JDCC09: Stuart Lee: Content is king


Stuart Lee took as his theme “Content is king, but we are in a republic”. After raising several laughs with his Star Trek ‘library of the future’ (where apparently there will be no enforced retirement age for librarians), he went on to call for a move towards community digitisation.

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JDCC09: Sarah Porter: Fostering knowledge


This session saw Sarah Porter put JISC’s work in context (encompassing everything from bourbon biscuits to global infrastructure). Quoting Nick Poole, she told us it was “time to stop thinking and get on and do”.

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JDCC09: User Engagement: Business and community engagement

The last parallel session in the User Engagement strand looked at the topic of business and community engagement, and enhancing access/removing barriers to institutional resources. The speakers encouraged us to look beyond the library walls and embrace the challenges of community engagement, pointing out the multiple benefits and exploring some practical case studies of community engagement in action.

Simon Whittemore from JISC gave some background on JISC’s £6m business and community engagement programme. Sarah O’Donnell from MMU discussed their wide-ranging community engagement programme. And Paul Lowe from the London College of Communication talked about three projects currently underway to engage the local community and the global community of photojournalists.

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JDCC09: User Engagement: Users, impact and metrics

Session 2 of the User Engagement strand looked at what makes a well-used resource, and how you go about measuring the impact your resource is having on its users using qualitative and quantitative metrics. Claire Davies from Curtis and Cartwright focused on the benefits of audience research, and Eric Meyer from their Oxford Internet Institute talked about the Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources (TIDSR) and different methods of measuring impacts. Finally, Susan Whitfield from the British Library gave an overview of the International Dunhuang Project to put the Silk Road online.

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JDCC09: Content in Education: Open educational resources

Open Educational Resources (OERs) are learning materials that are specifically designed to be shared, with learners and teachers in mind. The ways in which JISC is helping to make it easier to create and share OERs and how the Open University is leading the way in the use of OERs was the focus of this session, led by Amber Thomas, programme manager of the JISC OER programme, JISC, Andy Lane, director of OpenLearn, Open University, and Peter Burnhill, from JORUM.

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JDCC09: Content in Education: New media content

This is a pivotal moment for film and sound in education. Digital Britain was the last gasp of an ancien regime. We need Robespierres not Bourbons to do this future mapping.  For the students of the future, multimedia will be their way of working. We will not distract them from Facebook unless we can offer a more compelling experience.

This was the radical message that came out of a lively session on the use of digital media in education, featuring the work of the JISC Film and Sound Think Tank (Peter Kaufman, Paul Gerhard) and JISC Digital Media (Zak Mensah).

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