JISC Digitisation Programme

An AHRC doctoral studentship is available at the Oxford Internet Institute starting this fall. The studentship provides full fees and maintenance for eligible UK students, or full fees for eligible EU students.

The area of study is Librarianship, Archives and Records Management, which is broadly defined and includes information communities and the use and management of information in all forms and in all contexts; all aspects of archive administration and records management; all aspects of information policy in the information society; information systems; systems thinking; systems development; information retrieval (including interfaces and gateways); preservation and conservation of recorded information including Film archiving.

The deadline for application is 3 July 2009.

For more information please see the AHRC Postgraduate Studentship 2009 information sheet
.

Following the successful Workshop on the Digitisation of Library Material in Europe held in 2007, LIBER and EBLIDA will hold a second edition that will take place at the Royal Library of The Netherlands from 19 to 21 October 2009.

Topics in the programme are: public-private partnerships, new economic models, digitisation needs of research and public libraries, measuring the impact of digitisation projects, aggregation of digital content, interoperability and metadata issues.

Click on http://www.libereurope.eu/node/391 to see the full programme and to register.

Deadline for registration: Friday 2 October 2009

Please note that the number of delegates is limited to 180, so first come first served!

The JISC, along with the NEH, NSF and SSHRC are funding the Digging into Data challenge.

Applicants were inivted to send expressions of interest so that the funding bodies could ensure that potential project teams were working within the parameters of the programme. After an FOI (Freedom of Information) request, JISC can reveal that 91 letters of intent were received that included JISC as a funding source. Only two of those were considered outside the scope of the competition parameters.

Given the huge interest that this call has generated, JISC is now looking to try and organise extra funding for this competition.

£200k has been allocated at the outset (enough for funding 2 projects at the maximum of £100k each). Nothing has been confirmed as yet but it is hoped that this can be raised to £400 – £500k.

UK partners can apply for up to £100k; project teams as a whole may apply for 300k units, where 1 GPB or USD or CD equals a unit

The closing date for applications is the 15th July, and applications are sent via http://www.diggingintodata.org/

In terms of further cycles of funding for this programme, the funding bodies will review the situation in 2010 and then decide what future work there will be in this area.

The British Library archive of 19th-century newspapers is now available to the general public on a per per view basis. Over 2m pages of newspapers were digitised as part of the JISC’s Digitisation Programme

The HE and FE version of the same content was launched in Autumn 2007 and remains freely available to the tertiary education community. This version is available via institutional gateways

The British Library is currently completing a second phase of digitisation, and another 1m pages of historic newspaper content will be made freely available to HE and FE in autumn 2009.

In these times of economic hardship and ever decreasing household budgets, it is always good to remind ourselves of times when money was extremely short.

 The Visual Arts Data service (VADS)  has just launched an online wartime cosmetics archive.

The archives of Gala, Miner’s and Crystal, three prominent cosmetics companies operating during and after the Second World War, are held at London College of Fashion and have been digitised and made freely accessible through the VADS website.

The archives are a valuable resource for the study of the history of cosmetics, advertising photography, fashion promotion and women in the Second World War.

One of the company’s in the archive, Gala of London, was also the first company to introduce lip stick in a tube when they introduced their lipline in 1957.

During the War when silk was needed for parachutes and stockings disappeared from the shops, Miner’s had particular success with its leg make-up, Miners Liquid Stockings,allowing women to draw black lines down theback of their legs to simulate the seams.

The three cosmetics archives have been digitised by the London College of Fashion and made available online through the ‘Enhancing VADS’ project,  funded as part of the Enriching Digital Resources programme from JISC.

The collection is available through the VADS website.

Do you have your collection on-line? Do you want it to be accessible to as wide an audience as possible?

If you answer ‘Yes’ to either of  these questions then having your collection accessible through the flagship European portal is something you should seriously consider.

However you might not have heard of Europeana or have only just heard the name?

Therefore Collections Trust has organised a free to attend Conference for you to find out more. Here are some details:

It will take place on Friday the 26th June at the Commonwealth Club, near Trafalgar Square.

It starts at 10am and finishes at around 4pm.

Outline of the day:

Morning – Europeana Context:

*    Keynote speech (to be confirmed);
*    Funding in a European context (Neil Sandford);
*    Europeana – What it is, why it is important and developments (from the Director of Europeana, Jill Cousins and Go Sugimoto);
*    Introduction to Europeana Group projects (from various Europeana group project partners in the UK).

Lunch

Afternoon – UK Opportunities:

*    Examples of best practice (e.g. British Museum);
*    Role of Collections Trust (Nick Poole, CEO);
*    Round table (The way ahead in the UK).

Hope this wets the appetite!

If you want to attend then please e-mail Eleanor Lovegrove  eleanor@collectionstrust.org.uk

Moving images and sound recordings are still relatively little used as support to teaching and learning in comparison to other, more established, digital resources such as images and text material. However, they do offer great potential for being exploited in innovative ways within teaching and students work, as well as, of course, research.

The digitisation of key sections of the London Broadcasting Company/Independent Radio News (LBC/IRN) archive, the most important commercial radio archive in the UK, offers over 3000 hours of news and current affairs between 1973-1990s, which often present a different approach to state-funded (BBC) radio programmes.

