Whilst some of the tasks that facilitate this can be quite tricky, it is surprising that many digital projects still fail to take advantage of many simple ways in which ’search engine optimisation’ can take place.

The Strategic Content Alliance therefore commissioned a Canadian team to come up with some recommendations for implementing search engine optimisation, and I would urge any digitial project to look through it, and think about implementing the suggested guidance.

The pdf is available to download from
http://sca.jiscinvolve.org/files/2010/01/sca_chin_seo_report_v1-02.pdf

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.

• Explore the impact of the large scale digitisation of newspapers
• Consider the effect that this has had on research and researchers
• Question the implied changes to research methodologies

Not only has the digitisation of historical newspapers made it easier to discover information about events from the past, but the way in which they have been digitised makes it possible to discover how those events were represented, debated and sold as news. This conference will debate current limitations of this digitisation as well as opportunities for future development.

The conference is being organised jointly by the British Library and JISC. Speakers will include Professor Laurel Brake, Professor Tim Hitchcock, Professor Robert Shoemaker, Professor Miles Taylor and Dr James Mussell.

For more information and to book tickets visit the Institute of Historical Research’s website. Many thanks to the Institute for hosting the online registration form.

£35.00 for full registration
£25.00 student concession

It traces the flow of correspondence between intellectuals in eighteenth-century Europe, thus helping giving an indication of the flow of ideas from writers such as Adam Smith, David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

This YouTube video, featuring Dr Dan Edelstein from the US side of the team at Stanford University, is a useful introduction to the project, and reveals some of the general aims of the broader Digging into Data programme. Also involved in the project are Dr Chris Weaver from the University of Oklahoma and, in the UK, Robert McNamee from the University of Oxford.

Strand II, focussed on exposing digital content, may well be of interest to digitisation projects.

Often digitisation projects develop specific interfaces so that their users can search and browse through the digitised collections.

However, the recent advent of concepts such as linked data and APIs allows for content to be exposed and made available in other ways, thus allowing other users to builds tools, integrate other data, and provide novel methods of visualisation as well as allowing for machine driven discovery and representation of the resources

This call provides an opportunity, therefore, for digitisation projects to expose their content, this allowing users new and ways of exploring the content.

David Flanders (d.flanders @AT@ jisc.ac.uk) is the relevant JISC member of staff who can provide more information.

The European Community recently held a meeting in Luxembourg to inform potential applicants about their the ICT Policy Support Programme.

30 million Euros have been allocated to the digital libraries strand which aims to improve accessibility, use and preservation of Europe’s rich and diverse cultural and scientific heritage.

The call is broken up into six objectives, three focussing on cultural content and Europeana.  The other three focus on ’scientific’ information and the wider issues surrounding digital libraries.

Three objectives relate to Europeana:

• Coordinating Europeana

• Enhancing/Aggregating content in European

• Digitising content for Europeana

Three more objectives relate to further actions in the wider area of digital libraries:

• Access to European Rights

• Information / Registry of Orphan WorksOpen access to scientific information

• Statistics on cultural heritage digitisation activities

For those wanting further details on the call, I have produced a report outlining the details of the call.

The request led the Institute to a full-scale overhaul of they managed and exported their images, and the report on the JISC website provides plenty of useful detail on their thinking behind the change, plus some recommendations for others in similar circumstances.

Some of the key findings from the full report (pdf file) are :

• Metadata is often created in the context of a single, localised website rather than for re-use on other sites.
• Creating shareable metadata needs much greater attention to keywords, credits and rights.
• Institutions that are serious about exporting their content need to build rigourous image management processes to avoid data export becoming a laborious manual task.
• Development of such systems can then also help provide sophisticated management of internal processes.
• Personnel and structures at the portals often change making it difficult for content providers to build working partnerships.
• Evaluating the success of exporting metadata or content to others’ portals is a particularly tricky business.

Oxford University Computing Services is looking for a Project Officer (part-time, fixed-term) to work on the RunCoCo project. The work involves:
* running a communication campaign and developing engaging Web content to successfully promote the RunCoCo project and support its user community
* managing project events and overseeing the production of training materials
* providing advice to a number of community digitisation projects

Details and an application form are available from http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/jobs/ Completed applications must be received by 12 noon on 26th March 2010, and interviews will be held on 7th April 2010.

ADD LINKS

Salary: £27,318to £30,748 pa based on 1.0 FTE
Location: Farnham
Ref: 10-LIBR143-02
The University for the Creative Arts has campuses at Canterbury, Epsom, Farnham, Maidstone and Rochester and is home to 6,500 students from over 70 countries studying on courses in fashion, graphics, design, media, fine art and architecture.

