JISC Digitisation Programme

The Stormont Papers resources makes available the debates from the parliament of Northern Ireland (Stormont) from creation in 1921 until the end of Home Rule in 1971.

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.

The JISC is making up to £2m funding available for digitisation-related work under the following three headings. More information is available from the circular (Word document)

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

One of the most difficult aspects of developing a digitisation strategy is deciding how you will prioritise your digitisation work

Fragile manuscripts, fading newspapers, valuable coins, hidden audio recordings, historical texts and the like all clamour for the right to be digitised first.

The JISC Digitisation Programme recognises this is a difficulty and therefore issued an ITT, along with the Research Information Network, to look into the matter: PRIORITISING DIGITISATION: ESTABLISHING USERS’ NEEDS FOR DIGITISED CONTENT IN UK HE INSTITUTIONS.

Invitations are now invited for proposals.

The aims of the study are

• identify priority collections for potential digitisation housed within UK HE’s libraries, archives, museums as well as faculties and departments
• assess users’ needs and demand for special collections to be digitised across all disciplines, including the life and physical sciences as well as the arts, humanities and social sciences
• produce a synthesis of available knowledge about users’ needs with regard to usability and format of digitised resources
• provide recommendations for a strategic approach to digitisation within the wider context and activity of leading players both in the public and commercial sector

A recent blog post on Digitization 101 pointed to the article Online Digital Special Collections in English Universities: Promoting Awareness.

This article is a useful read for those involved in the creation of digital collections and responsible for their take-up once material is available online.

The author proposes a number of practical tips on activities and opportunities that can be exploited to raise awareness of an institution’s own digital special collections focusing on specific areas such as:

- making promotion important
- gaining more ‘power’ within own institution
- opportunities
- raising awareness
- contextual and promotional information
- targeting audiences
- access and use

Although projects involved in digitisation activity might have already thought, at some point or another during their project, of similar ways of engaging with their audiences, it’s useful to bring it all together as in here.

The template provided by the author can also be used as a basis on which to build a digitisation project’s Marketing and Communication strategy.

Standards for digital content such as file formats or metadata aren’t sexy. But they are crucial – without them resource discovery is impeded, functionality is diminished and long-term access is imperilled.

But implementing standards is not just a matter of a ‘Stalinist’ top-down mandate. Within in a project, service or an organisation standards impinge on all kinds of other issues – staff skills, costs of hardware, tools and software available, different end-users amongst others.

Alastair Dunning gave a talk at the Strategic Content Alliance’s event at Edinburgh, illustrating how standards need to be thought of as existing in an organic, shifting environment. Choosing to adopt an standards is not a straightforward matter – the ramifications of choosing any standards need be thought through.

It was followed up with a round table, also involving Brian Kelly from UKOLN.

The presentation is available from Slideshare. Details of the event as a whole, where along with standards, content licensing and sustainability models for digital content were discussed and debated in detail, will be available from the SCA blog.