Digital Collections Online is launched
Tuesday 16th March saw the launch of Exeter University’s Digital Collections Online.
Delivering images and digital objects from Exeter’s most prestigious research collections, including over 2000 images showcasing Victorian culture, openly available for teaching and research.
The website includes e-learning packages to help embed the collections use within the university’s teaching, learning and research.
Highlights of the collection include historic popular culture images from Queen Victoria to Alice in Wonderland.
The Launch was preceeded by a workshop on the Digital Futures of Special Collections.
Partly as a response to the Enriching Digital Resources programme, the workshop examined many of the issues Special Collections and Archives face in delivering digital resources to users in the twenty-first century and beyond.
Some of the themes that emerged from the presentations and discussions are worth sharing:
- Students don’t care where (physically) an object is stored: they simply want access, whenever they need it. Linked to this is:
- Objects must be easy to use and find: especially for students who will often take the path of least resistance in searching for content.
- The digital doesn’t replace the physical, instead it facilitates a dialogue between the object and its simulacra.
- Metadata is not dead, yet. Descriptions allow users to find the objects. But how do we overcome shortages of resources and expertise to enrich metadata?
- As much as possible content should be shared and set free. There are many challenges to this, but where possible this should be the norm, not the exception. This may also help answer the issue of enriching metadata.
- Sharing and opening up content is not a loss of authority or power… rather it is empowering others.
There were many others, some of which may inspire future blog posts, but these were the ones that stuck with me.
The workshop was collaborative and challenging as anything worthwhile should be, and it seems a fitting vehicle to launch a new online digital collection.
Digital Futures of Special Collections - Workshop
Building on the work of the Creating Heritage Artefacts for Research and Teaching in an e-Repository (CHARTER) project, the university of Exeter Special Collections are holding a free, one day workshop examining the futures of special colections.
Digital Futures of Special Collections
Workshop Day
16th March 2010
A workshop day aimed at curators and collection managers looking at the practical and strategic issues of heritage collections and digitisation.An opportunity to share good practice, problems and solutions and to build partnerships within the research library community.
The focus will be on the strategic and practical but not technical.
Included in the programme:
10:30am Arrival/Registration
11am – 11:50am Welcome; Academic Perspectives: creating digital collections online – a Dspace case b study. (John Plunkett, Department of English; Jessica Gardner, Assistant Director, Library and Research Support)
11:50am – 1pm What are we all doing and Why?
Collaborative group work
1pm – 2pm Lunch
2pm – 2:45pm Ensuring e-Content doesn’t mean Ephemeral Content: Learning the lessons from the JISC digitisation programme (Ben Showers, JISC Programme Manager)
3pm – 3:45pm Panel discussion with Susan Worrall (University of Birmingham), Dorothy Johnston (University of Nottingham), Inderbir Bhullar (Women’s Library)
Christine Faunch (University of Exeter)
3:45pm – 4pm Workshop round-up
4pm – 5pm Reception (all welcome) launching Exeter’s Digital Collections online and Research Commons
There is no charge to attend this workshop day; participants should be ready to discuss relevant issues that are most important to their organisation and the sector.
Lunch and refreshments will be provided.
Booking Details:
To book a place please email: libspc@exeter.ac.uk or phone 01392 263879/262097
Challenging our understanding of Digitisation
At the forthcoming Developer Happiness Days one of the sessions planned to take place will be exploring a DIY digitisation workflow:
Taking you from the act of scanning images and objects, learning how to process and edit them with software like ocrupus, blender and OpenCV, storing and manipulating them online and finally, through to printing their digital forms out, mashed together with comments, citations, automatic qr codes and even other digital objects!
While this session is not intended to showcase the same results one would expect to find on large scale institutional and heritage digitisation projects, the session might just force a consideration of digitisation practices and trigger off some interesting questions and dialogue.
So, if this confrontation with digitisation sounds interesting then there is an opportunity for attendance at this session by project members from JISC digitisation and eContent projects.
Spaces will be limited, so please contact me directly if you wish to register your interest: b.showers@jisc.ac.uk.
And to find out a little more about this session you can read Ben O’Steen’s blog and his ideas for the “The Secret Life of the Book” session at the event.
And further information about the Dev8d programme is available on the Developer Happiness website
#dev8d
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
The Cultural Heritage of Historic European Cities and Public Participatory GIS
‘The Cultural Heritage of Historic European Cities and Public Participatory Geographic Information Systems (GIS)’ was the title of a recent workshop held at the University of York.
The workshop explored the potential for GIS to deliver greatly improved access to urban heritage resources of all kinds to the general public and to the academy.
The workshop aimed to address a number of themes which surround the use of Public Participatory GIS, including:
- The lack of guidance on creating such an interdisciplinary public resource;
- a lack of standards;
- the legal issues related to accessing and disseminating data.
More information about this workshop can be found on the seminar webpages.
Further information about all the recent JISC funded workshops can be found on the digitisation webpages.
High Volume Digitisation and Robot Technology
A recent JISC funded Digitisation workshop, held at the Birmingham City University explored the subject of High Volume Digitisation and some of the trends, issues and robot technology that are involved in such undertakings.
Leading speakers and demonstrators from across the UK and Europe contributed to a comprehensive programme of events, open sessions and demonstrations.
The workshop helped demystified the terms ‘high volume, industrial scale and mass digitisation’ through a very practical demonstration of the step by step process with digital scanners and integrated software for OCR and metadata creation, aimed at practitioners and colleagues across the HE and FE community interested in large scale digitisation initiatives (LSDIs).
Common themes that emerged included:
- the importance for preparation and planning,
- measuring impact and feasibility studies,
- setting realistic scalable goals and solutions,
- deciding on in-house or outsourcing, and;
- digital access v digital preservation
Presentations and notes form the workshop are available from the Birmingham City University website.
The report from the workshop is also available from the JISC 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.
Mathematic Content in Electronic Media
A recent workshop held on the 9th September 2009 at the Open University discussed the issues that surround mathematical content in digital form.
Bringing together leading mathematicians and practitioners involved in the digitisation of mathematical content, the workshop addressed areas such as: collaboration, standards, improving practice, and reuse of software, in relation to mathematic content in electronic form.
The workshop had three aims:
- Content related technical problems in supporting eLearning in mathematics
- Standards related to digitisation of mathematics research literature, and:
- Formulas and equationsin otherwise non-mathematical content
The workshop has now produced a range of slides and video and a final report which are available from the Workshop website.