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.
Millions more newspapers pages to be available on Google
Today Google announced that they are launching:
“an initiative to make more old newspapers accessible and searchable online by partnering with newspaper publishers to digitize millions of pages of news archives.”
This adds to the large amount of existing online newspaper content, by publications such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, that is already being crawled by Google.
In addition, Google has entered a partnership with ProQuest and Heritage that will allow even more newspapers pages to be digitised and made available online. As the ProQuest press-release explains:
“ProQuest will contribute content to the partnership, and will introduce newspaper publishers nationwide to the program. ProQuest will also supply from its microfilm vault newspaper content that can be delivered effectively in the less formal framework of the open web.”
Newspapers content will be available through Google News Archive Search:
“Search results include content from a number of sources, including both partner content digitized by Google through our News Archive Partner Program and online archival materials that we’ve crawled. Search results can include content that is freely accessible as well as content that requires a fee. Articles related to a single story within a given time period are grouped together to allow users to see a broad perspective on the topics they are searching. “
Will a BBC video archive swamp everything else?
Various events earlier in the summer gave the BBC the chance to parade their plans to digitise their entire back archive of televisual material. (Although it’s interesting to note there is little info on this on the BBC site itself, particularly on its archive pages).
The plans are not new. Back in 2006, there were reports about this as well.
As often happens when the BBC gets involved, other providers are might be a little nervous about the effect of this.
With the power of the BBC brand and its related marketing strength, and the undoubted brilliance of technologies like the iPlayer, does this not mean that all users, irrespective of background, go straight to the BBC for their video content, rendering the offerings of other content providers somewhat useless?
Other content providers, such as JISC-funded projects like Newsfilm Online or InView will certainly have to work harder at persuading users to visit their site. However, compelling reasons do exist for getting those users to come.
- Comparative video - for instance, InView (due to launch in Spring 2009) is providing comparative videos, which allow users to see how different media outlets have covered the same historical event - something the BBC obviously cannot do by itself.
- Unique content- Newsfilm Online (the full version of which is due to launched on October 3 2008) will have content simply unavailable to the BBC. To choose at random - news items relating to Bird Flu, the Twin Towers attack or, from early Gaumont Screen reels, highlights from England Australia cricket matches, and also film rushes which never made it to the TV screen.
- NewsFilm Online will also provide a different editorial viewpoint, delivering content from media sources such as ITN and Reteurs, rather than the Beeb.
- Both the JISC-funded projects will be making their content freely available to the HE and FE communities, not just for streaming but to download, remix and re-edit. The flexibility to allow users to do what they want with such video clips is vital if users are to exploit the resources in as many ways as possible.
- It’s also worth remembering that the BBC, however impartial, sees the world via a British lens. Perspectives from other countries are supplied by digitisation projects by the National Archives in the United States, or various national bodies in the Netherlands, France or Norway.
- Additionally, the BBC is more news-focussed, and, although the BBC seems to represent a huge mass of content, it is only a drop in the ocean of what could be digitised and made available online.
- So for example, the Performance Shakespeare collection, which is part of Film and Sound Online and the Arts on Film Archive can focus on performing arts content not readily available from the BBC archives.
So that all goes to show there are plenty of reasons for users to work with video content beyond that made available via the BBC (which it should not be forgotten is only talking about these plans for digitisation at the moment).
But other content providers need to have focussed marketing and communications plans to ensure users are aware of this.
Communities and online collections
The Great War Archive web site, part of the JISC-funded First World War Poetry Digital Archive project, is a powerful example of how communities can be galvanised in the creation of a unique and poignant online resource for the benefit of the wider public.
An article on the Times Higher Education Supplement “From no man’s land to a people’s memorial” reported on how thousands of people contributed their “digital memories” of WW1 to the web site by uploading their own scans of items such as diary extracts, images and even matchboxes.
Although the submission period has now closed, people can still upload their material on the project’s Flickr group, details of which are on the Great War Archive web site.
