Eighteenth-Century Resources Online – Scholarly Opinions
JISC, along with publishers ProQuest, Cengage and Adam Matthews Digital, were involved in a couple of round table sessions at the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference at Oxford University.
The sessions were designed to get feedback from the scholarly community on resources such as ECCOand the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera
The presentation given by Alastair Dunning of JISC is included here. Below that are some of the key points made by the academics present, and there is a longer pdf document to download with extended notes, which also includes some of the key resources in the area.
Key Feedback from the Roundtable Sessions
- Repeated call for standardised interfaces – “Every car I drive may be different, but I still know how to drive it without thinking. Why should it not be the same for website interfaces?”. There was also strong support for an eighteenth-century portal.
- Digitisation taken for granted – The advantages of having digital editions online (“you can work without putting your socks on”) are so obvious that there is little need to argue for them
- We need to know what’s there – “Does EEBO really contain every early English book? Or are there gaps that are not obvious to researchers and undergraduates?”
- How do we stop the digital divide – “Scholars from less wealthy institutions should not be isolated because their library cannot afford the subscription cost”
- History (UK, European and world history)
- Social Sciences (including politics, economics, education and environment)
- Science, Engineering and Technology
- Art and Creative Industries (including images of buildings and works of art)
- Geography (emphasising exploration and the changing world)
The tender will require image rights to be granted for perpetual use within education and bidders will be required to provide metadata that complies with the project criteria. Training sessions in creating metadata will be provided for successful bidders.Total funding of £750,000 (including VAT) is available for this project. This funding can be used to compile metadata, but not to digitise content. The deadline for receipt of tenders is 13:00 on Thursday 19 February 2009.
The successful bidders will be announced by 27 March 2009.
The deadline for delivery of images and film, inclusive of metadata, is 15 December 2009.The full version of this call is available at JISC Collections documents and further details about the call, and a list of questions and answers on the bidding process can be found at Projects and Reports . - Steve Benford, Professor of Collaborative Computing, University of Nottingham
- Andrew Green, Librarian of Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru / National Library of Wales
- Jane Ohlmeyer, Professor of History, Trinity College Dublin.
Download the full feedback from the session – 18th-century-resources-feedback-jan-2009.pdf
Digital images for education: Community call
JISC and JISC Collections are pleased to announce a series of three tenders to provide digital images for use by the UK education community (schools, further education and higher education) under the title The JISC Collections/JISC Images for Education Project. More details of this call are attached, and can be found by following the links below.
The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and JISC Collections invite proposals from the academic sector and publicly-funded institutions, with a goal of life long learning, to provide still and moving images to support education across five broad subject areas:
Keeping the cost of copyright clearance down – orphan works survey
The JISC-managed Strategic Content Alliance the museum, archive and library sector Collections Trust have issued a survey on Orphan Works – http://surveys.omni-web.co.uk/start.aspx?sid=5DZ6VD
The idea of the survey is to get a sense of the scale of orphans works in the cultural heritage community, which will then act as evidence for more sensible legal framework for rights clearance when clearing works for digitisation.
More detail on the survey is pasted below
The Collections Trust and The Strategic Content Alliance are carrying out research to examine the impact of ‘orphan works’ (works for which the copyright owner is unknown or cannot be traced) on the delivery of services to library, archive, museum and information service users in the UK and other European countries. Background information on the research and its sponsors is provided below.
As part of this research project, we would be very grateful if you could fill out a short online questionnaire. It will take just a few minutes to complete.
As a thank you for taking part you will be entered into a prize draw to win £100 (or the equivalent in Euros), and we will also send you a synopsis of the findings once the research is complete.
The survey is at http://surveys.omni-web.co.uk/start.aspx?sid=5DZ6VD
The closing date for completion of the Survey is Friday 16 January 2009.
Major digital conference in Belfast
The 2009 Digital Resources in the Humanities and Arts conference looks like it will be a big one, drawing in delegates who are contributing to the recent developments in digital scholarship in the Republic of Ireland.
The conference is taking place at Queen’s University Belfast, from the 6 to 9 September 2009, and is entitled Dynamic Networks of Knowledge and Practice: Contexts, Crises, Futures.
Keynote speakers will include:
The call for papers is now open as well. The deadline for submissions will be 31 March 2009. Abstracts should be between 600 – 1000 words.