Establishing digitisation workflows and guidelines
When it comes to digitisation projects it is easy to become seduced into rushing straight into the digitisation before thinking about anything else.
However, it is often the case that successful digitisation projects spend what seems like a lot of time thinking about and drafting their work flows and guidelines before embarking on the ‘real work’.
The open-access repository digitisation work being undertaken at Exeter University Library by CHARTER (Creating Heritage Artefacts for Research and Teaching in an E-Repository) has created a robust document for their digitisation workflow and guidelines.
CHARTER is a small scale digitisation project which runs for one year, but has still recognised the advantages of documenting their guidelines.
CHARTER’s willingness to share and be open with their guidelines also allows the opportunity for other projects to explore and borrow from their work, as well as opening up the possibility of feedback and ever improving workflows and guidelines for this and future projects.
JISC Digital Media’s guidelines on project-management for a digitisation project offers a great place to begin. CHARTER’s progress can be followed on their blog, where their guidelines have also been posted.
Digital Futures: from digitization to delivery
Those who are thinking of embarking on a digitistaion project or need to improve their knowledge of the key issuses in running a digitisation project should consider attending the forthcoming training event Digital Futures: from digitization to delivery, held at King’s College London, 27th April - 1st May 2009.
Led by experts of international renown, Digital Futures focuses on the creation, delivery and preservation of digital resources from cultural and memory institutions. Lasting five days, Digital Futures is aimed at managers and other practitioners from the library, museum, heritage and cultural sectors looking to understand the strategic and management issues of developing digital resources from digitisation to delivery.
Digital Futures will cover the following core areas:
o Planning and management
o Fund raising
o Understanding the audience
o Metadata - introduction and implementation
o Copyright and intellectual property
o Sustainability
o Financial issues
o Visual and image based resource creation and delivery
o Implementing digital resources
o Digital preservation
There will be visits to 2 institutions to see behind the scenes and receive expert presentations. For the London Digital Futures this will be the National Gallery and the National Archives.
Digital Futures is lead by Simon Tanner, Director of King’s Digital Consultancy Services, King’s College London and Tom Clareson, Director for New Initiatives, Lyrasis.
What does opening up your data really mean?
There’s plenty of discussion about things like APIs (application programming interfaces) and concepts of opening up data, but to the non-initiated this can all seem rather confusing and overly technical.
However, as those who have created digital projects continue to look for new ways to expose their content to the widest possible audience, APIs offer a way to give access to whole of your collection so that others can come up with new ways of exploiting it. Often, it’s people outside your organisation who can come up with imaginative ways of using your content in ways you had never imagined.
This could include other parties
- using your subject metadata to build a harvesting search engine over a number of collections related to a specific theme
- using all your metadata related to dates and time to build a timeline
- analysing your descriptive metadata to build a tag cloud
And once an API is set up, you spend a lot less time responding to queries from people who wonder if they can hold of your data for their own projects. They just go straight to the interface and question the data they need. They then build interfaces around this data, that will drive more users to your website.
There are two really helpful blog articles that help describe this better.
- Mike Ellis’ interview with the Brooklyn Museum, who have just published their API
- The interview with the DigitalNZ (New Zealand) team, who have done some radically innovative ideas in how to get their nation’s content used.
(Thanks to Mag3737 for the Flickr photo)
Funding for workshops on digitisation and e-content
JISC has just released a funding call for applicants to organise workshops related to achievements and challenges in digitisation and e-content. Applications may come from in- or outside the HE sector.
Potential topics that applicants can address pretty wide and include
- particular areas of technology (e.g. optical character recognition, 3D digitisation, visualisation);
- the relationship with digital content and a specific subject area (e.g. the availability and usefulness of digital resources for those studying the history of the performing arts, or subject areas deemed strategically important or vulnerable by the government);
- issues relating to content that falls under broader headings (e.g. mathematical journals, parliamentary records, medieval manuscripts, historic maps);
- other areas related to digitisation.
In particular, JISC is looking for events that can
- incorporate relevant expertise from other countries within Europe;
- provide evidence and clear articulation of existing and potential benefits of digitised content to research and teaching;
- provide a roadmap incorporating current achievements and outlining future directions.
