On Thursday June 26 from 16.00 to 17.15 four Passau students following the seminar "Maps and Models of World War I" took part in an online meeting with a group from the University of Virginia Library Scholars’ Lab.
The group from Virginia included the director, Bethany Nowviskie, and project management and training specialist Ronda Grizzle, who organised the meeting in cooperation with Øyvind Eide from Passau. The Virginia group also included developers of the tool Neatline, which is the main tool used by the students in the seminar. During the meeting the seminar was presented, as was the scholarly and theoretical thinking behind Neatline.
The students from Passau presented their projects. Their feedback to the developers were mainly positive, stating that the tool was surprisingly easy to use for students with no training in computer science. The students also presented a number of problems they had using Neatline. The developers in Virginia replied to the critique, partly by explaining the reasons why the tool works as it does, partly by guiding students to solutions and workarounds, an partly by taking notes of issues for future development of the tool. The students from Passau were well prepared and raised many important issues. The staff in Virginian was very responsive and quickly understood all issues raised, being they practical or more theoretical. It was agreed that some of the students would send their lists of issues to Ronda Grizzle for distribution among the team in Virginia. We also agreed that the meeting was very helpful for both sides and that we would be happy to have similar meetings in the future.