The Imagio project is a Library and Learning Services project funded by the University to support teaching and learning.

Phase one of the project produced a policy and technical framework for the capture and storage of digital images. The Visual Resources Digitisation Officer will be responsible for the implementation and dissemination of phase two: the creation of a digital still image resource for use by academic staff.

This newly created post provides an exciting opportunity for someone wishing to gain experience in the development of digital image databases within an HE library setting.

It would suit a candidate with initiative who enjoys interacting and liaising with a wide-range of people.

Candidates should have a professional qualification in librarianship or information science with library experience, preferably in the HE sector. Experience of visual resources in a creative HE environment, and digitisation skills would be an advantage, as would a knowledge of copyright and IPR.

Application forms, Vacancy Summary and further information relating to the University for the Creative Arts are available for download or alternatively contact the Human Resources Department via email HR@ucreative.ac.uk or on 01252 892681 (24 hours -quoting the relevant reference).

The closing date for receipt of applications is 25 February 2010

Interviews will be held on week commencing 08 March 2010

We value the diversity of our organisation and welcome applicants from all sections of the community.

21 projects have been funded at a value of just over £4m.

Dr GP Earl £232,575.00
School of Humanities, University of Southampton
Reflectance Transformation Imaging Systems for Ancient Documentary Artefacts

Professor J Ellis £332,520.00
Department of Media Arts, Royal Holloway, University of London
Consolidated Moving Image and Sound Database Framework

Dr BA Fennell £334,574.00
School of Language and Literature, University of Aberdeen
Language and Linguistic Evidence in the 1641 Depositions

Professor RS Fensham £347,592.00
Dance Film and Theatre, University of Surrey
Digital Dance Archives (DDA): cross-collection interactivity and enhanced user engagement with dance resources

Professor PH Gray £111,768.00
School of History and Anthropology, The Queen’s University of Belfast
Documenting Ireland: Parliament, People and Migration, 18th-20th Centuries (DIPPAM)

Mr C Harrison £182,135.00
Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford
The Elements of Drawing: Enhancement and Dissemination for Impact

Professor AF Hartley £159,293.00
School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Leeds
IntelliText - Intelligent Tools for Creating and Analysing Electronic Text Corpora for Humanities Research

Dr E Leach £191,189.00
Music Faculty, University of Oxford
DIAMM: Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music

Dr AA Marsden £139,505.00
Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts, Lancaster University
Digital Arts Innovation Laboratory (DAILab)

Dr A Mazel £120,679.00
School of Arts and Cultures, Newcastle University
Rock Art Mobile Project

Dr M Melaugh £260,179.00
INCORE, University of Ulster
Visualising the Conflict: Immersion in the Landscape of Victims and Commemoration in Northern Ireland

Dr DT Murphy £109,606.00
Electronics, University of York
The Virtual Acoustics and Auralization Database

Dr D Obbink £113,487.00
Classics Faculty, University of Oxford
A Collaboration between Classics and Astrophysics: An Advanced Multispectral Imaging Laboratory Optimised through Crowd-Sourced Statistical Analysis

Professor W. R. Owens £100,778.00
Department of Literature, The Open University
Developing an International Digital Network in the History of Reading: collaboration between the UK Reading Experience Database and invited partners.

Mr D Pritchard £139,531.00
Digital Design Studio, Glasgow School of Art
Enhancing Engagement with 3D Heritage Data through Semantic Annotation

Professor JD Richards £141,771.00
Department of Archaeology, University of York
ADS+: Enhancing and Sustaining the Archaeology Data Service digital repository

Professor TP Schofield £262,673.00
Bentham Project, University College London
The Bentham Papers Transcription Initiative

Professor D Tudhope £109,802.00
Faculty of Advanced Technology, University of Glamorgan
Semantic Technologies Enhancing Links and Linked data for Archaeological Resources (STELLAR)

Dr C Watts £136,498.00
English, Birkbeck College
Voiceworks Digital Song/Text Project: a collaboration between Birkbeck Centre for Poetics, Wigmore Hall & Guildhall School of Music & Drama

Mr K Woolford (Conditional award) £487,794.00
School of Media, Film and Music, University of Sussex
Motion in Place Platform

Professor A Yarrington £61,462.00
Department of History of Art, University of Glasgow
Mobilising ‘Mapping Sculpture in Britain and Ireland, 1851-1951′ (Mobilising Mapping)