JISC seeks feedback on its future strategy
December 2009 will see the launch of JISC’s next three-year strategy and the organisation is seeking feedback on its first draft.
Professor Sir Tim O’Shea, chair of JISC’s Board says,
“Our core activity of supporting colleges and universities in delivering their missions through the effective use of digital technologies remains unchanged.
“However, in light of the changing environment, we are keen to know if our planned future investment priorities are focused on the areas of greatest importance to those in education and research.”
Over the past nine months JISC has been talking with college and university mission groups and membership organisations, such as UUK and Guild HE, to inform an initial draft.
This process has helped JISC to understand the key challenges facing higher education institutions and how JISC should respond.
Dr Malcolm Read OBE, JISC’s executive secretary, says,
“We would welcome comments on our draft strategy as these are vital if we are to deliver a digital infrastructure that improves the quality and productivity of education and research.”
To take this opportunity to provide feedback please visit the strategy section of JISC’s website.
We would welcome responses as soon as possible; feedback is requested by close of play on 24 September 2009.
Digital Curation and Preservation Outreach and Capacity Building Event
14-15 September 2009
Holiday Inn, Belfast, Northern Ireland
http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/capacity-building-belfast-2009
The Joint Systems Information Committee (JISC) and the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) in co-operation with the Strategic Content Alliance (SCA), the Public Records Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) and the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) are delighted to announce that we will deliver a joint two-day workshop in Belfast to help to establish more effective digital curation and preservation networks of support across the UK and between domains of public sector activity.
In particular, this workshop will explore:
“the current capacity of small and medium-sized organisations (including universities) to effectively undertake long-term preservation of digital materials
“how the mixture of organisations and support agencies in the area of digital preservation and curation can best work together, and how they relate to international initiatives
“recent and emerging technical developments in the curation and preservation field
The workshop will provide a mixture of presentations, breakout sessions and practical exercises and aims to:
“inform the ongoing refinement of the content and objectives of training and professional development courses for the widest possible audience.
“establish requirements for curation and preservation support, advice, and guidance for various domains from both a local and UK wide perspective.
To this end, the workshop will provide half-day taster courses for both Digital Curation 101 (DC 101) and Digital Preservation Training Programme (DPTP) courses.
Benefits of participation will include:
Participation in this workshop will provide registrants with an opportunity to establish peer support networks to share their concerns, experiences, and approaches both with colleagues from Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK for digital curation and preservation activity within their institutions. The workshop will also enable participants to help inform the development of future training and professional development courses to ensure that they are fit for purpose.
Following this event, a short report will be drafted offering:
“Recommendations for improved local and UK-wide communications and interactions between a range of support networks and public sector institutions;
“A summary of local and UK-wide training and professional development requirements as gathered from the workshop participants.
“A set of recommendations from a local and UK-wide perspective to inform the future development of digital curation and preservation training courses.
The venue:
The workshop will be held at the Holiday Inn, Belfast. If required, accommodation will be provided on-site for participants for the nights of September 13th and 14th 2009.
Holiday Inn
22 Ormeau Avenue
Belfast
BT2 8HS
For directions to the venue, please see the website.
Registration:
Registration is open to participants from the university; schools; library; cultural heritage; local government; health; public broadcasting sectors. Preference will be given to participants from Northern Ireland but will also be open to eligible registrants from the rest of the UK and from the Republic of Ireland. Registration is free and participation is limited to 40 participants.
To register for this event, please complete the online form.
Life-cycle of a Digital Object Workshop
Following University College London’s very successful conference on 3D Colour Laser Scanning in March 2008 we are planning a 2-day workshop exploring the life-cycle of a digital object.
The workshop is funded by JISC through the Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre (AHeSSC).
Who is invited?
The workshop is aimed at anyone interested in user engagement with 3D objects. It will help researchers and professionals better understand how to use 3D objects and related digital data records. It will be particularly relevant for conservators, curators and educators wanting to use 3D or 2D records of museum artefacts and for Arts and Humanities researchers interested in this field.
What will be covered?
3rd September.
The first day will offer opportunities for small group guided tours of relevant UCL facilities. Delegates will have the opportunity to discuss practical applications of the technologies with existing users:
Arius3D colour laser scanner
CAVE Virtual Environment
UCL Interaction Centre (UCLIC): a centre of excellence in human-computer interaction Slade School of Fine Art: use of a hand held scanner in art classes Digital Petrie Exhibition (in the making) Digital Manufacturing centre, Bartlett School of Architecture The day concludes with a wine reception.
4th September
The second day will feature talks and presentations on a range of topics, including 3D colour laser scanning and standards, 3D objects in virtual environments, 3D colour printing, the life cycle of an object and digital repatriation. More information is available here.
The workshop is FREE to attend but numbers are restricted to 50. Register now to confirm your place. Booking closes on 15 August 2009.
To book your place, please complete the booking form.
JISC Digital Content Conference - videos and slides online
If you missed the JISC Digital Content Conference, which took place on 30 June-1 July, or simply would like to go back to some of the presentations and issues discussed, you can now access and download all video, audio and most of the speakers’ presentations from the conference web pages.
For a summary of the key points discussed both during the plenary and parallel sessions, check out the blog posts that were written during the conference by our team of bloggers on the JISC Digitisation blog, where videos of the all the plenary sessions have also been added.
Many thanks to all of you who took the time to complete an evaluation form on the day. We have received some very positive feedback and some excellent suggestions for taking this event forward. If you have not yet completed a feedback form, you can still do so online. Your feedback form is very important to us.
National Portrait Gallery / Wikipedia argument
There has been quite a lot of information flying around since a Wikipedia user downloaded and then stitched together high-resolution images from the National Portrait Gallery, before putting them up as a single files on Wikipedia.
