Vacancy for Digitiation Programme Officer JISC Collections / JISC Executive
Salary: £28,000 to £32,800 depending on experience
Based in: Central London
Closing date for applications: Monday 29th September
JISC Collections negotiates agreements for and acquires online content to support education and research. The key ambition in establishing JISC Collections is to widen accessibility to online resources, to save the academic sector time and money, and to improve management of licensing by the sector.
JISC Collections is undertaking two projects in association with the JISC Digitisation Programme and requires a programme manager to support these projects and ensure that their successful delivery.
You will be required to:
• Support projects funded under the JISC Digitisation Programme’s Enriching Digital Resources call and ensure their successful delivery
• Obtain copyright clearances for content and data delivered via the JISC - funded Vision of Britain project
• Manage specific JISC Collections projects, with special attention to those involving the licensing of digital content
• As part of the JISC e-Content team to report back on project and programme management and share related information
You will need an understanding of the issues related to the digitisation of scholarly resources, such as data capture, resource discovery, rights clearance and usability. In addition an understanding of the issues related to the procurement and provision of online information resources in particular negotiation and licensing.
For a full copy of the job description please visit the JISC Collections web site or email Liam Earney at L.Earney@jisc.ac.uk
Millions more newspapers pages to be available on Google
Today Google announced that they are launching:
“an initiative to make more old newspapers accessible and searchable online by partnering with newspaper publishers to digitize millions of pages of news archives.”
This adds to the large amount of existing online newspaper content, by publications such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, that is already being crawled by Google.
In addition, Google has entered a partnership with ProQuest and Heritage that will allow even more newspapers pages to be digitised and made available online. As the ProQuest press-release explains:
“ProQuest will contribute content to the partnership, and will introduce newspaper publishers nationwide to the program. ProQuest will also supply from its microfilm vault newspaper content that can be delivered effectively in the less formal framework of the open web.”
Newspapers content will be available through Google News Archive Search:
“Search results include content from a number of sources, including both partner content digitized by Google through our News Archive Partner Program and online archival materials that we’ve crawled. Search results can include content that is freely accessible as well as content that requires a fee. Articles related to a single story within a given time period are grouped together to allow users to see a broad perspective on the topics they are searching. “
The Impact of Digitizing Special Collections on Teaching and Scholarship
A recent report from OCLC on The Impact of Digitizing Special Collections on Teaching and Scholarship. Reflections on a Symposium about Digitization and Humanities highlights the main recommendations that emerged from the symposium held in June 2008.
The symposium brought together both primary users of (digitised) primary sources as well as “custodians”, such as librarians, archivists, museum professionals and senior managers. Participants discussed, from their own particular view points, strategies to maximise the impact of digitisation of special collections on teaching and research.
The report calls for specific directions for libraries and archives to take in the near future:
- work with faculty to understand current research methods and materials
- go outside the library or archive to build collections and work with faculty
- continue to build digital and material collections for both teaching and research.
Other important issues that emerged were:
- licencing and third-party agreements: the need for common principles in negotiating licensing contracts in order to ultimately guarantee open access to content
- Metrics: the need for more evidence of the impact of digitization and the acknowledgement that quantitative web stats on their own are just not enough.
On this last point: JISC is currently conducting an Impact study of the projects funded under Phase 1 of its Digitisation Programme. The project, carried out by the Oxford Internet Institute, will have as one of its key outcome the production of a Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Resources, which will provide a framework for useful metrics to consider when assessing impact - see blog post on Measuring the impact of digitised resources.