D7.1 – Initial Dissemination and Communication Plan

This deliverable presents the initial Dissemination and Communication Plan for the ARIADNEplus project. The plan builds upon previous experience gained from the original ARIADNE project with the aim of raising awareness to an increased audience, reaching more end-users and promoting the Portal, along with its related standards and best practices across the board. ARIADNEplus will extend the geographic, disciplinary and temporal coverage of its datasets, the depth of the database integration as well as textual datasets (through NLP) and also the portfolio of tools and services offered to end-users. It will consequently involve a greater number of researchers, as well as heritage managers, and its stakeholders, it will now include people from the USA, Japan, and Argentina. This wider community not only includes the project partners, research institutions and policy makers but also research infrastructures in related cultural heritage disciplines, commercial organisations involved in archaeology and cultural heritage, semi-professional and amateur organisations as well as the public at large. As such, each community has different priorities and interests and the communications have to be tailored according to the resources available to the project. The consortium of 41 partners provide one such valuable resource through a variety of their own dissemination channels, from websites and newsletters to social media and their own networks of contacts. The are several ERICS and RIs who also have overlapping interests with whom ARIADNEplus will co-ordinate including Europeana, DARIAH and E-RIHS as well as key groups and associations such as the European Association of Archaeologists. The CARARE Association is also a partner and provides coverage for regions not represented by the consortium. Among the resources identified are mailing lists, Twitter (as the most effective social media channel), the press and the ARIADNEplus website. Leaflets targeted at specific stakeholder groups are also being produced, the first of these being for researchers and cultural heritage managers. In addition, dissemination materials have already been prepared such as pens, bags and notepads with the ARIADNEplus logo, along with upright banners that can be taken to conferences and events. For internal communication, there will be a monthly newsletter to keep all the partners updated on what is happening in the project as well as a 3-monthly summary sent out to subscribers (created in MailChimp) which will refer them to the website. Representation at conferences and events are a very effective means of reaching the wider research community and the project will focus on encouraging partners to submit proposals for papers and workshops as well as having booths where feasible. Training and Transnational Access also provide an opportunity to communicate (and achieve) the project objectives, the latter being a good way to contact younger, less experienced researchers. Finally, ARIADNEplus has the benefit of the experience gained from the first project to set realistic targets (indicators) for the measurement of its success and outreach, and also the advice and support of a Strategic Advisory Board whose initial recommendations have been taken on board and who will also assess and advise the WP7 team over the four-year lifetime of this initiative.