'Observing the 80s' http://blogs.sussex.ac.uk/observingthe80s/

Abstract

‘Observing the 80s’ is a website, a collection of primary sources and materials and an Open Educational Resource (OER) which can be downloaded and used with open-source learning management software Moodle. All are freely accessible to students, teachers and the public over the Internet. Put together by a team at the University of Sussex, ‘Observing the 80s’ brings together twenty-three voices from the Mass Observation Project (MOP) begun in 1981, twenty-six interviews from the oral history collections of the British Library (BL) and thirty-eight items of ephemera from the University of Sussex’s Special Collections to shed light on the political, social and cultural history of the 1980s.1 Begun in 2011, and funded to the tune of around £100,000 by Jisc, the project was launched in 2012, seventy-five years after the founding of the original Mass Observation (MO) in 1937.2 The OER is based on the University of Sussex undergraduate course taught by Lucy Robinson, entitled ‘1984: Thatcher’s Britain’ and uses excepts and clips from the array of primary materials; all these are also available in full in their ‘raw’ form, as PDFs on the ‘Observing the 80s’ website and to listen to on the BL website. The project was led by Jane Harvell, Head of Library Academic Services and Special Collections at the University of Sussex, and involved several historians, including Lucy Robinson, Jill Kirby and Dorothy Sheridan, who has worked with the MO papers since 1974.3