JISC plans for further international funding
Readers will recall that the JISC and the US National Endowment for the Humanities funded five transatlantic projects which were digitising material (such as the Shakespeare Quartos project) and creating tools for improving access to the digital material, like the Concordia project on ancient stone inscriptions. These are due to finish in March 2009.
JISC and NEH are currently considering how best to take this forward and are currently scoping a second phase of the projects. Whilst these plans are not finalised, JISC and NEH are considering funding two or three more transatlantic projects to start in Summer 2009, with a call likely to be made in December 2008.
These projects are likely to be larger in size than the original projects, with each partner receiving £100k - £150k ($150k - $225k).
Details all of all future JISC calls (until March 2009) are available on the JISC Road Map
More details will be posed on this blog and on the website as they are finalised.
Study of preservation plans of digitisation projects
JISC recently commissioned a tender to undertake a study of the preservation plans and processes of the sixteen projects funded under Phase 2 of the JISC Digitisation Programme and identify best practice and issues in terms of medium or long-term access to the digitised content.
The tenders have now been received and the winning proposal came from the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), an international membership body working on various issues related to digital preservation.
The leaders of the study (Frances Boyle and Kevin Ashley) will be commencing work soon, and, as well as studying the plans will be developing some case studies based on work of specific projects.
Outcomes from the study will be available in April 2009.
How publishers market resources - State Papers Online
The publishers Cengage have just release a new digital resource, State Papers Online, 1509-1714, drawn from various archival sources related to the government of Britain in the early modern periods.
What’s interesting is to see how they have marketed the resources via additional information on the resource homepage - http://gale.cengage.co.uk/statepapers/
Included are 10 essays from leading scholars, an essay from History Today (a good dissemination channel), details of conferences they will be attending and a clear indication of the content and functionality of the resource. The members of the Advisory Board are also clearly declared.
Not every digital resource should be following this formula, but it does provide some helpful ideas for how to get through to your bread-and-butter academics who will be coming across the resource for the first time
Book scanners: compare and contrast
For those considering large scale book digitisation, and the purchase of a book scanner, this brief report will help consider the pros and cons of some of the main book scanners currently available on the market.
Julian Ball, the author of the report, attended an event at the Munich Digitisation Centre (18-10 June 2008) where four vendors exhibited and demonstarted their scanners: Qidenus, Kirtas, Treventus and 4DigitalBooks.
The report lists basic specifications for each scanner, contact details and personal observations on the various products.
Julian Ball is the Manager of BOPCRIS, the Digitisation Centre based within the Hartley Library at the University of Southampton. He he also currently involved in one of the JISC-funded digitisation projects, 19th Century Pamphlets Online.
Download the report (PDF) on Book scanners Munich 2008.
Listen to a podcast on the 19th Century Pamphlets digitisation project with Project Manager Grant Young.
Digitising Moral Panic - Video in the Classroom
Carol Green, from Craven College Skipton, was one of the first lecturers to use the NewsFilm Online resource in a classroom setting, selecting a suite of films from the archive that explore the idea of moral panic.
In particular, she wanted to show her class of Journalism students that the idea of moral panic is not a contemporary one. Clips from the NewsFilm Online archive were central to her argument that moral panics are not only a contemporary concern, but had an imapact in the 1950s.
A news-clip reporting on violence between Mods and Rockers was a key part of her work.
You can see a video of Ms Green explaining her usage of the resource from the JISC website.
Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources
In a previous post earlier in the year, Measuring the impact of digitised resources (12/6/2008), we announced the work that the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) was about to embark upon of identifying use and usage patterns of five JISC-funded online resources and devising meaningful metrics for the measurement of the impact of digitised scholarly resources.
This is a crucial tool for those interested in digitisation, providing much needed evidence and analysis of how digital resources are actually making a difference
At a recent JISC Digitisation programme meeting, Eric T Meyer and Katherine Eccles provided some background on how the OII is planning to carry out the work and the mixture of quantitative and qualitative measures they will take into consideration to gain some understanding of the use of such resources.
Quantitative Measures include:
• Webometrics
• Analytics
• Log file analysis
• Scientometrics / bibliometrics
• Content analysis of media coverage
Qualitative Measures include:
• Stakeholder interviews
• Resource surveys
• User feedback analysis
• Focus groups
• Questionnaires
One of the interesting things that emerged from their presentation was the need not to “obsess” too much about any particular indicator at any given time (eg, no need to look at web stats every month), but to consider a range of indicators collectively at regular intervals in time, in order to identify patterns over a longer duration of time.
The work will culminate in the creation of a Toolkit for the the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources, which will be disseminated in Spring 2009.
Presentation (PDF) on the Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources.
Yesterdays’s Headlines …. Televised News Online
NewsFilm Online, launched last week, contains 60,000 digitised clips from the archives of ITN and other news sources.
It’s an incredibly rich resource, featuring news stories relating to events such as the Suez crisis in 1956, Nelson Mandela’s first interview in 1961, the moon landing in 1969 and the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997.
For the moment, it’s fun just exploring some of the content that is there.
But it will be interesting to see how the resources get used in the educational community.
Video has not had a great take up in teaching and learning - is this because of the content, or because of the medium? How NewsFilm Online is used will give us much more evidence in this area.
(Note the videos can only be accessed by those in UK university and college sector.)
Issac Newton Podcasts and other new digitisation projects
JISC has just selected 25 diverse projects at UK universities that are going to receive £1.8m of funding in the ‘Enrich Digital Resources’ programme. The support has been allocated to projects designed to benefit both researchers and learners, to improve existing digital content and to digitise new materials for sustainable access in the future.
The projects will use innovative technologies to create vibrant learning and research resources which serve to enhance or revitalise Britain’s scholarly and cultural heritage. They are broad reaching in scope, varying from using podcasts to improve access to Newton’s influential scientific texts to creating a digital archive to reflect the social change in East London arising from hosting the Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2012.
’Enrich Digital Resources’ will run from October 2008 until 2009, after which all the enhanced or completely new digitised content will be freely available via the Internet, in efforts to be as useful as possible to international research and learning communities.
The full list is available from the JISC website.
There is also a Google Map of the projects and their lead institutions.