JISC Digitisation Programme

As phase 2 of the British Libray’s newspaper digitisation programme prepares to conclude (1m more pages are due to be added in the coming months), there are some interesting reports about the digitisation process becoming available.

The project’s final report looks at the issues such as the capture of metadata, the standards used, and the complex workflow developed. It also gives detailed information on which newspapers have been scanned are being added to the collection

Readers may also be interested in Simon Tanner’s article in dLib magazine, which goes into greater depth on how to measure the success of OCR technologies, and the methodologies required for such work.

It also worth comparing the digitisation of the British newspapers with other sites around the world

USA’s National Digital Newspaper Program

Spain’s Hemeroteca Digital

Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program

A fuller list of international digitisation projects for newspapers is available at the International Coalition on Newspapers site

Funding letters have now been largely signed and JISC can announce the winners of its e-content Programme. The call was divided into two strands, the first to allow institutions to develop their skills and strategies for digitising and delivering their digitised content, and the second to maximise the use and benefits of existing digitised content.

Projects are starting from autumn 2009 onwards and all will be finished by February 2011.

Strand A – Institutional Skills and Strategies

LIFE-SHARE (Lifecycle Strategies and Architecture for Regional E-content), University of Leeds

• The LIFE-SHARE project will address institutional and consortial strategies and infrastructure for the creation, curation and preservation of digital content. Led by the University of Leeds, it will also work with the University of York, University of Sheffield and JISC Digital Media.

RunCoCo, University of Oxford – (Conditional award)

• Building on the work of the Great War Archive project, this project will encourage the formation of Community Collection projects, whereby projects are built across and by a broader community (education and public sectors) rather than focussed on a sinlge host institution.

Look here! University for the Creative Arts – (Conditional)

• Headed by the Visual Arts Data Service, this project will address how the digital life-cycle for content in the arts can be simplfied and embedded in institutional practice.

Centre of Competence for Heritage digitisation in the North of England, University of Manchester

• This project will investigate the feasibility of establishing a Centre of Competence for Heritage Digitisation, based within the University of Manchester, promoting best practice in object-centred digitisation.

Centre for Digital Asia, Africa and the Middle East, SOAS

• This project will see the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) establish a Centre for Digital Asia, Africa and the Middle East. The Centre will develop a digital collection, curation, preservation and dissemination strategy for SOAS.

OCRPodium, Kings College London

• OCRPodium will trial an open source approach to Optical Character Recognition, using the OCRopus software and embed OCR activities within flexible, semi-automated digitisation workflows for text-based material.

Strand B – Maximising the use of digitised content

Visualising China, University of Bristol – (awaiting funding letter)

• The Visualising China project will build on the digitisation work by the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Bristol and the 15,000 digital images which have been created, and 5,000 images available to search and browse with a further 7,000 having full meta-data, covering a date range of 1870 to 1950.

Mapping Crime beyond the John Johnson Collection, University of Oxford

• The Bodleian Library proposes to map between the crime material available through The John Johnson Collection: an Archive of Printed Ephemera and other online resources containing related material or source information.

Connected Histories, University of Sheffield – (conditional)

• Connected Histories will create a federated search facility for a wide range of distributed electronic resources relating to early modern and nineteenth-century British History.

Grass Portal, University of Sheffield

• Grasses are the fuel that feeds human civilization, and a major focus for international research as food security and natural ecosystems come under threat from rising populations and climate change. The GrassPortal will be a world-class ecological data facility for grasses and science investigating this area.

CEDAR (Clustering and Enhancing Digital Archives for Research), University of East London

• Led by the University of East London (UEL) CEDAR will further enhance and embed the East London Theatre Archive (ELTA) into three popular Theatre Studies programmes at Royal Holloway, Nottingham and Sheffield universities.

The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) have recently announced £4m worth of funding for digital projects. This is a welcome development, particulary in the light of the fact that the AHRC has had no dedicated funding for ICT work since the cessation of its Resource Enhancement scheme.

It has two particular strands, and projects can range from £50k to £1m

• supporting the purchase and associated implementation costs of leading edge digital equipment, resources or facilities.
• development of AHRB/C funded digital research outputs to ensure that they remain at the cutting edge of technological developments, are compatible with requirements for long-term sustainability and/or to enhance the accessibility of these resources to a wider range of audiences and broaden their usage and impact.

The closing date for bids is the 5th November. Further details are available on the AHRC website

For those wishing to see a list of the projects funded under the AHRC’s Resource Enhancement Scheme, there is a list available amongst the larger list of UK digitisation projects.

The Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource , funded under the JISC Digitisation programme, has been awarded the first prize in the Arts/Culture category of the Interactive Media Awards.

The Interactive Media Awards™ recognize the highest standards of excellence in website design and development and honor individuals and organizations for their outstanding achievement.

