Example Two: Pilot for the Willow Community Project archive

Here we used Padlet, a low-cost and easily accessible platform, and built a presentation of material from the archive around a timeline. Padlet offers the added advantage of viewers being able to ‘like’ and comment on items, adding their own memories to the archive.

Example Three: York’s Historic Music Venues Walking Trail

This interactive PDF slideshow (again assembled initially in Powerpoint) allows the viewer to interact with the trail content while walking between physical locations. The slides can contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia elements, and navigation buttons or hyperlinks can be used to move between slides or access additional information.

Example Four: The Willow Nightclub – Echoes and Memories in Virtual Reality

This experiment with Virtual Reality enabled us to work with a disused empty space that was once a vibrant venue. The Willow Nightclub, which was located on York’s Coney Street, closed down in 2015. A renovation programme for its first-floor premises was begun but abandoned during the pandemic and the site cannot currently be opened to the public for safety reasons. The current owners were willing to allow us into the building to film, however, and our 360-degree footage was edited into a VR experience that can be accessed on a VR headset or via phone, tablet and computer (using the mouse or touchpad to navigate around the virtual space). This is work in progress: text and images could be added to help us tell the story of the venue virtually, to show what happened where, and to bring its past existence into visual juxtaposition with its inaccessible present.

Click here for the latest view and explore (onscreen)!

Example FIve: The Willow Community Digital Archive

The Willow Community Digital Archive has been an experiment in community powered digital archiving using a bespoke digital library created in Greenstone3 by David Bainbridge at the University of Waikato. The WCDA developed out of the University of York’s StreetLife project (2021-23). The idea was to create a dynamic, interactive archive – with the flexibility and familiarity more usually found in social media settings – which visitors could browse but could also comment on and contribute to by uploading memories and images from nights out at the Willow. Funding from the University of York enabled us to collaborate with ThomFong – Vicki Fong is the daughter of the proprietors of the Willow, Tommy and Soo Mei Fong, which helped to broaden the scope of the collections to include perspectives not just from those who experienced the club as ‘punters’, but also the Fong family and their former employees. We also put together a public playlist of music heard in the club, based on what has been mentioned in the archive, at our public events, and what Vicki remembers hearing night after night – see The Willow Experience on Spotify.

Click here to explore the Willow Community Digital Archive!

For more on the development and design of the WCDA digital archive and the methodology of the project, you can read our latest paper – ‘(Re)capturing the Emotional Geography of Lost Music Venues: A Study of the Willow Community Digital Archive‘.

Our launch of the Willow Community Digital Archive at the Basement, City Screen, on 13 June 2025, as part of the University of York’s Festival of Ideas, attracted considerable attention in the media – here are a few previews and write-ups, with thanks to those journalists who supported the event:

BBC News (13 June 2025)

YorkMix (5 June 2025)

York Press (4 June 2025)

Yorkshire Post (18 May 2025)

Updated 15 June 2025 (Rachel Cowgill)