Pre-Raphaelites project wins award
The Pre-Raphaelites online resource has won the BETT Award for best digital collection and resource bank after being recognised as one of the UK’s leading educational websites.
Further details of the award can be found on the Birmingham City Council’s website.
This latest accolade follows earlier victories in the BIMA (British Interactive Media Association) and DADI (Drum Award for Digital Industries) Awards.
This continued acknowledgement of the websites design and usability helps highlight the importance of making these areas an integral part of a projects planning and execution.
Key features of the site include:
• 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.
Opening up regional newspapers - 100,000 pages of new content added to 19th Century British Library Newspapers
An additional 100,000 pages of digitised newspaper content have now been added to the 19th-Century British Library Newspapers interface.
This is the first part of the second phase of JISC funding to add 1 million pages of new content to this unique resource in early 2010, published by Gale, part of Cengage Learning.
The initial 100,000 new pages of JISC content will include selected issues from the following 19th-Century Newspapers from around the UK, with a strong focus on regional newspapers.
- Blackburn Standard
- Bury and Norwich Post
- Bradford Observer
- Cheshire Observer
- Royal Cornwall Gazette
- Isle of Man Times
- Leicester Chronicle
- Nottinghamshire Guardian
- Sheffield Independent
- Dundee Courier 1845-1900
- Daily Gazette for Middlesborough
- Southampton Herald and Isle of Wight Gazette
- Huddersfield Chronicle
- Lancaster Gazetter
- The Essex Standard
- Isle of Wight Observer
- The Standard 1883-1900
The new pages added to the collection in December 2009 will be an exclusive preview available to UK Further and Higher Education institutions as part of the JISC licence agreement. Access to the newspapers remains via institutional gateways.
More travellers’ tales for Vision of Britian website
The Vision of Britain website had now added four new writers to its collection of British travel writers, details of which are below
http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/travellers
John Byng, later Viscount Torrington — so far, just vol. 4 of the Torrington Diaries, including tours from London to Newark, around Kent and a lot of local trips in Bedfordshire, between 1789 and 1794.
George Head — the full text of “A Home Tour through the Manufacturing Districts” in 1835. An interesting complement to our Chartist writers, as from a similar period but without the politics.
Samuel Johnson — his version of the “Journey to the Western Isles” in 1773, so you can now directly compare what he and Boswell said about the same places.
John Wesley — A large selection from his diary between 1729 and 1791, complementing his brother Charles’s diary.
This part of our site remains the largest on-line collection of historical British travelling, but the key point is that you have two-way links between the authors and our gazetteer of places, so you can very quickly find out what all our authors said about particular places you are interested in.
The next update should be a substantial extension to the statistics collection, including the return of the parish-level population statistics we had to leave out.
Note that extensions to the travel writing collection depend on our locating existing computerised transcriptions, so please let us know about other suitable material. It is obviously essential that the original text be out of copyright.
Victorians find themselves in Second Life!
Last week saw the launch of the Resurecting the Past Project from the University of Bristol.
The project has built a 3D model of the Pompeii Court from the Crystal Palace exhibition in the virtual world of Second Life.
The project aims to:
- to make accessible to the public knowledge of the Crystal Palace and its collections.
- to increase awareness of and stimulate research into the Crystal Palace and to broaden our understanding of the place and perception of Classics in the nineteenth century beyond the universities and museums by reconstructing the collection and display techniques of a private speculative enterprise that shaped and reflected mid century ideas of taste.
- through dissemination and evaluation of our project to stimulate new approaches to teaching & learning, to encourage dialogue between academic institutions and the wider community and to encourage the increasing use of digital technology within the Arts and Humanities to reach its full, interactive potential.
The project launched with a party in Second Life on Wednesday 16th December, and can be visited by following the link from the project webpages.
More details about the project can be found on the JISC webpages.
British Cartoon Archive Workshop
The British Cartoon Archive recently ran a workshop which aimed at allowing this important resource to increase both its functionality and embed the resource further within teaching and research.
The final report from the workshop is now available.
Further information about the workshop and the Cartoon archive can be found on the Workshop Website
Visualising Climate Change
“The further back you look the further forward you see” - Winston Churchill
As part of JISC’s recently funded Digitisation Workshops series, climate scientists and researchers from across the world gathered at Met Office to discuss visualising climate data.
Led by the international research initiative ACRE (Atmospheric Clirculation Reconstructions over the Earth) the workshop was able to discuss future work on areas such as:
- recovery of historical data;
- the weather reconstruction/reanalysis itself, and:
- the use of the reanalysis outputs for climate science, applications and impacts studies and as a wider educational tool.