On the LBC/IRN web site one can download a brief but useful paper by Dr Hugh Chignell, of Bournemouth University, who’s been associated with the project since its inception, on suggestions for how the archive can be used by teachers and students, (Chignell, H., 2009. LBC/IRN Archive Teaching and Learning Case Study. Poole: Bournemouth University. (Unpublished))

In his introduction, Dr Chignell highlights some general points before delving into more detail:

-The archive is important both in terms of content (especially news and current affairs coverage of political, economic, social and cultural events and developments) and for also for production techniques employed (including interviews, vox pops, phone-ins, reportage and rolling news).
- The online resource lends itself to student centred learning in which the student can explore the archive using the search and key word functions. [...]
- Perhaps the most exciting archive-based student projects will include examples of audio which have been downloaded and then edited and incorporated into a web based report with audio examples, possibly within a multimedia product.

Dr Chignell then proceeds to suggest some key themes of the period covered in the archive that can be traced through the recordings, such as:

- the election and politics of Margaret Thatcher
- the Miners’ strike
- issues relating to Health and AIDS
- others issues of social relevance such as Marriage.

This project was funded by the JISC Digitisation programme and delivered by Bournemouth University in collaboration with BUFVC.

Other sound and moving images projects funded by the JISC Digitisation programme are the British Library Archival Sound Recording, and the British Film Institute’s InView project.

Many digitisation projects have an interest in (or feel that they should be) engaging with social networking and communication tools.

Many projects are tempted to automatically adopt the use of sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, LinkedIn, as well as share information through Flickr, Vimeo, You Tube, Second Life, Digg, StumbleUpon, Google Groups…etc….

But with so many different tools and sites out there, and with the different range of projects and outputs that digitisation produces, it can be difficult to find the tools that will really work for your project.

It is important that time is spent on using the tools that help maximise the aims and objectives of the project itself.  Resources are often limited meaning that participating in Web 2.0 simply for the sake of it is not a viable option.

There might be a variety of ways to assess the use of a particular tool or site to a project, but one way would be to create a chart to plot the use of a resource against the aims and objectives of the project.

I have created a very simplistic example of what such a chart might look like.

Examples of some recent projects that have sucessfully used Twitter for their project are:

• First World War Digital Poetry Archive  – Have used a range of social networking sites very effectively including Facebook and Twitter.

• East London Lives - Although this project only has a holding website, they have been able to engage a wide audience of interested followers with Twitter and Flickr.

• Serving Soldier – Again this is a young project, but have successfully used Twitter as a way to highlight interesting parts of their collection, and engage interested communities.  They have also been very strong bloggers.

Like many social networking sites, Twitter in particular is an excellent way for projects to highlight new collections they have digitised, or recently made available online.

It is also a wonderful way to create a ‘count down’ to the launch of a website or new online presence. Twitter also offers projects a unique way to ask for help, get feedback and call upon a vast and interested community of possible users.

Most important of all, it is fast and demands a limit on the amount of time and input it asks of you!

The Strategic Content Alliance and Netskills are offering introducory short courses on Search Engine Optimisation techniques to improve your online presence, web visibility and website traffic. This event builds on a highly successful course in London in February which resulted in improving professional practice and increased traffic to attendee’s websites.

The short courses are aimed primarily at delegates from universities, archives, museums, health, public service broadcasting, schools and cultural heritage. No particular technical knowledge is required as a prerequisite.

What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a process that aims to increase the visibility of a website in important search engines like Google. SEO works by modifying the content, the layout, and the architecture of web pages, in addition to using community building techniques to enhance the popularity of a website.

Topics covered will include:
• Maximising access and removing barriers to your content
• The importance of a structured approach to preparing content
• Content integrity and reaching the right audience
• Metadata and its significance
• Sustainable content and future proofing
• The social web and marketing

Dates, locations and registration

Belfast
10:30 Monday 29 June – 15:30 Tuesday 30 June 2009
The Mount Conference Centre – register for this workshop

Edinburgh
09:30 Thursday 2 July – 16:15 Friday 3 July 2009
Grosvenor Hilton Hotel – register for this workshop

London
09:30 Monday 27 July – 16:15 Tuesday 28 July 2009
JISC Meeting Rooms, Brettenham House – register for this workshop

Cardiff
09:30 Thursday 30 July – 16:15 Friday 31 July 2009
Hilton Hotel – register for this workshop

Previous courses have proved very successful and early booking is recommended.

JISC Digital Media recently launched Video Assist.  This is a new in-depth consultation scheme offering a free bespoke advice and training in the creation of video resources, for a selcted number of successful projects.

Below are further details of this exciting new service:

JISC Digital Media today announces the launch of Video Assist, a new service offering free in-depth support to projects in higher and further education institutions which require the creation of moving image resources.Video Assist provides a service to complement JISC Digital Media’s existing support framework of a helpdesk, advice documents and workshops.A project which qualifies for Video Assist will receive 4 days’ worth in total of bespoke off-site support and on-site supervision, helping the project to achieve its ambitions more quickly and effectively.The interaction with project personnel will embed skills and knowledge, leaving as a legacy a team of people able to carry out similar work in the future with a new degree of skill and professionalism.

Video Assist will run during the 2009-2010 academic year in three rounds, with two projects selected for support in each round.  For more information see the JISC Digital Media Website