JISC Digitisation Programme

The European Community recently held a meeting in Luxembourg to inform potential applicants about their the ICT Policy Support Programme.

30 million Euros have been allocated to the digital libraries strand which aims to improve accessibility, use and preservation of Europe’s rich and diverse cultural and scientific heritage.

The call is broken up into six objectives, three focussing on cultural content and Europeana.  The other three focus on ’scientific’ information and the wider issues surrounding digital libraries.

Three objectives relate to Europeana:

• Coordinating Europeana

• Enhancing/Aggregating content in European

• Digitising content for Europeana

Three more objectives relate to further actions in the wider area of digital libraries:

• Access to European Rights

• Information / Registry of Orphan WorksOpen access to scientific information

• Statistics on cultural heritage digitisation activities

For those wanting further details on the call, I have produced a report outlining the details of the call.

As an addition to its successful Freeze Frame digitisation project, JISC asked the University of Cambridge’s Scott Polar Research Institute to explore what was needed to export their collection of 20,000 digitised images to portals such as Europeana and Flickr, as well as to commerical image providers.

The request led the Institute to a full-scale overhaul of they managed and exported their images, and the report on the JISC website provides plenty of useful detail on their thinking behind the change, plus some recommendations for others in similar circumstances.

Some of the key findings from the full report (pdf file) are :

• Metadata is often created in the context of a single, localised website rather than for re-use on other sites.
• Creating shareable metadata needs much greater attention to keywords, credits and rights.
• Institutions that are serious about exporting their content need to build rigourous image management processes to avoid data export becoming a laborious manual task.
• Development of such systems can then also help provide sophisticated management of internal processes.
• Personnel and structures at the portals often change making it difficult for content providers to build working partnerships.
• Evaluating the success of exporting metadata or content to others’ portals is a particularly tricky business.