First hand accounts of the Holocaust
Today is Holocaust Memorial Day and to mark the occasion the British Library’s JISC funded Archival Sound Recordings project has added a new tool for Holocaust research and education, available online.
Here are some of the details of the collection by the project manager, Peter Findlay (more can be read on the Sound recordings blog):
Jewish Survivors of the Holocaust documents the moving testimonies of Jewish immigrants to Britain, many of whom survived Nazi concentration camps. Over 440 hours of life story recordings explore 66 personal experiences of persecution across war-torn Europe and the impact of the Holocaust, covering:
- Anti-Semitism before the Second World War
- Ghettos and concentration camps
- Resistance and liberation
- Searching for family in the aftermath
- Building a new life in Britain
- The legacy of the Holocaust
The Jewish Survivors of the Holocaust resource will also support primary and secondary education, supplementing the study materials and lesson plans provided by the British Library’s Learning team’s Voices of the Holocaust package.
The testimonies now available are drawn from a major oral history programme The Living Memory of the Jewish Community which between 1987 and 2000 gathered 186 audio life story interviews with Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and their children. It was initiated by National Life Stories based in the British Library’s oral history section and funded by a number of organisations including the Harold Hyam Wingate Foundation, the John S Cohen Foundation and the Porjes Charitable Trust.
The collection joins a growing range of oral history recordings on Archival Sound Recordings, which makes selections of music, spoken word, and environmental sounds from the British Library Sound Archive available online. Recordings can be accessed from British Library reading rooms and are available for free to licensed UK higher and further education institutions. In addition, over 2000 recordings, including Jewish Survivors of the Holocaust, are available to the public via the website.
UK higher and further education librarians can email (asr@bl.uk) to request a free licence.
Ginevra House
Engagement Officer
Higher Education Team
The British Library
Ginevra.house@bl.uk
www.bl.uk
+44 (0)20 7412 7245
Conference Announcement - ‘New access to past debates: 19th century pamphlets’
Below are details of a forthcoming conference being held by the 19th Century Pamphlets project. If you are interested in attending then contact details and further information can be found below:
‘New access to past debates: 19th century pamphlets’
The 19th Century Pamphlets Online project is holding a one-day conference at the University of Liverpool on Friday 20 March 2009.
This event marks the launch of a major new digital resource, providing desktop access to more than 23,000 19th century pamphlets covering the political, social and economic issues of their day - the result of sponsorship and investment from RLUK (Research Libraries UK), JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) and JSTOR.
The conference will seek to place 19th century pamphlets within their historical, literary and cultural contexts, and to consider the potential of their digitisation for research and teaching.
Confirmed speakers include: Miles Taylor, Professor of History and Director of the Institute of Historical Research; Laurel Brake, Professor of Literature and Print Culture at Birkbeck, University of London; and Brian Maidment, Research Professor in the History of Print at the University of Salford. The day will be introduced by John Belchem, Professor of History and Pro-Vice Chancellor of the University of Liverpool.
The conference will take place within the Victorian grandeur of the University of Liverpool’s Foresight Centre. It will begin with registration at 10:30 and conclude by 4:30. After the formal part of the day there will be an opportunity to visit the University Library’s recently refurbished Special Collections & Archives, to view the pamphlet collection of the Earls of Derby (the Knowsley
collection) and participate in a reception. A full programme will be made available nearer the time.
Participation in this event, which includes lunch and refreshments, is free, thanks to the generous sponsorship of RLUK (Research Libraries UK). However, places are limited and will be allocated on a ‘first come, first served’ basis. To reserve your place or request more information about this event or the 19th Century Pamphlets project, please email Grant Young at grant.young@bristol.ac.uk .
About the project and its collections
19th Century Pamphlets Online will provide access to some of the most significant collections of pamphlets held in UK research libraries.
This includes the personal collections of Joseph Hume (from UCL) and Joseph Cowen (Newcastle), the family collections of the Earls Grey
(Durham) and Earls of Derby (Liverpool), the Foreign Office and Colonial Office collections (Manchester), and selections from the large collections held by LSE and the University of Bristol. In all, more than 1 million pages (about 23,000 pamphlets) will be digitised and made freely available to UK users via JSTOR in early 2009.
The 19th Century Pamphlets Online project was instigated by RLUK
(http://www.rluk.ac.uk/) and is led by the University of Southamptonis. It has received major funding from the JISC(http://www.jisc.ac.uk/) in the second phase of its large Digitisation Programme. For more information about this project and the JISC Digitisation Programme, please see http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/digitisation/pamphlets
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Grant Young Project Manager,19th Century Pamphlets Online Digitisation Project (0.5 time) University of Southampton (based at Bristol) grant.young@bristol.ac.ukDigitisation and Digital Preservation Specialist (0.5 time) Cambridge University Library gy219@cam.ac.uk01223 211119 Monday or Friday (note NEW number)01223 765576 Tuesday-Thursday07847 328914 Mobile
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What’s your priority for digitisation?
