JISC Digitisation Programme

JPEG 2000 for the practitioner – a one-day seminar

A free seminar to explore and examine the use of JPEG 2000 in the cultural heritage industry will be held at the Wellcome Trust.

The seminar will include specific case studies of JPEG 2000 use. It will explain technical issues that have an impact on practical implementation of the format, and explore the context of how and why organisations may choose to use JPEG 2000.

Although the seminar will have an emphasis on digitisation and digital libraries, the papers will be relevent to a range of research and creative industries.

Places are limited to 80 attendees. Papers will be made available online after the event.

Further Details:

• Tuesday 16 November 2010

• 9am – 5pm

• Wellcome Trust, 215 Euston Road, London, UK

This seminar is hosted by the JPEG 2000 Implementation Working Group and the Wellcome Library.

Contributors:

Please submit the title and a brief abstract of your proposed paper and a bio of the speaker/s to c.henshaw@wellcome.ac.uk by October 4, 2010.

Delegates:

If you would like to attend please email your name and the name of your institution to c.henshaw@wellcome.ac.uk by 1 November, 2010.

A Rockhopper penguin, taken on British expedition to the Falkland Islands in 1936

The image is available from the Freeze Frame website, published by the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge

The Visualising China Project is hosting a one-day workshop in Bristol on Tuesday 21st September, with presentations and discussion on the topic of cross-searching distributed, interrelated, online resources.

Presentations will include:

• The Visualising China project which currently harvests data linking to two large, separate image collections.

• Connected Histories project will present their experiences in cross-searching more than 10 online datasets.

The workshop will tackle topics such as harvesting protocols (including OAI-related solutions), presentation layer problems/solutions such as for ranking search results, and scalability/sustainability issues in cross-searching.

The workshop is also interested in receiving more recommendations for speakers and topics for discussion.

If you have suggestions and/or wish to attend please contact Nikki Rogers as soon as possible: nikki.rogers@bristol.ac.uk.

Date: Tuesday 21st September 2010

Venue: ILRT, Bristol

“As the Headmaster came into lunch, he slipped into my side-pocket a copy of the ‘New Era’ dealing with problems of Marriage and Sex. Why? A nice gesture of friendliness, anyway.”

The above is a transcribed excerpt from a teacher’s diary from Keswick, Cumbria in 1937, the typescript of which is below. It is part of the material released from the Mass Observation Archive as part of the MOCO project – Mass Observation Communities Online.

The MOCO project has had two aims, and more diaries and photographs are available via the links below

1) Releasing sample content from the Mass Observation Archive, largely in the period 1937 to 1941.
2) Inviting and publishing content from contemporary community groups, who are contributing the content via the web tools developed by the project team.

The Stand is one of the oldest streets in London.  It follows the line of the Roman road of Akeman, and lies on the Saxon boundary of Aldwych.

The Strand is located in the centre of London.  It is the eye in a storm of diverse people, communities, societies and organisations that inhabit this busy thoroughfare.

A new project from Kings College, London will work closely with a range of local communities to help represent life on the Strand in ways meaningful to those communities, and to the academic community of Kings.

Strandlines will imaginatively explore the significance of place in people’s lives: Using academic expertise to suggest frameworks, especially life-writing, social media and oral history, to enable connection and engagement between the different Strand communities.

The project will create an online, interactive resource documenting life and work on the Strand over the past 200 years, through stories, audio and photographs. It will combine material taken from the College’s own archive, Westminster City Archives and elsewhere with people’s own photographs and memories, captured through a grassroots digitisation project.

To find out more about this project you can visit the Strandlines website.  The Strandlines Digital Community is part of a larger project aiming to “explore lives on the Strand – past, present and creative”.

28 Oct: Khrushchev promised that the Soviet bases on Cuba, that sparked the Cuban Missile Crisis would be removed. The bases had been the subject of a tense standoff between the Soviet Union and the USA.

