JISC Digitisation Programme

The inclusion of another 1m pages on the BL Historic Newspapers website takes the total number of pages of 19th Century Newspapers available online to over 3 million

22 new titles cover a range of both regional and metropolitan publications including the Cheshire Observer, the Royal Cornwall Gazette, the Isle of Man Times and the Nottinghamshire Guardian

The British Library’s 19th Century Newspapers project, developed in partnership with JISC and Gale part of Cengage Learning, offers researchers greatly enhanced access to a vast archive of socially, culturally and historically important collections previously only available in the Library’s London-based reading rooms.

Providing highly illustrated materials on topics as diverse as the war in the Crimea to ladies fashion, the new additions both widen and deepen this unique resource, offering users a broader cross section of British society in the 19th century.

Adding to an existing selection of 49 titles, the 22 additional publications have been chosen by leading experts and academics to significantly extend the geographical coverage of the resource including a whole range of both regional and metropolitan titles.

The additions to the archive have also sought to provide a more comprehensive picture of the political spectrum in the 19th century and include the entire runs of two additional major London papers – The Morning Post and The Standard – offering the conservative viewpoint alongside the liberal and radical papers already digitised such as the Daily News and Reynold’s Newspaper.

Free access for for all staff and students in UK HE is available via institutional gateways.

I recently blogged about the launch of the University of Exeter’s Digital Collections Online.

Some of the amazing images that were digitised and added to the repository demand to be highlighted in more depth.

With all the hype about Tim Burton’s new Alice in Wonderland film, it seems appropriate to highlight the amazing collection of images that the archive holds on film and cinema (and the optical and visual more generally).

The image of Alice included in this piece, is taken from a box of slides that come originate in a Magic Lantern Collection.

This pre-cinematic invention used a series of slides that were projected onto a wall.   Smallscale shows were put on by  travelling lanternists using a candle to project the images.

Occassionally visual tricks were employed to engage and capture the audiences attention – not dissimilar to our ongoing fascination and the appeal of 3D at the movies!

But, the link between the past and present is not the only value of digitising and making these collections available online.

The collection held by Exeter is fascinating, not only for what it can tell us about the history of cinema and film;  but also how the edges of each object and collection of objects touch upon, and overlap with other areas of study and research.

Many of the slide collections are incredibly rich resources for researchers and students looking not only at, for example,  cinematic history, but also the subject matter and content of the images and objects themselves.

Magic lantern slides cover subject areas including,  astrology and zoology offering a rare and primary source glimpse into Victorian culture and ideas.

The project has attempted to provide preliminary pathways through some of the content by creating ‘curated’ collections and e-learning packages centred around certain themes.

It seems this collection cannot help but cross new boundaries and inspire new ideas and avenues of thought.

Mining a Year of Speech is one of the projects in the Digging into Data Programme.

Its aim is to transcribe and then analyse a huge corpus of spoken language, using the massive quantity of the corpus to ask questions about the nature of speech and language

A launch event was held last week, involving some fascinating presentations and soundclips, which give an excellent insight into the benefits to be drawn from the analysis of massive amounts of digitised audio. There is also a parrot going mad.

Images from Spellman Collection of Victorian Music Covers, hosted at VADS.

JISC recently issues a call for studies to analyse the benefit and impact of digital resources.

Simon Tanner (King’s Digital Consultancy Services, King’s College London) and Pete Dalton (Evidence Base, University of Central Birmingham) have won the call, and are now starting the four month project, sifting through a mess of extant evidence and also working with funders, programmes, projects and other relevant stakeholders to build their argument.

The study will concentrate on four main areas:

• Meeting and advancing research needs
• Bringing collections out of the dark
• Stimulating the economy, underpinning competitiveness and developing skills
• Reaching out and building communities

The final report and related outputs are scheduled to be released in July 2010. More information is available from the webpage on the JISC website.

 The Codex (Centre for Digital Excellence) project at the University of Manchester recently visited National Trust Petworth House in Sussex to digitise a medieval Chaucer manuscript.

The project aims to establish partnerships with museums, libraries and archive repositories throughout the region, and beyond, to develop and test collaborative models for digitisation.

This was the projects first visit to a collection to photograph and digitise a collection, and also gave the team at Petworth House a chance to ask the team questions and watch them work.

The event was captured by the BBC and includes an interesting piece of film with the curator at Petworth House.

