Siobhan Davies Replay

In 2006, with a major Research Council grant, Coventry University established Europe's first digital dance archive, in partnership with the Siobhan Davies Dance company. The archive brings together a diverse range of materials associated with this artist to preserve, conserve and increase access to valuable, often fragile resources. The Siobhan Davies Replay website provides full public access via an attractive web interface, with interactive elements which enable users to create their own collections of archive content. The archive currently contains more than 5,000 core assets which generate more than 77,000 individual digital objects. Within four months of its launch the archive received over 26,000 site visits; 5,600 unique visitors from 71 countries. 

Other initiatives have developed and exploited online digital archives and repositories for research and learning:  the University’s online repository CURVE, funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) houses collections of texts and objects; and D-TRACES (also JISC-funded) provides important scholarly and pedagogical resources for staff and students in the HE sector.   Coventry University has embraced the potential of digital technologies to enhance users' experience of cultural heritage in projects such as Stratford Unplugged, a partnership with BT, Hewlett Packard, Staffordshire University and Stratford's Town Management Partnership, which offered users the opportunity to access online tourist information about Stratford upon Avon 'on the hoof' via PDAs.

Our engagement with digital archiving and the management and use of online digital resources has brought together different academic and technical experts including Professor Sarah Whatley (Siobhan Davies Archive project lead); Professor Gary Hall (Leader of Coventry University University’s Open Media Group and leader of the Digital Media Grand Challenge); Philip Vaughan (Deputy Director of the Library, with expertise in major digitisation projects); and Tim Luft (Operational Director of the Serious Games Institute), Dr James Shuttleworth (Associate Head, Computing and the Digital Environment) and Professor Hilary Nesi (expert in corpus linguistics).