Cartoon from the Daily Mail, 29th October 1962. By Leslie Gilbert Illingworth.

Image and caption from the British Cartoon Archive at the University of Kent – http://www.cartoons.ac.uk/record/ILW3584

JISC hosted an initial meeting of its Digital Content Taskforce in London on 27th July 2010. Delegates at the meeting discussed the current issues in digitising and creating digital content for educational use.

Below are the key themes from the presentations and the break out sessions (they can also be downloaded as a pdf). Links to the day’s presentations are available from another page on this blog.

The themes raised during the day will build into JISC’s funding. In this respect, we are aiming to provide more information within a few weeks.

1. Developing a national context and exploiting the idea of the “British Brand”
A national strategy is required, tied to the concept of a national collection. Connections with broader government themes (e.g. Digital Britain) need to be clearly articulated and communicated. Individual funding bodies need to be aware of the essential nature of the digital.

2. The importance of re-use
Much content has already been developed, but re-packaging this as ‘finished products’ rather than ‘raw collections’ will attract new users. So much has been done already! Let’s make the most of this investment.

3. Understanding users better; and understanding the selection process
We still don’t know enough about user demand. Having a clear focus on packaging and delivering our content will help identify the users and should elicit further evidence. This is turn, will help the difficult decisions in deciding priorities for digitisation.

4. Changing institutional missions
Benefits of further digital work need to be clearly articulated so that winning arguments can be developed at a senior strategic level within institutions. Just as importantly, digital content must become embedded in the teaching process (at whatever educational level) so that the use of the content becomes an everyday event.

5. Sustainability, open access and preservation
There is still much debate over how access to content is sustained over time. The convenience provided by open access makes things much easier for users; but pragmatism also dictates that thinking commercially will be vital in order to unlock much content. One crucial element of this is to develop the right partnerships; bodies like JISC can play a role in brokering such partnerships, which can often achieve sizeable benefits even from limited financial investment.

6. Technological Changes
The educational sector needs to exploit the possibilities afforded by developments such as new mobile devices and linked data. This allows existing content to be re-packaged or combined in new ways, thus presenting new offers for end users.

7. Developing a sense of community
Different types of crowdsourcing can create new (or strengthen existing) communities and inspire unexpected demand, with a range of social, economic and educational benefits. This new model must be explored further.

8. Credibility of the educational sector
Not continuing with the process of digitisation endangers the credibility of the sector; we fall behind as commercial offers of digital content become increasingly sophisticated. New skills and roles are required in the library setting; staff without a clear understanding of the digital future can make change difficult.

9. Impact and evidence
Continuing work in this area is hampered by the lack of clear quantitative figures, despite the plethora of anecdotal evidence and acknowledged enthusiasm for digital content. Funders and content providers must record and articulate their successes.

10. The UK and its competitors
The UK cultural and educational sector is falling behind other national players. Some other countries have already outstripped the UK (e.g France and NZ) in providing a critical mass of cultural and educational content and are already more widely exploiting its value for both non commercial and commercial use.

11. Intellectual Property Rights
The clearance of Intellectual Property Rights, particularly orphan works, remains a pressing problem. Continuing pressure needs to be exerted on the relevant bodies to enable the removal of the restrictions that slow down digitisation work.

The four thousand 18th and 19th century ballads that make up the Welsh Ballads Digitisation project at Cardiff University have gone live on a new website.

The project has made around 15,000 pages of rare Welsh ballads available online.  The collection also includes some of the ballads sung and available digitally.

The ballads give an unparalleled glimpse into Welsh society during the 18th and 19th centuries.

Cardiff University’s Dr Wyn James stated that the ballads:

“were the daily newspapers for the poor throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, and were sold cheaply and widely at markets, fairs, and villages.  They communicated news on local matters and overseas events of the day”.

The ballads launch has also attracted some interest nationally, with BBC Wales reporting on the story online.  To find out more you can visit the Ballads webpages at the National Library of Wales.

