Just what is a SPRUCE Mashup and what's in it for me?

Just what is a SPRUCE Mashup?. What's it about and what will I get out of it if I attend? More importantly, what do I tell my boss to convince him/her to let me out of the office for 3 days? Its a little difficult to describe what our mashups are like. Ideally you need to see one first hand to understand what we do and what value it has. However, we've had a go at collating information about our mashups on this page,

What is a SPRUCE style mashup?

Some further information can be found here:

• The event format is described in a paper published at iPRES 2012 conference:
• Swithun Crowe, an attendee from our third mashup event, blogged about his experiences here.
• A blog post from event facilitator, Paul Wheatley, on what was learnt about running mashup events on the AQuA Project: Digital Preservation in 3 days flat
• Results from the mashup events we ran for the AQuA Project, as captured during the actual events themselves: Mashup Collections, Issues and Solutions

Why is it worth attending?

SPRUCE Mashups are a great way to do some of the following things:

• Learn about digital preservation by doing it!
• Share knowledge and experience with other attendees and our experts (from The Digital Preservation Coalition, The Open Planets Foundation and The British Library)
• Build contacts with our community and meet colleagues working on similar challenges to you
• Develop your digital stewardship skills
• Solve some concrete digital preservation challenges
• Work in an agile way, and experience results from an end to end project inside 3 days
• Secure funding from SPRUCE for further work!

. Here's what previous attendees said about the Mashups we've run:

• To see people from different backgrounds with different expertises, talk and share experience with them.
• It felt very productive. Lots of development. Every solution that was developed was enlightening and showed potential for future use.
• Great to have people working on real life practical solutions to digital preservation problems at the event, rather than just talking about it and then not doing anything!
• Getting the outputs directly into the wiki was FANTASTIC!!!! will be using that immediately for future projects for capturing feedback is always difficult in addition to capturing the aha moments during a meeting that you quickly forget after.
• (What did I learn?) That better tools exist than the most popular / the ones that we use for some tasks.
• There were a ton of tools I was unaware of and am excited to go back to the office and try out...
• The fact that every single developer created a useful and re-usable tool

I'm not sure if I have what it takes to attend a mashup?

Attending a mashup means you have to contribute to the event. We don't allow observers. But that's the main requirement. You don't need prior "digital preservation" experience. In fact, our events are a great way to learn about managing digital collections. For more information about roles to play during an event and what you need to prepare in advance see this page.

Where do I sign up?

We're currently advertising our next event in Glasgow, UK, on the 16th - 18th April 2012. Sign up here.