In February 2021 we had DMPonline branding meeting where we re-visited the process and discussed what seems to work well and what we can still improve from the lessons learned from the past year to ensure we onboard new institutions even with a smaller developer team. Areas where we wanted to focus on was avoiding lengthy backward and forward communications around the further changes to the customised pages, ongoing request for minor changes and identifying how this process can be further improved to avoid any delays and provide further transparency of this process.

2020 brought about monumental change. In May, following the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and many others, there was a global groundswell of antiracist activism headed up by the Black Lives Matter movement. By and large, white people began to consider the privileges and biases afforded by whiteness and white supremacy, at an individual and a structural level. One major issue is the sharing of knowledge and data ownership. This blog looks at how archivists, as a collective of information workers, can embed anti-racism into their practice.

The benefit of subscribing to our enhanced package is that you get to customise your pages. In our recent blog post, we have laid out how we revisited and improved the process. One of the areas where we have realised we will need to improve on is also introducing UAT (User Acceptance Testing) for your newly customised testing pages. In this blog post I summarise how to go about testing your newly created pages, however you can also watch a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHmViocehQM).

It has been some time since our last user group and after some brainstorming how to do this effectively in the virtual environment, we thought that discussing new features that you would like to see would be a useful exercise at this point in time. Patricia suggested to ask you to raise the issues prior the session as an open discussion is more difficult online and this helped us structure the event. We have decided to run a half day event with a coffee break. We divided the day into two halves where in the first part we gave an update on the service and introduced the concept of voting, and in the second part we had the opportunity to discuss the features that gained the most votes. The agenda has now been updated with links to the presentation from the day which you can access here. In this blog post you will find out how we run the day, what we learned from the discussion and what our plans are going ahead.