The web interface http://www.jisc-content.ac.uk/ which has recently been set up to provide a more user friendly way of navigating the content that JISC funding has helped made available to the HE and FE communities.

The site is not aiming to give item level access to each collection, i.e. it is not a federated search in the manner of Europeana. Rather it is a gateway that provides an brief descriptions of each collection, and offers users different, and hopefully, engaging ways to browse through these descriptions, and learn more about what is on offer.

The content currently includes material licensed by JISC Collections (http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/) and material digitised via the two phases of the Digitisation Programme, the Enriching Digital Resources strand, and the first phase of the JISC – NEH (National Endowment for Humanities) Transatlantic work. Information from the current community content programme will be added when projects come online

The plan is to update the site over time, and particular to make some changes in response to feedback gathered over the next month or so. If you have feedback, modifications etc. then please send it to collections@jisc.ac.uk

I have recently attended a number of events on the role(s) of Public engagement in the Arts and Humanities.

As a result I thought it might be useful to document some of the key issues that arose from these events, and some of the actions institutions and departments have been taking to deal with these challenges.

These are not exhaustive, nor final… just some of the more interesting points that arose from the discussions.

Benefits of Public Engagement

• New research outputs and collaborations – How does engaging the public change the nature of research outputs?  Indeed, members of the public can do aspects of research that individual researchers are unable to do by themselves (e.g. Galaxy Zoo)
• Opening up new research areas – by involving the public can entirely new areas of research be uncovered?
• Dissemination - Engaged research is already embedded within communities and interested groups etc.  Dissemination is a natural part and benefit of public engagement, not an add-on or after thought.
• Making research relevant – If we are sceptical of that which we do not understand, then our involvement in that work means it becomes important to us all, and we are able to better understand its benefits.  At times of scrutiny (especially financial) that understanding can be extremely important.

Issues with Public Engagement

• ‘Self-defined’ engagement – Is this publicly instigated or research led engagement?  What are the implications for engagement if it is always led and instigated by the researcher?
• Low institutional status – Angela Hobbs gave a fasinating presentation on her unique role as Senior Fellow for the Public Understanding of Philosophy.  However, it was made very clear to Angela that this role would significantly hamper her chances of promotion and that in times of crisis hers could be the first to be cut!  Why would early career researchers adopt engagement if it is bestowed with such low staus by many institutions (in practice, if not in spirit).
• Tension between research outputs and engagement – The low status of engagement often stems from this issue: It is hard to keep research outputs high and still effectively engage with the public.  Usually it is the researchers career that suffers!
• Lack of recognition – Again, this follows from the lack of status within institutions, but engagement is not, generally, formally recognised within the academy.  This is probably the biggest barrier to embedding public engagement within researchers work.
• Lack of best practice – Despite the fact that public engagement is not a new way of working (researchers have been working in this way for a long time) there is very little in the way of best practice and support for this type of research methodology.  A few organisations, such as the National Co-Ordinating Centre for Public Engagement, are however, working to change this.

Toughts for Funders

Is the way we fund engagement part of the issue? The project methodology is a possible barrier to the uptake and embedding of public engagement by researchers – when the funding ends, so does the engagement.  Are there better ways of funding projects and research to engage outside of the academy?

Another issue that arises from the funding model is that researchers often lack the partnerships and collaborators prior to funding being available.  Could funders provide small amounts of money to establish some of these engagements and relationships, before large amounts of money are spent on research.

A final thought is about Impact and public engagement projects/research: How do we measure the impact that community and public engagement projects have within both the academy and the community?  indeed can we really measure it?

Should it be less about impact and evaluation and more about dissemination and best practice?:

You can count the number of seeds you sow; not the quality of the trees that will grow

Finally…

The recently funded Community Content projects from JISC confront and address many of the issues that arose from the discussions and workshops at these events.  Visit the project webpages to discover more.