JISC Digitisation Programme

Following recent discoveries in the John Rylands Library Special Collections, UNDEREXSPOSED is an exhibition in Collaboration with The Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI), celebrating the life of one of Manchester’s early photographic pioneers, J.T. Chapman.

Chemist, inventor and photographer, Chapman invented some of the processes that were to become standard in early photography.

However, he is widely omitted from history books as he published his formula under the pseudonym ‘Ostendo non Ostento’ (I show, not boast).

Working from Deansgate, Manchester, Chapman also invented and sold his own cameras and projectors.

The exhibition also showcases a selection of glass plate negatives, recently discovered and linked to the Langford Brooke family of Mere Hall in Cheshire, which have been cleaned, re-housed and digitised by CHICC.

CHICC is The Centre for Heritage Imaging and Collection Care, a JISC funded project to develop a Centre for Heritage Digitisation, based within the University of Manchester.

The John Rylands Library will be holding a series of events associated with the exhibition, for more information please contact 0161 306 0555 or email jrul.events@manchester.ac.uk

Following on from yesterday’s blog post about the Enriching via Collaboration and Developing Community Content strand of funding, JISC has added a further tranche of funding in its eContent and Digitisation programme.

This is for Rapid Digitisation projects. A total of £400k funding is available, and it is expected that 6 to 7 projects will be funded.

A call for this will be published in October, and more information made available via the Digital Content Partnerships event on 28th October – for which see the preceding blog post.

In relation to the forthcoming call from eContent Programme, JISC is hosting “Digital Content Partnerships” on 28 October 2010. The event, open to all, will be to offer further information on the call, offer opportunities to form partnerships as part of proposals for the call and to engage further with JISC’s campaign for digital content.

Overview of the forthcoming call is at the very bottom of the page of the JISC Roadmap for future funding, under the heading ‘Content Call for Enriching and Developing Community Content‘.

The event will take place at Goodenough College, Mecklenburgh Square, London, from 11am to 3.30pm.

All potential applicants, whether in the guise of a lead institution or a supporting partner, are invited to attend and can register via the online form.

As you will see in the form, delegates are encouraged to give some information on their possible proposal, in order to appeal to potential partners. This information will be shared during the day, providing a basis for conversations on developing projects together.

For example, delegates may wish to use the form to look for partners who have specific expertise (whether in enhancing, commercialising or marketing existing digital content); to look for partners who have similar content to themselves; or delegates may wish to just give basic information about the content they hope to be working with within the project. The text of the call, particularly Strand A on ‘Enriching via Collaboration’, gives some idea of the type of partnership sought by JISC.

Notes will be taken and published for those that are unable to make the day. JISC staff will also be available for questions at a later date.

JISC has recently funded seven new projects to explore the Impact and Embedding of Digitised Resources.

The aims of the programme are 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)

The Projects

Below is some further information about the new projects.  This will be updated shortly with a JISC webpage for the projects and links to project webpages.

British History Online as a Case Study

Institute for Historical Research, University of London

This proposed project will use the Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources to enhance and broaden the British history Online (BHO) information on usage and impact of digital resources, thereby informing future development of BHO and contributing to its long-term sustainability and use in research, teaching and learning.

Dance Teaching Resource & Collaborative engagement Spaces (D-TRACES)

Coventry university

The D-TRACES Project (Dance teaching resource and collaborative engagement spaces) will exploit a unique and significant digital dance resource, the Siobhan Davies digital archive. Following a systematic analysis of user engagement and impact on the local student experience, the project will develop a model for embedding the digital archive within the Personal Development Planning (PDP) element of the undergraduate dance curriculum at Coventry University, thereby generating learning objects for much wider distribution.

Listening for Impact

University of Oxford

This project will perform a thorough, rapid analysis of the impact of the public Oxford Podcast audio video collection of 1800 scholarly items, launched in September 2008. By mixing technical innovations and user engagement it will increase discoverability and reuse of material within teaching, learning and research.

Embedding a vision of Britain through Time as a resource for academic, research & Learning

University of Portsmouth

A Vision of Britain through Time may be the worlds best local history web site, but in no way meets academic expectations for an on-line GIS: a comparison with the web sites created by the US National Historical GIS shows almost no overlap in functionality. This project will add enhanced statistical mapping, a custom mapping facility, and new data download facilities covering historic mapping, boundary maps and, crucially, statistics. These facilities will complement not duplicate existing download facilities at Edina and UKDA. Access to most new facilities will be Shibboleth controlled and restricted to UK HE users, to manage computational load and for copyright reasons.

The project will create a detailed report on a site with high and unusual usage patterns, and unusual success at income generation. One goal is simply to better measure specifically academic use.

SPHERE

Kings College, London

Stormont Parliamentary Hansards Embedded in Research and Education (SPHERE) will attempt to extend the work of LAIRAH and similar projects by developing new methodologies for assessing the value of digital resources, and will implement a series of measures to assess the use, value and impact of the digital scholarly resource, the “Historical Hansards”, and implement a series of practical approaches to embed the resource within teaching, learning and research.

Crime in the Community: Enhancing User engagement for Teaching & Research with the Old Bailey Online

University of Sheffield

The Old Bailey Proceedings Online is accessed by a wide community, but academic users have to date not fully exploited this resource and its advanced functionality in their teaching, learning and research. Crime in the Community will assess the ways in which this website is currently used, and generate a series of new tools and online facilities that will allow educationalists and researchers to make more effective use of the 120,000,000 words of highly tagged and accurately transcribed historical text available through the site.

HumBox Impact

University of Southampton

The JISC/HEA funded HumBox project developed a repository of OER materials for the humanities. The project was a collaboration between four Humanities HEA Subject Centres (LLAS, English, History and Philosophical and Religious Studies), and worked closely with the wider UK humanities community to establish what is now a flagship example of what can be achieved in a discipline through OER engagement.

