Coventry Digital

Coventry Digital has launched! Coventry University has teamed up with Coventry City of Culture Trust, Culture Coventry and other partners to launch Coventry Digital - a new online platform designed to celebrate the city's heritage. The new digital resource is an online library documenting the past and present culture and history of Coventry. It comes as a timely boost to the marking and documentation of Coventry's proud history and bright future ahead of its UK City of Culture celebrations. Anyone can view or contribute to Coventry Digital by visiting the website. So far, more than 12,000 items including photos, videos, maps and documents have been uploaded to the archive featuring a wide range of Coventry's most unique and defining features from years gone by as well as more recent times. Coventry Digital was set up to allow people with connections to Coventry to revisit and celebrate its past and update it with new assets, images and content. It is hoped Coventry Digital will create a deeper appreciation and understanding of the city's culture for residents and visitors of all ages. As funding partners of the project, Coventry Atlas has facilitated the digitisation of a vast range of images, assets and resources that have been made available through Coventry Digital, including an interactive map displaying bomb damage to the city during the war. Coventry University's Dr Benjamin Kyneswood, Director of Coventry Digital, said: "We have every confidence that Coventry Digital will be a great asset to the city and its surrounding communities and it will undoubtedly get better as we add more to it. "We're asking families, businesses and community groups to contribute their archives by getting down their shoe boxes, opening up those old filing cabinets, and getting in touch. We want people in twenty, forty, sixty years to be able to see their grandparents in colour and voice through Coventry Digital, knowing their memories are safe and accessible. We want people to look back and have a better understanding of where they come from. Coventry Digital also has the potential to allow augmented and virtual reality uses as its content and contributions develop, enabling a more in-depth and advanced resource for documenting the city's cultural journey. Coventry City of Culture Trust Creative Director, Chenine Bhathena, said: "A focus of our year as UK City of Culture is to encourage everyone in Coventry to participate, both in our programme and in telling the city's stories. A lot of these stories are well-known around the world, but this project gives us all the opportunity to highlight the often-forgotten stories of a place, focusing on the people and day-to-day life of Coventry. "It is an archive that will continue to grow over the years, and become richer with every submission by the people of the city during our landmark year as UK City of Culture." Francis Nielsen, Cultural and Creative Director of Culture Coventry, said: "Coventry Archives preserve the physical images and records which tell the story of Coventry and its people - from medieval times to the present day. Coventry Digital enables us to make our collections more accessible as well as enabling communities and organisations to share and co-curate their own memories and stories alongside them. "Over 7,000 of our images are already accessible on the site and we cannot wait to see our historic images displayed alongside the images, videos and documents of the people of Coventry." Victoria Northridge Archives Manager

Coventry Digital asks for password provided - would not let me choose my own?

If you look under to the right of where it says "Log in", Prof, it says "Register". You can put your email address and password in there, then they send you an email to approve it and you are good to go.

Thank you, Anne!

What great news that Coventry has its archive of images back online again. Over the last few years it's been rather an honour to have been able to host their original Pictures of Coventry Library images, although I can't say it didn't put rather a dent in our own available server space! With this in mind, I've now removed our own Library Browser, and the blue link on the left now goes directly to the new Coventry Digital website, which contains many more images than were previously available. I have not, of course, removed all of the 6,000 or so of our original images, because many of us have displayed or linked directly to those in many posts - so I've kept those images behind to avoid sad empty posts! (If anyone finds one missing, please let me know.) Linking to images on the new website is still possible, but needs a little more thought. Obviously the first step is to locate the required picture via their search - for which you'll need to have registered with them and be logged in. On a PC, or laptop with a mouse, right-click on the image, and select "Copy image address" from the little window that drops down (this might differ, depending on the Browser - I'm using Chrome). On a 'phone or tablet "touch screen" device I'm not certain how easy or possible this is, as holding the image does not offer the "Copy URL" option on my 'phone, so if anyone knows a good method, please share your knowledge. Next, return to the forum post you were making, and click the button just above the text-entry box, which will pop-up a small window where you can enter the web-address (URL) of the image you just copied. Just check that the cursor is in the place in your post where you want the image to appear, then click the "Add image" button. (This procedure, of course, applies to any external image.) Best of luck, and big thanks to Victoria and her team for the new website.

nb The site doesn't accept spaces in the password. I kept getting an error until I removed it.

Submitted a password but no answer from the Herbert!

Yes, thanks again, Rob. Your capture of the collection was easier to reference to though. Maybe you should work for The Herbert!

Prof, try again. I thought I'd been successful but I missed the error message (which made no sense). I agree Neil. The Herbert site is designed to catch the eye and not so good for searching through.

Thank you Neil, you're very kind! I'm gradually building up my own collection now though - I added a few more the other day!

You might need to contact Coventry Archives via this post, Prof. I had the same trouble - tried to register with my usual email address, but received no activation email. When I tried again it simply said I couldn't register as that address was already in use.... I was in a loop! So, I registered again using a Gmail address, and got my reply straight away, so at least I was able to search their site. Unfortunately, I can find no contact link on their site, so I was unable to directly request any help, so I contacted Coventry Archives, who put me in touch with the Coventry Digital site webmaster, who deleted my unwanted account and activated my original email address. Apparently this is a common problem, so we're not alone - I hope they can fix it! Their searches are a bit quirky though, and this is certainly where my own system has an advantage. I was looking for a photo of the Tile Kilns in Stoke, so I typed in "kiln" - and got 4 results, but not the one I thought should be there. So I typed in "kilns" - and got 16 results, including the one I was looking for, near Harefield Road. But logically, any image that contains "kilns" in the title also, surely, contains "kiln"!? Their search would appear to only look for "whole" words, so be careful how you word your searches. If you search for "spire" for instance, you won't find all the images of "spires"!

Rob, thanks for your advice re obtaining their password for Coventry Digital. I've tried all ways and not once received an e-mail from them. Today I even went into the site and put in my e-mail address and then asked for new password (though I had not had one to begin with). It looked great, but alas still no e-mail and no password for me to start using the site. Hope you can help. Thank you!

Prof, it's possible that it didn't accept your original registration. There should have been a password because that's part of the form when you sign up. It rejected mine because I used a space in my password but it didn't say so. It may be that it rejects other characters too. Try the registration again and only put in numbers and letters.

Sadly, trying to register again with the same email address won't work Helen. I got into a loop with that - their system just tells you that the email address is already "in use", so prompts you to respond to the email that they sent..... which never arrives! Most websites offer the chance to reset a password, or at least to click a link to re-send the registration email - but this one doesn't, for some unknown reason, so you end up with an unusable account. Prof, I'll send you a private message with the email address of the web chappy responsible for creating the site.

That could be the situation Rob but in my case it just didn't accept the registration so the email wasn't locked out.