Click here to visit the Gay Birmingham Remembered website
[opens in a new browser window]

The Client

The Gay Birmingham Remembered project was established by Birmingham LGBT Community Trust, a charity that works with one of the city's 'hidden' communities. Their remit is to provide service and support to organisations and charities within the community.

It was the result of a realisation that some members of the LGBT population of Birmingham were ageing and the wealth of experience that existed in their minds would be lost forever if not recorded that led to the formation of the Gay Birmingham Remembered project.

The Customer Base

For a client with such a diverse remit, Capricorn identified the customer base simply as being anyone with an interest in history, diversity and social politics. Naturally we were aware that the website would become an information resource for anyone working in the LGBT field as well as a tool for strengthening the position of the community as a whole. After all, when a community is not apparent to the naked eye, its representation becomes all the more difficult, and all the more important.

The Challenge

Prior to Capricorn's successful brief, the Gay Birmingham Remembered project team has assembled a vast amount of data. This included many, many hours of recorded personal recollections from over eighty community members as well as hundreds of photographs, scans of discontinued publications and artefacts. All of this had to be structured in such a way as to be easily searchable, browsable and absorbable.

We felt that the most logical way of building relationships between all of this data was to create a hierarchy or information. At the topmost level, we looked at Topics; those events, places, things and people that held wide influence throughout the community over the last fifty or so years. These became grouped into one or more identified Groups: Society, Law, Health, etc.

Once these Topics began to be established, we could begin to relate the recorded experiences of the community to them. Of course, a single statement (a Memory) from a person could relate to several different Topics, so it was important that the administration system allowed multiple links to be built.

It's not just enough that this data exists in a place on the internet; it must also be accessible to the user. Into the design, Capricorn built multiple entry points to allow a user to access the information on many levels. First comes a simple search function which examines the database a returns the most relevant results. The homepage displays links to a random daily selection of Topics and Memories, meaning that with each subsequent visit, a user can find something new to read.

With the addition of a Timeline search, Topics and Memories can be viewed in the form of a history, brought alive by the memories of the people who lived through it. Using a Google Maps API with contemporaneous overlays, we have been able to allow the shape of the LGBT scene in Birmingham to be visualised integrated with functionality that allows interrogation of the database.

Capricorn were aware very early on that this project could not just be completed and forgotten. To do so would be as bad as putting it in a box at the back of a cupboard. Therefore we added a further level of functionality that allows users to contribute their memories to the database onwards into the future.

Today's news is, after all, tomorrow's history.