JISC Digitisation Programme

The British Museum’s ‘Wikipedian-in-Residence’, Liam Wyatt, recently gave a talk to JISC on some of the work that the British Museum and Wikipedia were doing together.

In particular, Liam focussed on the Hoxne Challenge, a one-day event organised at the British Museum at the end of June 2010.

Rather than the usual model of building up an article slowly over time with geographically dispersed contribuitors, this event brought together numerous experts and enthusiasts to see if they could construct a high-quality in-depth article on a particular topic.

The topic was the Hoxne Hoard, a discovery of late Roman gold and silver coins, and other previous items in 1992,

The team included various experts from the British Museum plus interested Wikipedia enthusiasts, some of whom attended the event, some of whom were online.

The result, after six hours of editing, was an incredibly detailed article on the Hoxne Hoard, fully referenced with 112 footnotes.

Such a process suggests a different way of approaching crowdsourcing – rather than indiviudals donating indiviudal pieces of digitised material or related metadata, the individuals worked as a team, structuring up their knowledge and expertise according to the basic rules relating to the creation of a Wikipedia article.

While the process could not be used for every single culutral item, in certain contexts it could be incredibly powerful of building up knowledge.

For much detail on the success of the event, have a read of Liam Wyatt’s blog post

London Lives makes available, in a fully digitised and searchable form, a wide range of primary sources about eighteenth-century London, with a particular focus on plebeian Londoners.

This resource includes over 240,000 manuscript and printed pages from eight London archives and is supplemented by fifteen datasets created by other projects. It provides access to historical records containing over 3.35 million name instances.

Facilities are provided to allow users to link together records relating to the same individual, and to compile biographies of the best documented individuals.

The Wellcome Library has launched a new blog dedicated to JPEG 2000. The blog charts our progress in determining what type of JPEG 2000 we will use, how we use it, and how it impacts on the rest of the Digital Library infrastructure.

The blog is also fed to our new Twitter account, Wellcome Digital, where you can also keep abreast of our news and views on UK PubMed Central and the development of our Digital Library and digitisation programme.

http://jpeg2000wellcomelibrary.blogspot.com/

Forwarded by John Unsworth, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) has just launched a new digitization program, AccessTEI. This program allows member institutions to outsource the transcription and basic structural encoding of source material (whether in print or manuscript, in any language, any sized job), at bulk prices with Apex Covantage, a leader in digitization outsourcing. The program features an easy-to-use web-based portal (http://accesstei.apexcovantage.com/).

A current list of institutional members is at http://www.tei-c.org/Membership/current.xml. If your institution or project is not already a member, cost of membership varies from $100 to $5,000/year, depending on the size of the organization and the type of economy in which it is located. A membership application can be found at http://www.tei-c.org/Membership/teimembershipform.pdf. Pricing for AccessTEI services to TEI members can be found athttp://accesstei.apexcovantage.com/Home/PriceMatrix.

This program, which was developed with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is only one of the benefits available to members of the TEI. Member institutions are also eligible for significant discounts on XML software and site licences, and savings (usually over 50%) on workshops and conferences hosted by the TEI.

A review of one of the JISC digitisation projects (the John Johnson collection of ephemera from the Bodleian Library at Oxford) made it onto Radio 4 on Saturday 12th June.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00sn68v/Saturday_Review_12_06_2010/

(from 21.27 mins to 30.30 – the recording will be available until 19th June)

It was interesting to hear the comments from an audience that is not solely academic – obviously most of the comments were about the historical material, but there are some interesting thoughts on the effectiveness of the search engine, and the confusion over who the website is for (ie universities or the general public), and also how it could be presented to make it more interesting.

Surprisingly, there was little mention of the fact that the site was not open access. Only at the end did the host mention that access (for the general public) was via local libraries.

Having recently issued our Funding Call on impact & embedding of digitised resources now seems an appropriate point at which to reflect on some of the work JISC has done to investigate and facilitate the impact and usage of digital resources.

The Oxford Internet Institute (OII) recently submitted their Final Report on a workshop they undertook entitled: Digital History Workshop: Connecting Researchers to Digital Collections .

The workshop addressed some of the issues and outcomes from the OII’s JISC funded study: The Usage and Impact of Phase I Digitisation projects and Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources (TIDSR).

These issues can be broadly defined as:

• The difficulty in connecting with potential users (researchers, teachers, students and the public);
• In some disciplines (i.e. History), habits dictate that researchers and students are not enthusiastic about the use of online resources for their studies.

The workshops, undertaken over two days, attempted to focus on scholars and researchers who had an interest in learning how digital resources could enhance and potentially transform their research and work.

Focussing on early stage researchers in the second event, the workshop attempted to establish, and challenge attitudes to digital resources early on in the researchers career.

The workshops attempted to confront some of the barriers that are often noted in the uptake and continued use of these resources:

“Of key importance to these workshops, but in particular to the first workshop, was the combination of information sessions with reflective papers from key scholars working in various research areas, and the opportunity to ask questions both of custodians/creators of digital resources and of those already using these tools for academic research and teaching.”

Conclusions

By having prominant scholars demonstrating their use and research activities in connection with online scholarly resources, these workshops highlighted that:  “Researchers are attracted to new methods and approaches most readily when presented with tangible and substantive examples from their peers and mentors“.

Furthermore, the TIDSR study and workshops highlight the importance of having multiple methods for seeking out information about users.  This user research can help deepen our understanding of how these resources are used and embedded in the practices of teachers, students and researchers.

Final Thoughts

“We found during the TIDSR project that funding for monitoring usage and impact beyond the launch of digital resources is often limited, and it is therefore vital that such funds are put to the best use.”

Hopefully the funding for the 7/10 grant call: Impact and Embedding, can help address this recommendation/concern from the workshops and wider impact study.

The Strategic Advisory Board on Intellectual Property (SABIP) have published a report this week entitled “The Economics of Copyright and Digitisation: A Report on the Literature and the Need for Further Research” .

The report undertakes a critical overview of the theoretical and empirical economic literature on copyright and unauthorised copying.

This report highlights two issues which are in particular need of further research in order to inform copyright policy:

• How does digital copying affect the supply of copyright works?
• Does the copyright system entail obstacles to desirable aspects of technological transition?

On the issue of copyright and digitisation the report states:  It is certain that digitisation will continue to alter the cost structure and demand for many copyright works and that new related products and services will emerge.

The full report is available to download.

SABIP would be grateful to receive any feedback you may have on the report.

The AHRC funded project Jane Austen’s fiction manuscripts represent the first significant body of holograph evidence surviving for any British novelist.

They represent every stage of her writing career and a variety of physical states: working drafts, fair copies, and handwritten publications for private circulation.

Digitization enables their virtual reunification and will provides scholars with the first opportunity to make simultaneous ocular comparison of their different physical and conceptual states, facilitating intimate and systematic study of Austen’s working practices across her career.

Many of the Austen manuscripts are frail; open and sustained access has long been impossible for conservation and location reasons.

The digital edition will include in the first instance all Jane Austen’s known fiction manuscripts and any ancillary materials held with them.

Visit the project website for more information.