The project was led by Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery, which has an unrivalled collection of Pre-Raphaelite art, and has digitised more than 2000 images of paintings, tapestries, drawings, sketchbooks, and other material relating to members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood such as John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Holman Hunt.

The web site was beautifully desinged by TAK! and includes detailed information on art works, a powerful zoom-in functionality provided by Silverllight, learning resources and a personal collection area, where users can create their own theme-based Pre-Raphaelite collections of images, a useful tool especially for teachers and learners.

The Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource scored increadibly higly in pretty much all that is important for a serious web site – Design, Content, Feature functionality, Usability and Standards compliance, reaching a total of 492 out of 500.

The Welsh Ballads Digitisation Project, funded as part of the Enriching Digital Resources Programme will be holding a one-day Open Seminar, for academics, students and members of the public.  The seminar will be  featuring a range of speakers on issues relating to ballads and digitisation.

The seminar is taking place on Monday 14th Spetember, from  10am – 4pm at Cardiff University, Arts and Social Studies Library, Corbett Road.

In addition to promoting the current project and exploring possible future developments, one aspect of the seminar was to place the Welsh ballads digitisation project in the context of other ballad digitisation projects, notably those carried out by the National Library of Scotland and the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. In that respect this Welsh digitisation project may be regarded as one which completes a network of British ballad digitisation projects.

Further information about the event can be found on the project website or by contacting keelanp@cf.ac.uk

Places are still available for two free seminars organised by JISC Digital Media on key topics relating to digitisation projects.

1) Successfully Building and Managing Digital Media Collection (5 places remaining)

Date: 15th September

In order for a digitisation project to provide useful, effective content many interlinking aspects need to be considered. This seminar, which draws on the knowledge of experts in the field, considers some of the vital facets which lie quite apart from the actual act of digitising. Topics range from setting up small projects to looking at case studies of large, successful mass digitisation projects, recording accurate and relevant metadata, rights issues and balancing the demands of users and stake holders.

2) The Digital Media Collection +100 Years (20 places remaining)

Date: 16th September

Obsolescence, deterioration of physical storage media or withdrawal of institutional support: just what will prove to be the greatest threat to the materials we digitise today? This seminar projects one hundred years into the future and attempts to predict the future ‘preservability’ of what we digitise today. This seminar will examine changing user demands and inevitable developments in technology.

Location:

Both seminars will be held at the University of Bristol at 3-5 Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1TB

Further details of the day, can now be seen on the JISC Digital Media Web site

Places are available on a first-come, first-served basis. Please send your request to attend to training@jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk

The seminars are funded by the JISC under the ‘JISC ITT Workshops & Seminars: Achievements & Challenges in Digitisation & e-content’ strand.

The addition of over 1500 recordings of Chopin’s music – including key performances of piano repertoire, including all Mazurkas, Preludes, Etudes, Polonaises and more – is another string to the bow of the British Library’s Archival Sound Recordings.

The Sound Archive has now built up a formidable array of early recordings of canonical composters, comprising over 500 hours. All the pre-1958 recordings are available freely to UK users.

• Beethoven
• Mozart
• Bach
• Brahms
• Haydn

The workshop

This free workshop focuses on high-volume digitisation of bound materials e.g. books, manuscripts, newspapers, magazines, registers and ephemera.

This is a growing area of interest for technical and project managers, practitioners and researchers, and useful for anyone interested in what is also known as ‘mass’ or Large Scale Digitisation Initiatives (LSDIs).

Bringing together experts, UK and European case studies, the latest technical developments and good practices, the day is intended to provide an outline awareness of what is involved in planning LSDIs for digital preservation or digital access. This includes LSDI feasibility, logistics, scaling, outsourcing, costing, risks, quality, metadata, OCR and FAQs.

The day will include real-time demos of robotic-arm scanners with opportunities for two way dialogue and open questions.

Location

The New Technology Institute, Birmingham

Date

Wed 23rd September 2009 (all day)

More Information & How to Register

For more details and the workshop programme please click here . Alternatively, email dcs@bcu.ac.uk or tel. (0)121 331 6350 and ask for Bev Dodd or Beth Delwiche for information or to register.

Deadline for registration

Fri 18th September 2009. Attendance is free until the deadline, but places are limited so attendees are urged to reserve places early and avoid possible disappointment !

This workshop is sponsored by JISC as part of the JISC Digitisation programme.

The University of Oxford’s First World War Poetry Archive has just released a new collection of digitised poems and other material, by Edmund Blunden

Blunden was sent to the Western Front in 1916, and served as part of the 11th Royal Sussex regiment. He received the Military Cross for his actions during the Battle of the Somme. He died in 1974, after having received numerous awards, including a CBE and the Queen’s gold medal for poetry in 1956.

Articles on the new collection feature in The Independent, the Guardian and the Great War Fiction blog .

The Blunden collection adds to the numerous poets already featured online, including Vera Brittain, Robert Graves and Isaac Rosenberg.