The ACRE workshop builds on other Climate Research projects funded by JISC including the Historic Navy Log Books project (CORRAL) that is attempting to use 18th Century Navy logbooks to map historic climate patterns to help inform current climate research.
The workshop has produced a Report and further information and slides from the workshop can be found at the ACRE website.
From Botanical Research to Murder Most Foul: 11 new e-Content Projects begin
The 14-15th October saw the first Programme Meeting for the 11 new projects that from the new e-Content Programme.
The meeting is an opportunity for projects to meet each other and share ideas and inspirations, as well as an opportunity for programme managers to meet all the projects in one space.
Meeting the Projects
The day began with a JISC Quiz and the projects delivering a 3 minute presentation outlining the work they’re doing.
These included the fascinating GrassPortal which demonstrated how being able to plot the spread of invasive grasses can help save rare topical forests from fires, through to Connected Histories which used the example of William Payne of Bell Yard to show the importance of being able to bring together disperate historical resources for the benefit of researchers and teachers.
Embedding and Sustaining Projects
Hilary Grierson from Strathclyde University gave a very imformative presentation on how projects can align the work they are doing to institutional strategies.
JISC and Project Management
After lunch Poala Marchionni, JISC Programme Manager, gave a presentation on what JISC expects from projects and what projects can expect to recieve from JISC.
Alastair Dunning, JISC Programme Manager, then gave a very innovative presentation on some of the lessons learnt from the phase two digitisation projects. These lessons include: Cool URLs; design for websites, and usability testing.
Alastair’s presentation can be found here.
Comms and Marketing
Finally, Jane Charlton, JISC Communications Coordinator, gave a presentation on Communication and Marketing for the projects, and what support and guidance JISC can give projects.
To find out more about the 11 projects that make up the eContent Programme you can visit the eContent webpage.
Furer-Haimendorf Photographs Launch Event
Friday 30th October sees the launch of the Fürer-Haimendorf archive at the School of Oriental and Arfican Studies in London.
The day will includ
e a seminar, 10am-5pm, and an evening launch event from 5pm-7pm.
The photographs of Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf are the world’s most comprehensive picture of tribal cultures in the himalayas and naga hills in the mid-twentieth century.
With this launch, they will be available to everyone on the web.
The uses of these photographs in contemporary fieldwork and the significance of digital archives will be discussed at the semina
r.
More information about the launch of this amazing collection of photographs can be found on the SOAS website.
More details about the project and the 25 projects that make up the Enriching Digital Resources programme can be found on the JISC webiste.
Unlocking 20 years of independent radio news
In 1973 a group of Fleet Street journalists, with no experience of radio broadcasting, came together and set up the UK first “independent” (commercial) radio service, at the time the only alternative to the BBC, without quite knowing where this would take them.
Today, through the digitisation of the London Broadcasting Company/Independent Radio News (LBC/IRN) archive, members of the UK Higher and Further education sector have the chance to delve into 20 years (1973 - mid-1990s) of independent radio programming covering national and international news such as the Falklands war, the troubles in Northern Ireland, the years of Margaret Thatcher and the death of Princess Diana as well as feature programmes and audience phone-ins, a first of its kind at the time.
Leading up to the official launch of the LBC/IRN digitisation project, Sean Street, Director of the project, talks to Steve Allen, from LBC, (Steve discovers the LBC archive) about the early days of the LBC and how the team at the University of Bournemouth carried out this challenging project of preserving and making accessible a slice of our more contemporary history.
The LBC/IRN digitisation project was funded by the JISC Digitisation Programme.
Navy Logbooks help make Waves for Climate Scientists
Today sees the launch of the UK Colonial Registers & Royal Navy logbooks (CORRAL) project that helps address the growing need for reliable climatic data to help researchers in climate change.
This collaborative project between the MET Office, The National Archives, the British Climatological Data Centre and University of Sunderland is making historical Navy logbooks openly available online for anyone to access.
Containing a wealth of rich weather observations and climatic data, these logbooks offer climate scientists an astonishingly good record of climate data that can help inform climate studies today.
By making these historic logbooks available online researchers can learn lessons from the past that will help them make predictions about the climate in the future.
Complimenting the rich scientific data the logbooks contain, is also a wealth of historical data and personal observations about life onboard these 
ships.
Footnotes in the logs include descriptions from Captain Bligh of being tied up by crew members and subsequently escaping on the HMS Bounty to some rather graphic details of punishments given out onboard and accounts of near Polar Bear attacks on officers taking temperature readings.
Find out more about the project from the JISC Project page, and the CORRAL website. Or listen to Dr. Dennis Wheeler talk about the project in a recent podcast.