A new online discussion forum has recently launched in order to gather people’s feedback on digitisation priorities for special collections.
Current debates raise issues such as what defines a special collection, how to determine digitisation priorities, user needs in research & teaching, and a provocative “Devil’s advocate” thread to provide a platform to air “contrary positions”.
Everybody can join the forum at http://forums.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/
This online forum is part of the DiSCMap project (Digitisation in Special Collections: mapping, assessment, prioritisation), funded by the JISC Digitisation Programme. DiSCMap seeks to produce a “top priority” list of special collections held within the UK Higher Education sector for potential future digitisation, based primarily on the needs of researchers and teachers.
Through the working of the forum, the DiSCMap project will also investigate the potential of online environments in assisting the delivery of research project outputs, and its usefulness for encouraging more and freer discussions at both national and international level.
DiSCMap is being carried out by the University of Strathclyde, Centre for Digital Library Research, in partnership with Manchester Metropolitan University, Centre for Research in Library and Information Management.
The Library of Congress and Flickr
A year ago the Library of Congress asked members of the public to tag and describe two sets of approximately 3000 historic photos using Flickr, the photosharing website. The LOC reports that within the first 24 hours of the project starting Flickr recorded 1.1 million total views on the account, with 3.6 million views a week later, and have had 10.4 million views on Flickr up to October 2008. Very impressive figures indeed!
The project was able to stimulate interest not only in the images themselves, and it would appear from the report that the academic and public community were surprised by the depth of cultural and historic resources available at the library. But the project was also able to prompt interest in web 2.0 technologies and foster an interest in the library and its diverse resources and collections.
The LOC reported that the project pilot had the following outcomes:
- 10.4 million views of the photos on Flickr.
- 79% of the 4,615 photos have been made a “favorite” (i.e., are incorporated into personal Flickr collections).
- More than 15,000 Flickr members have chosen to make the Library of Congress a “contact,” creating a photostream of Library images on their own accounts.
- 7,166 comments were left on 2,873 photos by 2,562 unique Flickr accounts.
- 67,176 tags were added by 2,518 unique Flickr accounts.
- 4,548 of the 4,615 photos have at least one community-provided tag.
- Less than 25 instances of user-generated content were removed as inappropriate.
- More than 500 Prints and Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC) records have been enhanced with new information provided by the Flickr Community.
More information about the project and the full report can be found at the LOC’s Prints and Photographs reading room. There was also a very interesting article in the New York Times exploring tagging and descriptive metadata in Flickr and Wikipedia.
Digitisation on YouTube
The recently launched JISC channel on You Tube, JISCmedia, showcases short videos on the digital collections that will be going live between now and Spring 2009 funded under the JISC Digitisation Programme.
Here’s an example from the Cabinet papers 1915-1978 project, which has digitised millions of pages of government debates on key events of the 20th century.
To see the showreels for some of the other projects, hover with your mouse over the top of the video clip, the You Tube search box will appear, search by JISCmedia.
More videos will be added over the next few months.
Digging into Data Challenge - Funding Call
The Digging into Data Challenge is an international grant competition sponsored by four leading research agencies from the UK, US and Canada. The challenge that this funding call wishes to confront is what do we do with a million books, images or articles? How does the huge volume of digitised material effect humanities and social science research? And what innovative approaches might be developed to help address these questions.
More details of this challenge are included below:
The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) from the United States, the National Science Foundation (NSF) from the United States, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) from Canada invites institutions to submit proposals for the Digging into Data Challenge .
The goals of the initiative are:
- To promote the development and deployment of innovative research techniques in large-scale data analysis.
- To foster interdisciplinary collaboration among scholars in the humanities, social sciences, computer sciences, information sciences, and other fields, around questions of text and data analysis.
- To promote international collaboration.
- To work with data repositories that hold large digital collections to ensure efficient access to these materials for research.
The JISC is making a total of £200,000 available for this initiative. Lead institutions from England and Wales may apply for up to £100,000 of funding. Funding is available for projects starting from January 2010 for up to 15 months. All projects must be completed by March 2011.The proposal process will be in two stages and interested potential applicants must first send a letter of intent by 15 March 2009. The deadline for receipt of the final proposal in response to this call will be Wednesday 15 July 2009. Late proposals will NOT be accepted. Details of how to submit are in the main request for proposal. Each funder has also produced an addendum with information specific to that funder and this should be read in conjunction with the main proposal. A full version of the call can be found at: Funding Opportunities
New archival collections available from JISC Collections
JISC Collections is making two new archival collections freely available to universities, colleges and research councils:
The British Periodicals Collections I and II: Traces the development and growth of the periodical press in Britain from its origins in the seventeenth century through to the Victorian “age of periodicals” and beyond. The collections comprise six million keyword-searchable pages and forms an essential record of more than two centuries of British history and culture.
