JorumOpen
The recent launch of JorumOpen sees free access to a growing collection of open educational resources.
JorumOpen will allow lecturers and teachers to share materials under the Creative Commons licence framework. This will allow for easier sharing, grants users greater rights for use and re-use of online content and is easier to understand.
Jorum has also developed a range of Youtube videos on using JorumOpen.
For digitisation projects this is an ideal place to both deposit any educational resources you may have developed as outputs for your project, and also offers a unique resource for uncovering and reusing new resources.
The Past’s Digital Presence Conference
A Graduate Student Symposium at Yale University February 19th and 20th, 2010
Graduate students from around the globe will address how databases and other digital technologies are making an impact on our research in the humanities during this interdisciplinary symposium.
- How is digital technology changing methods of scholarly research with pre-digital sources in the humanities?
- If the “medium is the message,” then how does the message change when primary sources are translated into digital media?
- What kinds of new research opportunities do databases unlock and what do they make obsolete?
- What is the future of the rare book and manuscript library and its use?
- What biases are inherent in the widespread use of digitized material? How can we correct for them?
- Amidst numerous benefits in accessibility, cost, and convenience, what concerns have been overlooked?
Keynote Speaker
Peter Stallybrass, Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the Humanities, University of Pennsylvania
Colloquium Speaker
Jacqueline Goldsby, Associate Professor, University of Chicago
Closing Roundtable
Rolena Adorno, Reuben Post Halleck Professor of Spanish, Yale University
Edward Ayers, President, University of Richmond
Willard McCarty, Professor of Humanities Computing, King’s College London
George Miles, Curator, Western Americana Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
REGISTER NOW: Registration for this conference is now available online.
Advanced registration is required, however, there is no registration fee for university affiliates. The deadline for registration is February 5th, 2010.**
For more information and conference program, please visit our website or email us at: pdp@yale.edu
Also join our Facebook Group and follow us on Twitter.
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
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.
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
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.
Grant 13/09: BCE, e-Content & Digitisation programmes: Developing community content
As you have probably seen, JISC has frozen its current and future funding calls for ‘capital-funded’ projects but not ‘core-funded’ projects.
The current call within the BCE and e-Content programmes for Developing community content draws its funds from both capital and core funding.
For those planning Strand I bids (Rapid user innovation), the call is still open and JISC will still be expecting proposals by 8th February.
For those planning Strand II bids (Co-development of content), the call is currently frozen. JISC is expecting the funding situation, for this and other calls, to become clearer by the end of January or the start of February. Applicants within affected strands are advised to put their proposals on ice for the moment, and await further information. Hopefully, there will be greater clarity at the start of February.
If you have further queries, please address them to funding@jisc.ac.uk. JISC has now also prepared some questions and answers.
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.
New JISC funding call published
The JISC call for developing community content has now been published on the JISC website.
Brief details about the call were mentioned in a previous blog post.
Questions about the nature of the call can be sent to Alastair Dunning; and questions about the application process can be sent to Avalon McAllister.