a writer of historical novels, an editor of a digital edition of Mozart's letters, several students at Westminster school in London, and several third year history undergraduates at Nottingham University.

The team is looking quite international with members born in England, Germany, Italy, Spain, Ireland, Canada, and the US.

We are kicking the project off with the core group of advisors and facilitators on Monday 20th August at the National Archives, Kew, and with the full team of project associates in the week commencing September 3rd, by web conference. We are also hoping to hold a post end of project conference, provisionally in the last week of January 2013, which all project members will be invited to attend, together with invited academics, archivists, school teachers, and public historians.

Dr Eska will be assisting the MarineLives project team with (a) defining palaeography training needs (b) pointing towards palaeographical online (and hardcopy) resources (c) helping to set editorial policy and standards (d) acting as an expert to resolve palaeographical problems which cannot be resolved in the individual facilitated project teams.

An article about our project will appear in this September's issue of History Today. Attached below to this email is a near final proof, should you be interested in reading it.

It would be good to hear whether you would like to discuss our project further by phone.

Very best wishes

[INSERT NAME]

[INSERT YOUR CONTACT DETAILS]

Web: http://www.marinelives.org
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/MarineLives
Twitter: @marinelivesorg

Standard data for signature

Web: http://www.marinelives.org
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/MarineLives
Twitter: @marinelivesorg

Proof copy of History Today MarineLives article

View or download article on MarineLives to be published in the History Matters section of History Today, September 2012:

On the crest of a wave