The Burney Collection: Represents the largest single collection of 17th and 18th century English news media available from the British Library. The collection includes nearly 1 million pages from more than 1000 pamphlets and newspapers from the period, including the first successful London daily and first illustrated newspaper all dating from 1600-1800.
Together these archives would cost individual institutions between £50,000 and £90,000 to purchase, but these agreements make them available freely until at least the end of 2013, and have been licensed on behalf of the UK academic community in perpetuity.
The British Library is currently digitising another one million newspaper pages as part of the JISC programme British Newspapers 1620-1900 . These are expected to be realised in the spring 2009.
From motion capture to ancient manuscripts - Workshop, 30th January
This workshop, funded by JISC, is taking place on 30th January 2009, at King’s College London. There is more information on the JISC website and you can book a place there too.
Researchers from all parts of the campus are long-used to collecting, structuring and presenting their data in databases, spreadsheets, webpages etc, using a range of widely available and generic tools. In recent years, however, advances in digitization technologies have led to the creation of much more complex data objects.
For example:
- Motion capture technologies now enable the creation of ‘motion sculptures’ that capture dance movements.
- Optical character recognition (OCR) enables the digitisation of ancient manuscripts, offering researchers the potential to study them collaboratively on-line.
- OCR also enables the digitisation of large corpuses of text with potential for new discoveries through text mining.
- Research using digital objects such as these presents new challenges, but also new opportunities for multi-skilled, multi-disciplinary collaboration.
This half-day workshop, part of the JISC e-Infrastructure Roadshow series, will highlight some of these opportunities and present some of the practical methods researchers can take for using/manipulating complex digital objects.
Coordinated by the Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre, it will provide an interdisciplinary perspective illustrated by examples drawn mainly from the arts and humanities but also the biomedical sciences.
Speakers will include David Fergusson, Deputy Director, Training, Outreach and Education, the National e-Science Centre, who will give an introduction to national infrastructures that support the use of complex digital objects and Jens Jensen from the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, who will talk about the use of the National Grid Service for the arts and humanities.
Make sure collection names are obvious
The British Library’s Sound Archive has some fascinating collections but they tend to have some quite obscure names.
For example, the St Mary-le-Bow public debates have contributions from Iris Murdoch, Peter Cook and Enoch Powell.
A previous version of the Sound Archive website replicated these collection names - and quite possibly put off users who failed to understand what may actually have been in each collection.
However, a new browsing structure has now been created.
It is much more obvious - collections are organised organised according to subject name giving users a more immediate understanding of what might be available.
“Improving your online presence” course
“Improving your online presence” is a FREE 3-day course held in London aimed at showing how simple and inexpensive techniques can be used to boast your collection’s web visibility and consequently traffic to your website.
The course is organised by the Strategic Content Alliance (SCA) and the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN) and builds on highly successful courses in Canada resulting in improving professional practice and increased traffic to attendee’s websites. Delegates from university archives and museums, health, public service broadcasting, schools and cultural heritage are particularly welcome to attend.
The course will consist of three strands:
An introduction to search engine marketing – 9th February;
Writing for the web – 10th February;
Community building and web analytics – 11th February.
It is strongly recommended that delegates attend all three days in order to get the maximum benefit. Places are strictly limited on a first come first serve basis. To register please use the online form at http://survey.jisc.ac.uk/scaseocourse/
Date: 9th-11th February 2009
Location: Woburn House Conference Centre, 20 Tavistock Square, London, WC1H 9HQ
Timetable
9th February 10.30 Registration – 11.00 start – 15.30 close
10th February 10.30 start – 15.30 close
11th February 10.30 start – 15.30 close
A buffet lunch and light refreshments will be provided over the three days.
Accommodation
The organisers have negotiated a preferential room rate of £130 instead of the usual £250 per night (room only) for superior rooms at the Novotel - Euston (Four Star) (see attachment for hotel information). Executive rooms are on the higher floors of the hotel with a King sized bed and Wi-Fi Internet access. Executive rooms are also available at £30 per night supplement.
If you wish to take advantage of this special reduced rate please indicate this on your online registration, which must reach us by 12:30pm, Monday 12th January.
Please note that the hotel will contact you after this date to take full amount of stay – i.e. payable in advance (at booking time) by credit card, the full deposit is not refundable even if the booking is cancelled or modified. This will not be reimbursed by the Strategic Content Alliance or the Canadian Heritage Information Network. You are, of course, at liberty to stay at any hotel in London.