JISC Digitisation Programme

The 14-15th October saw the first Programme Meeting for the 11 new projects that from the new e-Content Programme.

The meeting is an opportunity for projects to meet each other and share ideas and inspirations, as well as an opportunity for programme managers to meet all the projects in one space.

Meeting the Projects

The day began with a JISC Quiz and the projects delivering a 3 minute presentation outlining the work they’re doing.

These included the fascinating GrassPortal which demonstrated how being able to plot the spread of invasive grasses can help save rare topical forests from fires, through to Connected Histories  which used the example of William Payne of Bell Yard to show the importance of being able to bring together disperate historical resources for the benefit of researchers and teachers.

Embedding and Sustaining Projects

Hilary Grierson from Strathclyde University gave a very imformative presentation on how projects can align the work they are doing to institutional strategies.

JISC and Project Management

After lunch Poala Marchionni, JISC Programme Manager, gave a presentation on what JISC expects from projects and what projects can expect to recieve from JISC.  

Alastair Dunning, JISC Programme Manager, then gave a very innovative presentation on some of the lessons learnt from the phase two digitisation projects.  These lessons include: Cool URLs; design for websites, and usability testing.

Alastair’s presentation can be found here.

Comms and Marketing

Finally, Jane Charlton, JISC Communications Coordinator, gave a presentation on Communication and Marketing for the projects, and what support and guidance JISC can give projects.

To find out more about the 11 projects that make up the eContent Programme you can visit the eContent webpage.  

A recent workshop held on the 9th September 2009 at the Open University discussed the issues that surround mathematical content in digital form.

Bringing together leading mathematicians and practitioners involved in the digitisation of mathematical content, the workshop addressed areas such as: collaboration, standards, improving practice,  and reuse of software, in relation to mathematic content in electronic form.

The workshop had three aims:

• Content related technical problems in supporting eLearning in mathematics
• Standards related to digitisation of mathematics research literature, and:
• Formulas and equationsin otherwise non-mathematical content

The workshop has now produced a range of slides and video and a final report which are available from the Workshop website.

In the last few years there has been an increasing number of initiatives involving the general public in creating or contributing content to existing digital collections, including scholarly digital resources.

Projects have ranged from involving the general public in the cataloguing of galaxies (Galaxy Zoo) to experiments in amateur digitization to supplement a literary digital archive (First World War Poetry Digital Archive) and third sector initiatives, where citizens can get involved in issues affecting them, (Mysociety).

- What typology of user engagement is emerging from such projects?
- What kind of value might these initiatives bring to the formal education sector?
- What are the modalities for a true two-way user engagement between a project and the general public as its main contributor?
- Are there any subject areas that lend themselves more favourably to this kind of experiments?

These are the issues tackled by a recent study commissioned by the JISC Digitisation programme, Digitisation, Curation and Two-Way Engagement.

Looking at strategic and policy issues, and taking into consideration a number of case studies, this report examines

the potential for digitising and curating collections of cultural or social worth from the general public [paying particular attention to] the principle of two-way engagement – knowledge co-creation and exchange rather than simply knowledge transfer: a dialogue which enriches knowledge for mutual benefit.

Friday 30th October sees the launch of the Fürer-Haimendorf archive at the School of Oriental and Arfican Studies in London.

The day will include a seminar, 10am-5pm, and an evening launch event from 5pm-7pm.

The photographs of Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf are the world’s most comprehensive picture of tribal cultures in the himalayas and naga hills in the mid-twentieth century.

With this launch, they will be available to everyone on the web.

The uses of these photographs in contemporary fieldwork and the significance of digital archives will be discussed at the seminar.

More information about the launch of this amazing collection of photographs can be found on the SOAS website.

More details about the project and the 25 projects that make up the Enriching Digital Resources programme can be found on the JISC webiste.

In 1973 a group of Fleet Street journalists, with no experience of radio broadcasting, came together and set up the UK first “independent” (commercial) radio service, at the time the only alternative to the BBC, without quite knowing where this would take them.

Today, through the digitisation of the London Broadcasting Company/Independent Radio News (LBC/IRN) archive, members of the UK Higher and Further education sector have the chance to delve into 20 years (1973 – mid-1990s) of independent radio programming covering national and international news such as the Falklands war, the troubles in Northern Ireland, the years of Margaret Thatcher and the death of Princess Diana as well as feature programmes and audience phone-ins, a first of its kind at the time.

Leading up to the official launch of the LBC/IRN digitisation project, Sean Street, Director of the project, talks to Steve Allen, from LBC, (Steve discovers the LBC archive) about the early days of the LBC and how the team at the University of Bournemouth carried out this challenging project of preserving and making accessible a slice of our more contemporary history.

The LBC/IRN digitisation project was funded by the JISC Digitisation Programme.

A workshop was held at the University of Bath on 24th September 2009, looking at some of the current issues in using Optical Character Recognition for digitisation, organised in the context of the EU Impact project.

Videos, slideshows, notes and questions from the day are now all available from the workshop webpages

Today sees the launch of the UK Colonial Registers & Royal Navy logbooks (CORRAL) project that helps address the growing need for reliable climatic data to help researchers in climate change.

This collaborative project between the MET Office, The National Archives, the British Climatological Data Centre and University of Sunderland is making historical Navy logbooks openly available online for anyone to access.

Containing a wealth of rich weather observations and climatic data, these logbooks offer climate scientists an astonishingly good record of climate data that can help inform climate studies today.

By making these historic logbooks available online researchers can learn lessons from the past that will help them make predictions about the climate in the future.

Complimenting the rich scientific data the logbooks contain, is also a wealth of historical data and personal observations about life onboard these ships.

Footnotes in the logs include descriptions from Captain Bligh of being tied up by crew members and subsequently escaping on the HMS Bounty to some rather graphic details of punishments given out onboard and accounts of near Polar Bear attacks on officers taking temperature readings.

Find out more about the project from the JISC Project page, and the CORRAL website.  Or listen to Dr. Dennis Wheeler talk about the project in a recent podcast.

Today sees the launch of the East London Lives 2012, a digital archive project which aims to document some aspects of change in the lives of East Londoners towards the hosting of the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

The archive hosts content from research projects based at the University of East London and other contextualising material about London and specifically the five East London boroughs and the bid promises that were made about the impact of the Olympics.

Importantly the archive also contains a wealth of community generated content, including oral histories, image, video and interviews.

Below is a short video created by the project which gives an excellent feel for what the archive has done, and why it is such an essential resource going into the future: