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Published:
Tuesday, 9 January, 2024 - 10:59
Collections WA Training Account

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  • 22 Sept 2022:        ASCCA Digital Mentor Training program.
  • 27 Oct 2022:          WA Universities Digital Asset Management seminar.
  • 29 Sept 2022:        Australian Society of Archivists AGM.
  • 29 Nov 2022:         AMaGA Great Southern Chapter meeting. 
  • 8 May 2023:           Mid West Chapter meeting and PD seminar.

There were positive outcomes from all these engagements including new specialist contributors such as the John Curtin Prime Ministerial Library collection. 

Further strategies implemented to engage regional organisations with CWA: 

  • an onboarding phone call to new members to offer support and provide direction for preparing collections for uploading. 

  • Generating a sense of community through social media interactions including active reposting and/or liking social media content that mentions Collections WA as well as celebrating new organisations or milestones. This has resulted in an estimated:

  • 465% increase in Facebook reach 

  • 437% increase in Facebook page visits

  • 7% increase in Facebook page likes

A deliverable for Year 2 is to enhance the visibility of CWA to drive new contributors and attract interest from partner organisations and end-users. 

The Communications Plan, prepared in 2020, will be reviewed and strategies implemented that target those audiences. It is also a priority to connect the communications of CWA with the WAnderland promotion. 

 

  1. WANDERLAND

WAnderland was launched in June 2022 with 224 organisations. Of them, 81 eligible organisations were identified and targeted for engagement. On June 30, 86% (70) of eligible WAnderland organisations had joined CWA. 

Mass import to CWA was implemented for organisations who are on both platforms. This streamlined the conversion process and allowed organisations to easily share content from their WAnderland profiles to quickly establish a presence on CWA. This continues to be a target audience for Year 2 to grow the collections and organisations on CWA. 

 

  1. ADMINISTRATION 

One aspect of the Year 1 Operational Plan was placed on hold because of staff resourcing. It was planned to investigate a First Nations specific collections project, but this was unable to be started and will be scoped properly and revisited in coming years. 

Staffing was a challenge this year due to the maternity leave of the AMaGA Project Manager and resignation of the AMaGA Program Officer. To manage this issue in the coming year AMaGA has implemented the following strategies: 

  • Enhanced support for CWA staff by the AMaGA National Office team members including management of all contracts, personel and finances. 

  • Implementing monthly project meetings and quarterly management meetings to monitor budgets, staff wellbeing and project outcomes. 

  • Establishing an achievable Operational Plan for the staff available whilst still reaching the objectives of the project.

  • Seeking funds for supporting projects to enhance the number of staff and build a team with greater capacity.

    1. FUNCTIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Note: in conusltation with the Victorian Collections team (managed by AMaGA Victoria) it was discussed that an important development to consider for the future of CWA is to increase staffing in accordance with project success. An objective of CWA is to continue to grow the number of contributors as well as end users. As each of these audiences grows it will take increasing amounts of dedicated staff time to manage their engagement. It will be vital to the success of CWA to employ further staff in future to ensure growth and maintenance of audiences. Whilst project funding can contribute, it will be necessary to have a baseline of core staff committed to growth and development of the platform. 

It is recommended that an evaluation be done to consider the appropriate level of staffing required. This can be scheduled in the final quarterly meeting of the year in April 2024. 

The resource library was reviewed in August and September 2022 with the following observations and outcomes: 

  • Updating the resources needs to be more frequent and will be ongoing. 

  • Resources need to be updated or created in a timely fashion in response to site development. 

  • An online training manual is being rolled out in stages. This will make updates and modifications easier. Users will still be able to download a training manual in PDF form, but on the expectation that it will be updated less frequently. 

  • Screen casts of the ‘primary’ tasks for CWA have been identified as an effective way to train people virtually. These are planned for production in Year 2. 

  • Fact Sheet “Creating QR codes” was developed to explain the benefits and procedure how to make the QR codes. 

Several new site features were rolled out: 

  • A QR code Generator was built to allow contributors to generate codes for exhibition labels, catalogues and marketing material etc. that link directly to a Collections WA record. 

  • Zoom function was built into the site with images of a high enough resolution able to be magnified.