Conference 2007: Paola Marchionni and Alastair Dunning: Digitisation phase two
The JISC Digitisation Programme: an introduction to the digitisation strategy and new collections coming on stream from 2009
Paola Marchionni, Digitisation Programme Manager, JISC
Alastair Dunning, Digitisation Programme Manager, JISC
“If Google is The Beast, then the JISC digitisation programme will be The Beauty”
AD: What we do is very different from the kind of digitisation that Google does. The two phases fund a variety of different projects with impulses from different places. It’s now been brought together in a coherent way. With the Digitisation Strategy we want your feedback on the blog or by email so we can take it forward. Would like to think firstly, about how we fit in with the wider UK framework to provide access to all, and secondly, strategic subjects - what are the subjects where we want to build a forest of content, not saplings. Time to think strategically about how we can build strategically. Already looking into Islamic Studies and bringing people together to think about the issues.
Phase Two:
- £12.5m funding - bids chosen after public consultation and peer review
- 16 projects, running from early 2007 to early 2009
- Wide range in skills and experience and size of the projects
- Collections span five centuries of social, political, economic and cultural history in the UK
- Variety of formats
- Variety of institutions and partnerships
- Materials difficult to access and fragile
- Relevant to teaching and research interests
PM: can group the projects under a number of key themes are headings which map to our strategy but not supposed to be reductive - most fall under more than one grouping
User engagement:
Protection from deterioration:
Contxtualised resources:
- British governance: cabinet papers
- Voices: moving images in the public sphere
- Historic boundaries of Britain
Delivery, access and sustainability:
- Free to all: Modern Welsh journals online
- Use of existing infrastructure: Nineteenth century pamphlets
- Use of existing infrastructure: UK theses/EThos
- Commercial partnerships: Electronic Ephemera, Oxford
Building a national critical mas:
- E-resources on Ireland
- British newspapers 1620-1900
- East London theatre archive
- Independent Radio News
AD: programme outputs: lessons learnt from phase one:
- High quality content for educational sector
- Extra emphasis on learning resources
- Developing critical mass in particular areas
- Developing cross-search facilities to provide linkage between project content
Programme outcomes:
- Sophisticated rights framework
- Technical metadata knowledge
- Enhanced digital infrastructure
- Enhanced digitisation knowledge, both broad and detailed
- Variety of sustainability and business models
- Enhanced technical standards
- Create awareness of digitisation needs both from users and from collection curators
Catherine Draycott: very inspiring to hear abut the projects and the SCA and with my BAPLA hat on there are over 400 picture libraries in the UK and at least 15% of BAPLA is made up on MLA sector but other libraries also have something to offer the educational community. Yes, commercial, but many are sole traders - photographers who are passionate about their images and have poured much of their own mony into digitising their work. How can this be made available to the ducation sector? Would like to take that forard with JISC and find a way in which there might be some kind of win-win
AD: The digitisation programme is open to anyone with an interest and can make it freely availble to our community. Also interested in scientific content. It’s natural and understandable that the focus is on arts and humanities but would be interested to work with those in the science faculty as well.
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