Developing an International Digital Network in the History of Reading: collaboration between the UK Reading Experience Database and invited partners.

Reading is a fundamental part of modern life; the ability to read and the act of reading are highly valued in all developed societies. The practice of reading, however, is not a uniform or unchanging one: it has a history, like any other human activity. To study that history we need evidence not only of what people in the past read, but how and in what circumstances they read, and what impact their reading had on them. The Reading Experience Database (RED) was established at The Open University as an open access digital resource offering users a searchable body of evidence of reading by British subjects, at home and abroad, from 1450 up to 1945 (see http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/). RED was funded by the AHRC for three years, 2006-2009, and currently holds about 30,000 separate records of reading experience. It attracts over 3,000 visits each month, and the rate of usage is rising at 50% per year. RED has been designed as a resource not only for historians of the book and of reading, but for social historians, local and family historians, literary scholars, biographers, book collectors, librarians, and anyone interested in the readership and reception of particular authors or books, and in the activities of specific readers or groups of readers.

For the purposes of RED, a 'reading experience' is defined as a recorded engagement with a written or printed text beyond the mere fact of possession. Under 'written or printed text' we include books, newspapers, journals, advertisements, playbills, scripts, pamphlets, almanacs, commonplace books, and ephemera. The evidence presented in RED is drawn from autobiographies, diaries, marginalia and letters, etc., and from databases such as the Old Bailey Sessions Papers and Mass Observation Online. As well as details of work(s) being read, RED records data about readers: their name, age, gender, occupation, social class, religion, and place where the reading took place. This richly textured data offers both a micro and a macro perspective, enabling us to get closer to the cognitive and affective elements of individual reading experiences, as well as illuminating the broader changes in historical circumstances and material conditions within which reading took place.

Reading, however, is not confined within national boundaries. It is a transnational phenomenon and researchers need to be able to collect and analyse evidence from different countries. This new research project is designed to facilitate the establishment of RED projects in Australia, Canada, the Netherlands and New Zealand, and to ensure that these national REDs are compatible with the UK RED and with each other. The current UK RED software will be made freely available to partners in these countries, and a systematic, easy-to-use 'umbrella search' function will be developed which will enable a user of one RED to search across all the others. We will create a new web portal interface designed to facilitate ease of use, making use of web 2.0, and including teaching and research tools (offered as web tutorials). We will create additional capacity in the RED datasets to enable future inclusion of oral testimony of readers born before 1950, and visual evidence, such as photographs of reading. These developments will enhance the attractiveness of REDs to a wide variety of users, and will facilitate further international collaboration in the history of reading.

In summary, the current project is designed to: (a) broaden the use of and contribution to RED beyond the British Isles, making it a centre for international collaboration in the history of reading; (b) create an 'umbrella search' function to allow a user of one RED to search all the others as well; (c) increase understanding of the history of reading by ensuring that REDs include oral and visual data to supplement textual sources; and (d) engage with the wider public interest in the history of reading outside academia.

Maximising impact
Over the three years of AHRC funding, the previous RED team took part in a range of knowledge transfer activities with schools and libraries. Furthermore, over 60 volunteers, mostly from outside the university sector, have entered thousands of items of data into RED. These activities confirm the potential of RED as a valuable public resource and as a focus for community-led digitisation activity. To maximise the impact of the new project, in research, teaching, wider participation and knowledge transfer, we will:

1. Create a new, more user-friendly web portal front end, offering a web-tutorial on using RED; a student skills' diagnostic for assessing use; web 2.0 tools, such as an interactive discussion forum; and an RSS feed.

2. Facilitate wider public educational partnerships, by making data sharing readily available. Using an Entity Authority Tool Set to tag authority data will allow us to share data within the databases and externally with other established public access digital resources. Widespread data sharing with outreach projects in the digital humanities (such as Project Australia, Yourarchives.gov.uk, Your History, Your Heritage-Collections Canada) will maximise public participation. Wherever possible, we will hot-link data with external digital sources (e-repositories, digitisation projects, biographical sources, etc.), thereby increasing access to and engagement with our data.

3. Involve non-academic partners, such as public bodies, government institutions, libraries, archives, local history societies and continuing education bodies, in knowledge transfer activities. Potential partners would include English Heritage, the Reading Agency, the Literacy Trust, The School Library Association, and CILIP.

4. Hold a series of workshops targeted at specific practitioner communities, such as teachers, librarians, local studies archivists, museum curators. These would show, for example, how RED might be used by teachers in the classroom, or how family historians could become involved in the project, by entering material about the reading habits of family members in the past. RED's accessibility as an open learning resource will foster self-education within the wider community.

5. Encourage further listing of the enhanced RED resource with public and local libraries, and gather feedback from these during the course of development. The existing UK RED is listed on the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education's Quick Reads site, The Reader Online magazine site, as well as on international sites such as Korea's National Library for Children and Young Adults site, and Portugal's National Directorate for Books and Libraries site. This international Web presence would increase exponentially with the establishment of a series of searchable national REDs.

Assessing Impact
RED has achieved a significant Web presence. An Internet search using the major search engines yielded the following results: Google, nearly 46,000 hits; Yahoo and AltaVista, nearly 34,000 hits(searched 2 November 2009). RED attracts well over 3,000 visitors a month (data from Open University Academic and Administrative Computing Services). For the new project we will use a standardised diagnostic tool (such as Google Analytics) across all the databases to provide more detailed quantitative data about access to and use of the databases. We will implement a citation data policy (using JISC's TIDSR as a guideline) to provide qualitative and quantitative data about citations. We will also introduce feedback questionnaires (online/e-mail and hard copy) to provide additional qualitative data about the impact of the project. Usage data will be monitored through the course of the project and included in ongoing development and outreach plans. These impact assessment tools will provide a significant legacy after the funding per