The maximum amount for each workshop is £8,000. The timetable is tight. Bids need to be in by 8th May, and the workshops take place between June and September 2009.
The full call is available from the JISC website
Managing a Digitisation programme
The JISC Digitisation programme is coming to end and most projects have launched, or are about to, the digital resources created over the past couple of years.
What are the key issues that projects felt they would need support on during the development of their resources and what kind of support has JISC provided to projects?
Key issues signled out by projects at the outset of the programme:
- IPR and licencing
- evaluation methodologies
- metadata (technical and descriptive)
- marketing and publicity strategies
- digital preservation
- Quality Assurance
- Web search and delivery
- Incorporating Web 2.0
- Interface design
- creation of e-learning resources
Support activities offered to projects throughout the programme:
- workshops and training days
- presentations
- ad hoc support through specialist consultants
- surgeries
- promoting knowledge sharing through meetings, group work, mentoring schemes, visits to each other’s projects, email discussions
- commissioned studies
- regular contact with JISC Programme Managers
In general, feedack from projetcs on these activities has been very positive, but it’s interesting to notice that the most consistent positive comment about such initiatives was the value of meeting other projects, networking, sharing ideas, issues and challenges, and on the whole the opportunity for discussion as part of a community of practice.
First World War Poetry Digital Archive - Engaging New Audiences
The First World War Poetry Digital Archive at Oxford University recently held a two day workshop for teachers and lecturers to help support the creation of resources to enhance teaching and the student experience of the poetry archive.
One of the most interesting outcomes of the workshop was the immense popularity of the Great War Archive (GWA), a Flickr community for members of the public to submit images relating to the First World War. Participants drew heavily on this broad public archive of images and personal memorabillia, all directly related to the First World War.
The manuscripts, letters and texts of the poets work was often complimented with images from the GWA which allowed the participants to explore wide thematic and subject areas, including propaganda; childrens’ literature; ‘afterwards’; and women and war. All materials were then added to the education section of the archive.
While the poetic manuscripts and correspondnce is clearly at the heart of the project, and represents one of the most comprehensive archives of first world war poetry anywhere, the GWA engages the formal poetry archive in a much wider discussion with the first world war in general, and in the experiences of families and communities who were directly, or indirectly effected by it.
Institutions are increasingly under pressure to reach out to the wider community, and are finding it an ever increasing part of their remit and conditions of funding to prevent the exclusion of certain groups.
It will be very interesting in the next few years to see how heritage institutions such as libraries, museums and archives engage in this dialogue, and to see how JISC and similarly funded projects find innovative ways to address wider participation.
Peer Reviews and Digital Resources
One of the key problems in getting widespread acceptance of digital resources has been the lack of a review process, as would happen to an article or a monograph.
Thus it’s heartening to note the Institute for Historical Research is specifically undertaking more reviews of digital resources on its webpages.
Three of the JISC projects have already been reviewed. The British Library’s 19th-century newspaper site is called “a wonderfully rich resource which has all the benefits of a well-funded, exhaustively researched project.“, the Cartoon Archive represents “an enormous step forward in making accessible a hitherto hidden resource.”
Meanwhile the First World War Poetry Archive is “one of the most comprehensive (if not the most comprehensive) archival sites on the web. It is also one of the best attempts to navigate the museum/archive/website divide that I have seen.” It should be noted the the reviews website also offers creators a chance to respond to their reviewers, as Stuart Lee from the poetry archive has done
Funding for digital heritage questions
The AHRC have teamed up with British Telecom to provide funding related to digital cultural heritage
Plenty of the questions relate to issues relevant to the JISC Digitisation Strategy
From the briefing paper on the AHRC website, it says the research questions of interest are:
• How can the availability and accessibility of heritage sites/cultural collections be enhanced across time and space through digital technology?
• What do audiences at/visitors to heritage sites want and need such
technology to do? How does this vary at local, national and international
levels?• How does specific technology influence the ways in which we interpret
heritage environments e.g. artifacts/exhibits/landscapes?• What are the legal issues around digital heritage e.g. digital rights,
ownership, authority?• How can we ensure that use of technology in digital heritage does not
exclude certain user groups?• How can we enhance the end-to-end experience of visiting a heritage
environment i.e. from the initial discovery of a site to visit through to
further exploration and investigation after a visit has been made?