There is a lot going on in the digital transformation project. Jane Van de Ban, Birkbeck’s Digital Content Manager, provides this summary of activity over the past term.

What are we doing?
We are upgrading the Birkbeck school/department web presence, to provide entirely new, refreshed content, including new images, and improved navigation. With five school sites, 18 department sites, 21 microsites and over 32,000 content items – pages, images, files, events and news stories – all of which need to be reviewed and upgraded – this is a huge undertaking.  

Our objectives are to:  

• review all the content, topic by topic and piece by piece  
• decide what needs to be retained and upgraded
• consider how best to present this information online, via workshops with subject experts from across the Birkbeck community
• ensure that all content:
  • fulfils user needs  
  • meets our digital standards  
  • is fully optimised, to ensure that Google and other search engines index it properly 
• build appropriate wayfinding pages, comprised of high-quality images and signpost text, to improve navigation across the Birkbeck site. 

Welcome to our expanded project team
Due to pressing technical issues with our content management system (CMS), Plone, we need to deliver this project by the start of the 2019-20 academic year. To help us deliver this ambitious project, our team has grown, with freelance editors and web staff from all of our schools working alongside us for a few days each month.  

So, a special welcome to Ollie Chinyere (Arts), Yossie Olaleye and Aaliyah Archer (BEI), Louise Ross and Matt Wicks (Law), Pauline Jones (Science) and Antonio Terzini (SSHP) and our freelance editors, Rebecca Slegg and Denise Drake.  

Improving access to MPhil/PhD funding information
At our launch workshop, subject experts told us the following about MPhil/PhD funding: 

MPhil/PhD funding is hugely complex and requires knowledge of different funders’ priorities and processes, as well as the conditions attendant on them.  

Funding is not static – it is awarded throughout the recruitment cycle. So, we need a flexible web solution that allows us to add and withdraw funding throughout the year.  

Information on funding needs to be easy to understand for both prospective students and academics, as the latter need to provide specialist information on the full range of MPhil/PhD funding available. 

Based on this workshop, we have developed a bespoke MPhil/PhD funding resource (on our development site) and shared it with subject experts across the College, who gave us extensive and helpful feedback, mostly related to the layout of the new wayfinding page. We have now revised and updated the content and aim to get final sign-off in January, after which we will schedule the go-live. 

Rationalising application information for MPhil/PhD applicants
As with funding information, you will find application information for prospective MPhil/PhD research students scattered across the Birkbeck website. The objective is to make it as easy as possible for users to read and follow our advice before applying.

At the workshop, the prospective MPhil/PhD research students need to explore potential supervisors and ideally, contact them and start writing a research proposal before applying. Although this advice is provided across our website, departments still receive ‘cold’ applications, which require a lot of administrative and academic support. We also learned that the application process is similar across schools – the most striking differences relate to funding.  

In response to the workshop, we have consolidated and improved our MPhil/PhD application advice on our online prospectus and on our central How to Apply pages, which will help improve the application process (we will, of course, test the changes with users). This information also dovetails with the improved MPhil/PhD funding information.  

The application information is now live and, early in the New Year, we will unpublish redundant, duplicate department pages and redirect users to our new, consolidated information. This will make it much easier for academics and prospective MPhil/PhD research students to find information.  

Telling the public about our research projects
In all the years that we have talked to schools/departments about their web presence, one message has come out loud and clear: the absolute centrality and importance of research. Yet, if you explore our department pages, it’s difficult to find much information about research.  

Around 160 funded research projects are currently underway at Birkbeck but learning about them is very challenging: the majority don’t have any presence on the Birkbeck website, and the only comprehensive list is a spreadsheet maintained by the Research Office.   

Yet, our subject experts told us that: 

We need to publicise the full range of our funded research projects.  

The audiences for this information range from the general public to corporations looking to invest their Corporate Social Responsibility fund, businesses keen to invest in new ideas and tools, potential academic collaborators, and REF panels.  

We need to provide more than just a summary of each project.  

With this and other findings, we have started to develop web pages for every funded research project at Birkbeck, using a standard template. In the New Year, we will engage with researchers to take this project forward, with a view to publishing these new pages in 2019.  

Other DTP projects
Other work that is ongoing includes: 

Improved search: the ITS Web Team have been busy implementing our new, much improved search tool, which will make it far easier to find relevant information on our website. This is due to go live in the first half of 2019, following a rethink of the implementation to reduce reliance on the College’s current CMS. 

Academic staff profiles: redeveloping staff profiles was set as a project priority by the Web Working Group and we commissioned new designs and extensive user testing and consultation with staff across Birkbeck. Pending final consultation relating to KEF and business services, the new profiles will be built and then populated with information by the DTP content team. The plan is that academics will maintain their profiles via My Birkbeck for Staff.  

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