The statement from the National Portrait Gallery clears up a lot of confusion and seems quite even handed.
The National Portrait Gallery is very strongly committed to giving access to its Collection. In the past five years the Gallery has spent around £1 million digitising its Collection to make it widely available for study and enjoyment. We have so far made available on our website more than 60,000 digital images, which have attracted millions of users, and we believe this extensive programme is of great public benefit.
The Gallery supports Wikipedia in its aim of making knowledge widely available and we would be happy for the site to use our low-resolution images, sufficient for most forms of public access, subject to safeguards. However, in March 2009 over 3000 high-resolution files were appropriated from the National Portrait Gallery website and published on Wikipedia without permission.
The Gallery is very concerned that potential loss of licensing income from the high-resolution files threatens its ability to reinvest in its digitisation programme and so make further images available. It is one of the Gallery’s primary purposes to make as much of the Collection available as possible for the public to view.
Digitisation involves huge costs including research, cataloguing, conservation and highly-skilled photography. Images then need to be made available on the Gallery website as part of a structured and authoritative database.
To date, Wikipedia has not responded to our requests to discuss the issue and so the National Portrait Gallery has been obliged to issue a lawyer’s letter. The Gallery remains willing to enter into a dialogue with Wikipedia
Digitisation Workshops
JISC has recently funded a number of workshops to investigate and explore the challenges and achievements in digitisation and e-content.
The workshops will be looking at a broad range of areas associated with Digitisation, including: Optical Character recognition (OCR), Collaboartive editing, Large scale digitisation, Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and Digitising and Mathematics.
A list of workshops and titles (where available) are below:
- UKOLN, University of Bath - Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for the mass digitisation of textual materials:IMProving ACcess to Text
- University for the creative Arts - Digital Imagery: creation and importance in the visual arts
- Queen Mary, University of London - Digitising Correspondence (Digitising Early Modern Letters)
- JISC Digital Media - Digitising Performance
- Met Office Hadley Centre - Climate Data Digitisation and Visualisation
- University of Birmingham - Collaborative Scholarly Editing over the Web
- University of York - Geographical Information Systems in History and Heritage
- University of East London - High Resolution Digitisation of Large Artworks
- The Open Univesity - Mathematical Content – tools and standards, practice and strategy
- JISC Digital Media - Successfully building and managing a digital media collection and The digital media collection +100 years
- University of Kent - Building Usage of Cartoon Archives
- Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford University - Digital History Workshop: Connecting researchers to digital collections
- Birmingham City University - High Volume Digitisation: Issues, Trends & Innovative Robot Tech
These workshops are expected to be taking place throughout September, 2009.
Further information about the workshops, including dates and times and agendas will be available shortly on this blog. More information can also be found on the Workshops Webpage.
Manchester Middle English Manuscripts Conference
To celebrate the completion of the In the Bygynning project and the launch of the Manchester Middle English Digital Library, the John Rylands University Library, University of Manchester is hosting a major academic conference on 17-18 September 2009.
The Manchester Middle English Manuscripts Conference will consider the Rylands collection within the wider context of other corpora of ME manuscripts, and explore the potential of digitisation to enable novel methods and new avenues of scholarly enquiry.
Keynote speaker Professor Julia Boffey of Queen Mary University, London, will open the conference with a public lecture on the evening of Thursday 17th September. Other speakers include Professor Wendy Scase (Birmingham), Prof. Tony Edwards (De Montfort University) and Professor John Thompson (Queen’s, Belfast).
The conference will be of interest to medieval historians, students of Middle English literature, linguists, codicologists, historians of the book, archivists and manuscript curators.
For further information and to download a booking form, please consult the Rylands Manuscripts Brochure and Rylands Manuscripts Conference application form.
The deadline for registration is Friday 28th August, but early booking is strongly recommended.
“Ideal Women” online
“Many, if not all, of the Pre-Raphaelites had their own ideal of beauty“,
as the recently launched Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource illustrates through beautiful images of Pre-Raphaelite paintings and sketches in its Learning resources section.
The Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource gives free access to over 3000 images related to the works of artists belonging to one of the most important British art movement, including founding members William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais as well as material from the broader context.
Key features of this beautiful and easy to navigate web site are:
• full record information for each image
• zoom-in function, to allow users to examine images in great detail
• browse and advanced search
• background resources on the Pre-Raphaelite movement and artists
• exemplars of learning resources, such as “Gender and Sexuality”, as well as the facility for teachers to create their own
• personal collection, a functionality which allow users to group and theme images from the collection as well as take part in online discussions
The Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource was funded by the JISC Digitisation programme and created by the Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery.
History of Britain’s changing places and lives is put online
The JISC-funded A Vision of Britain Through Time website launches today, giving e-access, often for the first time, to over two centuries’ worth of facts, figures, surveys, maps, election results and travel writing showing how 15,000 UK places have changed.
The changing story of Britain’s towns and villages can be explored in new depth online, which unites more than 200 years worth of official documents, maps and travel stories.
The site has been created with funding from JISC as part of a programme to offer a wider audience free access to academic research and resources.
Launch of the Virtual Manuscript Room
This month sees the launch of the first phase of the Virtual Manuscript Room(VMR), as part of the Mingana Day at the University of Birmingham on 8 July.
The presentation of the collection online is a crucial part of JISC’s £1.8 million Enriching Digital Resources programme, a set of 25 projects which enhances the use of online content for teaching, learning and research
In this first launch, the VMR project making available over 10000 images from 70 Eastern manuscripts from the university’s Mingana collection, including a full set of images of one of the oldest copies of the Qur’an in existence.
A full program for the day (including lunch!) is available from the VMR launch website. All are welcome! if you would like to come to this day, please email Frouke Schrijver at FXS821@adf.bham.ac.uk