In a podcast recorded earlier this year, before the launch of the Great War Archive, Kate Lindsay, Project Manager for the First World War Poetry Digital Archive discusses this exciting development, along with the other unique features of the collection.
In the news: lags and legacies
The launch of a couple of digitisation projects have made the news this week. There’s excitement in the papers over the prospect of digging over some of the most sensational trials in British criminal history as the Old Bailey opens its previously unseen files to the public.
The Old Bailey Online website, published by the Humanities Research Institute, is a collaboration by the Universities of Sheffield and Hertfordshire and the Open University. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the trials run to more than 110,000 pages of text and some 120 million words. In addition to the text of the trials, the website provides 195,000 digital images, as well as contemporary maps, images of the courtroom and information on the historical and legal background to the Old Bailey court.
The site is the largest single source of searchable information about everyday British lives and behaviour ever published, said co-director Professor Tim Hitchcock. ‘Besides the desperate drama of crimes punished, the proceedings give us a new and remarkable access to the everyday. History is full of information about kings and queens and wars, but there isn’t much that tells us about the everyday life of ordinary people,’ reports the Guardian.
According to the Times, the website ‘creaked under the strain’ as thousands of Britons, Americans and Australians rushed to search for news of the nefarious dealings of their distant ancestors in Victorian London.
And, who knows, perhaps it might even fill in some more of the jigsaw puzzle that is the Murder of Jean Alexander...
Meanwhile, Origins Network has launched an online searchable database of the contents of 28,000 wills from 1470 to 1856, cataloguing family feuds, dissolute daughters, thieving servants and all possessions great and small ever held dear. It provides, says the Guardian, “a vivid snapshot of social history”.
Finally, the Guardian’s Arts Blog has a lively discussion about online photography archives, following a long and interesting post by Liz Jobey in which she suggests that Britain is lagging far behind the US in terms of extent of and access to digitised image resources.
In the news: Darwin Online project
The Guardian reports today that about 90,000 pages of manuscripts, field notes, photographs and sketches connected with Charles Darwin are being placed online, where they can be viewed free. The material is the last major set of additions to the Darwin Online project, started in 2002 and based in Cambridge, and which claims to be the largest Darwin bibliography and manuscript catalogue created.
According to the Guardian,
One set of pages that is likely to attract considerable interest is Darwin’s scrawled first draft of his theory of evolution from 1842. The scribbled argument is crammed with afterthoughts, footnotes and crossed-out text. A transcript of the text has been published previously, but few will have seen the original facsimile of Darwin’s unpolished thought process.
‘Read all about it’
The JISC-funded 19th Century Newspapers digitisation project was highlighted in today’s Guardian as part of a growing number of online newspaper archives which constitute an invaluable resource for historians and researchers.
Stephen Hoare commented:
“The digitisation of the British Library’s 19th-century newspaper collection - the most comprehensive archive ever to go online - was launched in November 2007 after three years of preparation and scanning. The archive covers billions of words and its two million computer-readable pages are a historian’s treasure trove. It represents 48 titles such as the Morning Chronicle, the Graphic, the Examiner and a cluster of Chartist publications.”
Read the full article on The Guardian web site.
In the news: first world war archive
Another National Archives/geneology.co.uk digitisation project makes the news today. The Guardian reports that the pension records of almost a million soldiers who served in the first world war have for the first time been made available on the internet, allowing descendants to access a wealth of information about anyone who was injured or discharged due to illness. Full story here: Internet archive puts flesh on the bones of first world war soldiers’ experiences.
In the news: Web transports 2m Britons to convict cousins
The Telegraph and the Mail both report today on the National Archives/ancestry.co.uk project to make available online convict transportation records which will allow Britons to trace their links to the thieves, robbers and poachers who were deported to Australia in the 18th and 19th centuries. The online register, created from the original records held at the National Archives in Kew, includes the name, date, place of convicton, and marital status of most of the 163,000 convicts sent to Australia. About 2m Britons are believed to be descended from relatives of the deportees.
Read the Telegraph story: Britons have chance to track convict cousins; Read the Mail story: Web will transport 2m Brits to their Oz convict cousins
