The project reported that “usage Statistics for the John Johnson Collection resource during the first two months since the launch (March 2008) have been extremely encouraging […] The number of sessions in this period is roughly a quarter (23%) that of the total number of sessions within UK institutions of one of ProQuest’s leading humanities databases during the same period.”

The new release includes additional content in the five categories of material represented in the collection - Entertainment, the Booktrade, Popular Prints, Crimes, Murders and Executions and Advertising - as well as improved search screens.

For example, the new Crimes, Murders and Executions category-specific search screen includes additional fields for Criminal, Victim and Crime, as well as a set of checkboxes that allow the user to restrict searches according to the sentence passed. This makes it easy to find ephemera relating to a particular crime, for example highway robbery or sedition, or particular forms of punishment, such as the death penalty.

In this podcast interview, David Tomkins, Project Manager at the Bodleian and Peter White, Project Manager at ProQuest, talk about what ephemera is, what makes the John Johnson Collection special, their partnership and the challenges around digitising ephemera.

Listen to the podcast

As an extra part of their work, they have commissioned photography of some of the theatres themselves, such as Wilton Hall, the Theatre Royal or the wonderfully named Half Moon theatre.

The team have decided to put these photos up on Flickr as an extra dissemination channel. A dedicated website is currently being built, but the team wanted to test what usage was like using a publicly available platform. Usage is currently being monitored, and the team will report back as their project progresses.

The Wellcome Library – part of the Wellcome Trust – is currently developing a new strategy which will include a programme to digitise the Library’s unique and significant, out-of-copyright, holdings.

Given the scale of the task – preliminary projections suggest that the size of the collection (excluding the in-copyright material) is around 45 million pages – it is envisaged that the Library will seek an external supplier (or a consortium of suppliers) to undertake and manage a large element of this programme.

The Library invites Suppliers, who are potentially interested in helping the Library plan its digitisation programme, to respond to a Request-for-Information document which sets out the current boundaries of this project.

This document can be accessed at http://library.wellcome.ac.uk/node350.html

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.

Listen to the podcast

The University of Exeter carried out the study and in their final report made a range of recommendations:

• The creation of a authoritative gateway to Islamic Resources
• Develop digitised catalogues of Islamic manuscripts and related research material such as recent theses;
• The commissioning of a feasibility study into the creation of a corpus of interactive online education materials, which could also be hosted by the national gateway
• Continuation, and increase, of the subsidies for major online reference works in Islamic Studies.
• The archiving of the websites of UK Islamic organisations
• Subsidising the acquisition of an online collection of research monographs in Islamic Studies, should such a collection be developed by a commercial organisation.

Read the full report on User Requirements for Digitised Resources in Islamic Studies (Word) or (PDF).

“there is some readiness among the education community for Web 2.0 technologies but only in the context of academia as a status-conscious, competitive environment. Whilst there are clear benefits to be achieved from providing teachers and students with the opportunity to share ideas in the context of stimulus artefacts, many hold reservations about ‘giving away’ their intellectual property.”

Some interesting points to note:

• Social networking features are perceived by both HE students and lecturers as primarily for pleasure rather than for work, although for younger students, the boundaries between work and life are increasingly blurred
• Content is still king: to be a truly useful research tool, students and lecturers need to know that a resource has been created for them and has scholarly merit, and reliable and relevant content
• Wikipedia was singled out by both FE and HE interviewees as being particularly unreliable, and yet highly popular;
• The features most associated with a Web 2.0 approach (rate, comment, upload, blog and send to friend) were commonly described with reference to social networking or e-commerce sites and were largely considered non-academic and therefore inappropriate for the Pre-Raphaelite online resource.

The study was carried out by Illumina Digital.

Read the Pre-Raphaelite Resource project: Audience Research Report;
Appendix 1; Appendix 2; Appendix 3; Appendix 4; Appendix 5

But in the rush to explore the issues related to the preservation of terabytes of astronomical or physical data, it’s worth remembering that it not just the sciences that are the preserve of large-scale data and preservation issues.

This recent graphic from Wired states that while the Hubble Space Telescope has collected 120 terabytes of data, the ancestry.com geneaolgy database is over four times bigger, coming in at 600TB

Large-scale preservation needs to be across the board, not just on the sciences.

It’s been available since 2006 and some statistics from the website are available. Of most interest is graph showing the spread of search terms entered by users

There are two interesting points from this

1) The bulk of your users may not be looking for the things you expect them to be looking for.

2) Pre-arranged hyperlinks on your home page can provide a user-friendly way of letting users get to know a resource’s contents.

Measuring the use and impact of digitised resources is no easy exercise. This is not only because of the changing nature of information seeking behaviour of different audiences, which has an effect on how users engage with digital resources. It is also due to the challenge in establishing appropriate metrics and criteria for measuring the impact and use of digitised collections.

When can a digital resource be considered a well-used resource? When and how do we know a resource has had an impact on its target audience? Are visitors’ numbers a useful performance indicator for judging the success of an online scholarly resource or should we dwell more on investigating what visitors actually do on a web site?

Yet, measuring impact is an important step in ascertaining if we’re reaching our audiences and responding to their needs. Impact has also been recognised as “the key factor in the potential for achieving long-term sustainability” for online academic resources in a recent report on Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources - an Ithaka Report commissioned by the Strategic Content Alliance.

Such are the issues, among many others, that the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) will be grappling with over the next year by leading on the JISC study on “Usage and Impact of Digitised Resources Funded Under the JISC Phase One Digitisation Programme”.

In addition to focusing on the assessment of five online collections created as part of the JISC Phase One Digitisation Programme, the OII will also produce a Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Resources which aims to provide a set of approaches and tools available to measure and potentially improve the impact of current and future digitisation projects.

The Toolkit will be of value not only to JISC within the context of its digitisation programme, but also to the wider community. The OII study is due to terminate in Spring 2009 and both the final report and Toolkit will be made publicly available by JISC.

1. Pilot and small-scale digitisation. Proposals may focus on undertaking pilot digitisation, small-scale digitisation or a smaller feasibility study prior to larger scale activity. Alternatively, proposals may focus on completing or adding to a digital resource where there are some gaps in the content or room for expansion.

Data capture would be expected to be reasonably straightforward, and it would be presumed that the lead institution would already have some facilities and basic metadata in place so to allow for immediate commencement of the project. When undertaking digitisation, there should be no significant IPR issues to tackle.

2. Enhancement of existing collections. Funding under this heading would be targeted to help promote and further develop collections that have already been digitised but are currently underused or could benefit from extra development. The funds could be used to enhance the quality of the interface or metadata, for example, and to raise its profile among researchers and teachers who might not otherwise be aware of it.

3. Developing Clusters of Content. Proposals under this heading will focus on bringing together related digital resources. This may involve merging the metadata or technical infrastructure for related resources; developing cross-search functionality; exploiting Web2.0 methodologies such as data mash-ups to ‘cross-fertilise’ the content in existing resources.

Alternatively, proposals may concentrate on creating thematic clusters of digital resources and promoting their use (e.g. around broad themes such as nineteenth-century Britain or the environment); or may undertake feasibility studies to tackle the larger intellectual, strategic and technical issues of facilitating cross-search functionality over numerous resources in related disciplines

JISC Programme Managers Paola Marchionni (0203 006 6064) and Alastair Dunning (0203 006 6065) are happy to discuss proposals with applicants