JISC Digitisation Programme

JISC has just announced funding for its Grant call 7/10: e-Content and Digitisation programme: Impact and Embedding of digitised resources.

Funding of up to £150,000 is available for projects addressing the impact and embedding of digitised resources.  It is anticipated that 4-6 projects will be funded and the maximum funding for any one project is £40,000.

Proposals are not limited to previously funded JISC projects.

The deadline for receipt of proposals in response to this call is 12 noon on Friday 9 July 2010.

The call aims to:

• Facilitate institutions in carrying out an analysis of the impact of their digitised resources/collections that have been live for at least one calendar year.

• To develop strategies and practical solutions to ensure the increased use and impact of the resources in teaching, learning and research within higher education (HE)

This call is in response to a number of important studies and pieces of work attempting to asses the impact and usage of digital resources, including the impact study carried out on the phase I JISC digitisation projects.

Projects must start in October 2010 and complete by March 2011.

Everything you wanted to know about Wikipedia but were too afraid to ask event – Monday 7th June, Brettenham House, London

Liam Wyatt is Vice President of Wikimedia Australia and a historian. He has recently been appointed as the first “volunteer Wikipedian in residence” at the British Museum – the first residency of its kind anywhere in the world. His principle task there will be to build a relationship between the Museum and the Wikipedian community through a range of activities, both internally and public-facing.

The Strategic Content Alliance is running a free event on the afternoon of Monday, 7th June (two sessions about 2 hours or so in duration). At this event, Liam will be drawing on his experience in bringing the museum and Wikipedia communities together to present a museum-sector-specific overview on the opportunities, benefits and challenges of working with Wikimedia. After his presentation, and along with other Wikipedians attending, there will be the opportunity for in-depth discussions and Q&A.

For further information and to register please go to http://c24scawiki.eventbrite.com/

Despite the unbiquitous presence of moving image and sound in much of our daily lives, it has largely failed to make any impact in academic teaching, learning and research.

In an attempt to strengthen the role of film and sound in further and higher education, the Film and Sound Think Tank has recently launched a set of videos.

The films examine the role of audio and visual content in education, and how the protential of this media can be unlocked.

The fourth video is available on Vimeo:

JISC – Unlocking Artists’ Rights – JISC Film and Sound Think Tank

As an aside, it is interesting to note the number of views these videos have had in their short life on YouTube (one of the videos – Using Ausio in education – had 138 views).

While the numbers don’t necessarily tell us the whole story – how long were they viewed? – this may already signal the importance and levels of interest in this topic to the education community and beyond.

Alastair Dunning recently presented on JISC’s digitisation sustainability processes at a funders’ forum discussing policies on the long-term maintenance of digital resources. The presentation is available here.

Various bodies were represented at the meeting including Arts Council, Big Lottery Fund, Canadian Heritage Information Network, Institute of Museum and Library Services
Internet Archive, Ithaka, Centre for Research Libraries, Cornell University and the Danish Agency for Libraries and Media

Some of the key points are listed below:

* Increasing need for resource creators need to work with business development and knowlege transfer offices within universities so as to come up with creative ways of deriving value and developing income. The funding raised by the eBird project (http://ebird.org/) might not be replicable by everyone but its ways of finding multiplie incomes sources are fascinating
* But those projects that are unlikey to derive external income need to work harder at aligning themselves with institutional strategies
* Sponsorship of digital resources is underused (the $20k the eBird gets from Zeiss is interesting)
* Greater need for transparency of costs
* Is there any role for funding bodies in giving loans instead of grants? Could funding bodies operate more like Venture Capitalists?
* All parties need to work harder at reducing the costs of digital projects
* Do funding bodies need to work more closely with institutions rather than just individual project teams? Can centres of innovation for business development in this area be constructed?

The second strand of Grant 13/09: BCE, e-Content & Digitisation programmes: Developing community content aims to build new digital collections, or transform existing collections through genuine co-creation with specific external communities.

Below are the five winning projects from strand II of this call (two are currently conditional awards):

OurWikiBooks

(Conditional Award)

University of Manchester (Alexandria Walker)

This project will undertake co-development, with teachers and GCSE and A-level students, of a new digital collection of key concerns and knowledge in computing education.  In the process, the project will build a community that collaboratively creates digital collections of imaginative educational materials for use in learning and teaching computing, with this content being made available to the computing education community in the UK and worldwide.

My Leicestershire

University of Leicester (Ben Wynne)

This project will create a base digital archive comprised of historical texts from the University of Leicester Library’s Special Collections complemented by video recordings from MACE, oral history recordings from EMOHA and private collections of historical photographs of ‘ghost signs’, buildings, bridges and other architecturally significant sites from across the county.

Media and Memory in Wales, 1950-2000

(Conditional Award)

University of Aberyswyth (Dr. Iwan Rhys Morus)

This project will collect and archive oral testimony relating to the age of television in Wales.  It will solicit memories of significant televisual moments in politics and culture.  By focussing on four distinct geographical and linguistic communities, it will seek to provide a spectrum of memories that represent a national collective memory of television in Wales.

Welsh Voices of the Great War Online

University of Cardiff (Gethin Matthews)

This project will work with the families of those in Wales who fought, or otherwise served, in the First World War in order to collect and make available online the range of artefacts that are held in private hands.   The results will be presented via the People’s Collection website, a Welsh Assembly Government funded project.

Community Cafe Projects

University of Southampton (Alison Dickens)

The project will address the scarcity of up to date, online resources for community languages.  The aim of the project is to co-create a community collection of online language and cultural materials which will significantly enhance existing materials to support community languages.

The first of this year’s releases of the John Johnson Collection: An Archive of Printed Ephemera has just been announced.

The publication is a series of fourteen specially commissioned essays that respond to a diverse selection of items from the John Johnson Collection.

These concise and illuminating studies – which have been contributed by Rob Banham, Troy Bickham, Robert Colls, Simon Eliot, D. J. Taylor, Michael Twyman and Mariana Warner – are available in the John Johnson Collection alongside digital facsimile images of the items to which they relate.

The complete list of essays is accessible via a link on the John Johnson Collection home page or by clicking the Responses link in the toolbar that appears at the top of every screen in the John Johnson Collection.

New Content

Facsimile images of more than 13,700 items have been added to the John Johnson Collection with this release, bringing the total number of scanned items to 62,421 (a total of 167,356 images), including more than 19,700 pieces of theatrical and non-theatrical ephemera from the Nineteenth-Century Entertainment category and more than 9,500 items from the Booktrade category.

Over 10,900 Popular Prints are now available in facsimile form, along with more than 20,700 items from Advertising and over 1,400 from Crimes, Murders and Executions.

Future Developments: Enhanced Records for Crime, Murders and Execution

Of the five major categories of material included in The John Johnson Collection, the Crimes, Murders and Executions section is one of the most popular and most often consulted, providing documentary evidence which supports research in various aspects of social history.

The Bodleian Library and ProQuest are enhancing this material, with the help of JISC e-Content funding, by mapping individual records to the appropriate entries in a number of external online resources that contain references, citations or other related material, thereby offering users the scope to explore more easily themes and narratives encountered in the John Johnson Collection.

The project will guide researchers to other information directly related to their line of enquiry, and allow them to build connections or follow trails between different resources.

The resources that the project will link to are:

• Old Bailey Proceddings Online
• Harvard law School Library’s digitised broadside collection: Dying Speeches and Bloody Murders
• Newgate calendar
• Bodleian Library’s digitised catalogue of broadside ballads.

 More information is available about the project on the JISC website for this project.