One of the key ways of getting exposure to your website is by ensuring that search engines such as Google have successfully harvested your content, and added information on your site to their indices.

Whilst some of the tasks that facilitate this can be quite tricky, it is surprising that many digital projects still fail to take advantage of many simple ways in which ’search engine optimisation’ can take place.

The Strategic Content Alliance therefore commissioned a Canadian team to come up with some recommendations for implementing search engine optimisation, and I would urge any digitial project to look through it, and think about implementing the suggested guidance.

The pdf is available to download from
http://sca.jiscinvolve.org/files/2010/01/sca_chin_seo_report_v1-02.pdf

Tuesday 16th March saw the launch of Exeter University’s Digital Collections Online.

Delivering images and digital objects from Exeter’s most prestigious research collections, including over 2000 images showcasing Victorian culture, openly available for teaching and research.

The website includes e-learning packages to help embed the collections use within the university’s teaching, learning and research.

Highlights of the collection include historic popular culture images from Queen Victoria  to Alice in Wonderland.

The Launch was preceeded by a workshop on the Digital Futures of Special Collections.

Partly as a response to the Enriching Digital Resources programme, the workshop examined many of the issues Special Collections and Archives face in delivering digital resources to users in the twenty-first century and beyond.

Some of the themes that emerged from the presentations and discussions are worth sharing:

• Students don’t care where (physically) an object is stored: they simply want access, whenever they need it. Linked to this is:
• Objects must be easy to use and find: especially for students who will often take the path of least resistance in searching for content.
• The digital doesn’t replace the physical, instead it facilitates a dialogue between the object and its simulacra.
• Metadata is not dead, yet.  Descriptions allow users to find the objects.  But how do we overcome shortages of resources and expertise to enrich metadata?
• As much as possible content should be shared and set free.  There are many challenges to this, but where possible this should be the norm, not the exception.  This may also help answer the issue of enriching metadata.
• Sharing and opening up content is not a loss of authority or power… rather it is empowering others.

There were many others, some of which may inspire future blog posts, but these were the ones that stuck with me.

The workshop was collaborative and challenging as anything worthwhile should be, and it seems a fitting vehicle to launch a new online digital collection.

20 July 2010, 10am-4pm
British Library Conference Centre, Euston Road, London

• Explore the impact of the large scale digitisation of newspapers
• Consider the effect that this has had on research and researchers
• Question the implied changes to research methodologies

Not only has the digitisation of historical newspapers made it easier to discover information about events from the past, but the way in which they have been digitised makes it possible to discover how those events were represented, debated and sold as news. This conference will debate current limitations of this digitisation as well as opportunities for future development.

The conference is being organised jointly by the British Library and JISC. Speakers will include Professor Laurel Brake, Professor Tim Hitchcock, Professor Robert Shoemaker, Professor Miles Taylor and Dr James Mussell.

For more information and to book tickets visit the Institute of Historical Research’s website. Many thanks to the Institute for hosting the online registration form.

£35.00 for full registration
£25.00 student concession

One of the projects in the Digging into Data Challenge is entitled Digging into the Enlightenment: Mapping the Republic of Letters

It traces the flow of correspondence between intellectuals in eighteenth-century Europe, thus helping giving an indication of the flow of ideas from writers such as Adam Smith, David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

This YouTube video, featuring Dr Dan Edelstein from the US side of the team at Stanford University, is a useful introduction to the project, and reveals some of the general aims of the broader Digging into Data programme. Also involved in the project are Dr Chris Weaver from the University of Oklahoma and, in the UK, Robert McNamee from the University of Oxford.

JISC has recently published its 02/10 call, entitled ‘Deposit of research outputs and Exposing digital content for education and research.’

Strand II, focussed on exposing digital content, may well be of interest to digitisation projects.

Often digitisation projects develop specific interfaces so that their users can search and browse through the digitised collections.

However, the recent advent of concepts such as linked data and APIs allows for content to be exposed and made available in other ways, thus allowing other users to builds tools, integrate other data, and provide novel methods of visualisation as well as allowing for machine driven discovery and representation of the resources

This call provides an opportunity, therefore, for digitisation projects to expose their content, this allowing users new and ways of exploring the content.

David Flanders (d.flanders @AT@ jisc.ac.uk) is the relevant JISC member of staff who can provide more information.