The HumBox Impact project will undertake an analysis of the impact of the collection on contributors and the wider teaching audience and will investigate emerging working and sharing patterns.  HumBox Impact will use the findings from its study to: Develop strategies to ensure the increased use of the HumBox collection in HE; and develop tools (web site enhancements) to support new and emerging working patterns.

Images all from the Visual Arts Data Service

Pius VI, by Goulet, 1803, Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, Co. Durham

Clement VII, by School of Sebastiano del Piombo, 1527-34, Pollok House, Glasgow

Pope Benedict XIII, (Italian School), 1720s, Grosvenor Museum, Chester

Christ and the Pope, (German School), late sixteenth century, Pollok House, Glasgow

Alexander VIII as Cardinal, Francesco Trevisani, 1690s, Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle

Earlier this month, JISC supported a workshop on the University of Nottingham on the development of gazetteers – historic dictionaries of place names (and other geographical information) and their co-ordinates or other appropriate reference.

Plenty of work is being done throughout the UK on research on place names, and many projects are keen to exploit such work in the digital realm, but the fruits of such work are only slowly becoming available.

Services such as EDINA’s excellent Unlock service, which identifies place names and adds in geographical co-ordinates, are beginning to allow users to exploit the rich seam of geographical information that exists in nearly all digitised resources. But for those working with historical material the services lacks the gazetteers which can identify non-contemporary place names.

Thus the Nottingham workshop looked at how projects such as the English Place Name Survey, the JISC Chalice and Halogen projects, the Unlock service, and various place name projects in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland could work together to create rich gazetteers to allow for greater exploitation of the geographical information that exists within digitised historical materials.

A full report is being prepared by the conference organisers Paul Ell (Queen’s University Belfast) and Lorna Hughes (King’s College London), but there seemed to be four key points from the day.

1. More use needs to be made of the EDINA Unlock service. Further use will help build the possibilities for the service and geographical information in the educational sector.
2. Different gazetteers need to be developed for different research questions. But questions still remain about the level of precision required, IPR restrictions, and the possibilities for re-use.
3. A registry of gazetteers would help exploit existing research and data sets. Equally, there needs to be agreement over how individual items from gazetteers can be published on the WWW, and the stable URI base that will inform a linked data approach to geographical entities. The Pleiades service, of place names from the ancient world, was mentioned in this context.
4. There needs to be training for academics and students to understand how ‘geographies’ can interact with their work, and how spatial content can be represented.

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Agenda from the Workshop

10:00 Coffee and Arrival

10:30 Lorna Hughes, Jayne Carrol: Welcome and introduction

10:40 Lorna Hughes – e-Research for historic place names: strategic developments

10:50 The state of the art in historic place name research

1. Jayne Carroll and Paul Carvill – An overview of English Place name Survey and the Key.
2. Kay Muhr – Place-Names in Northern Ireland current state-of-the
Art;
3. Jean Anderson – Place name research and resources in Scotland
4. David Parsons – Welsh Place names initiatives

12:00 Humphrey Southall – Data Models for Historical Gazetteers: Administrative units, locations, “places” and place-names.

Discussion

1:00 lunch

1:45 e-Research and historic place name research: recent initiatives

Alastair Dunning – JISC and e-infrastructure for e-resource Integration
Jo Walsh and Clair Grover – the JISC-funded CHALICE Project: linked data
Leif Isaksen, Southampton – HESTIA: Place name extraction from text

Discussion

3:30 tea
departure

FREE 2 day workshops to be held in (follow links for registration)

• Belfast, 14 September 2010 – 15 September 2010
• Glasgow, 7th October 2010 – 8th October 2010
• London, 12th October 2010 – 13th October 2010
• Manchester, 28th October 2010 – 29th October 2010
• London, 16th November 2010 – 17th November 2010

These workshops address the importance issue of “search engine optimisation” and many related issues. Participants will gain a perspective on how basic guidelines, simple content planning, social media activities and use of metadata, all contribute to the effectiveness of a web site. The course is provided by the Strategic Content Alliance (SCA) and JISC Netskills.

Topics:

• How to improve search and discovery of online resources
• An exploration of technologies such as HTML5 and CSS3
• Emerging search engine enhancements and techniques
• The importance of the semantic web and semantic mark-up
• Accessibility issues and access management
• Content integrity and reaching the right audience
• Metadata and its significance, particularly RDFa
• The use of social media including cloud and blog services

Who is it for?

This event is aimed primarily at participants from universities and higher education but is also of interest to those from archives, museums, health, public service broadcasting, schools and cultural heritage. No particular technical knowledge is required as a prerequisite.

Last week saw the Citizen Cyberscience event at King’s College London, and it featured plenty of ambitious scientific research projects making extensive use of the enthusiasms and knowledge of an international public.

Projects on show included Einstein @home, which used volunteer’s PCs to detect various astronomical phenomenoa, and herberia @home, a distributed project to classify and transribe planet speciemens.

Of the sessions I attended, much of the focus was on research itself, with little being said about the relationships the scientists are building up with the public. Via such projects, an awful lot is being learnt about how to engage citizen scientists and maintain their interest, but this seemed to get lost in the discussion of the scientific research that propels this work in the first place.

The RunCoCo project at the University of Oxford is dealing with some of these issues (albeit for more community focussed projects that deal more with social or cultural themes), but one feels there is plenty more that the academic community needs to learn about how to engage the public.

The apparently easy success of the cyberscience movement should not disguise the fact it takes time and effort to get members of the public to contribute to sometime complex projects and that one or two mis-managed projects could easily destroy broader public trust in working with the research community.

A bit more discussion about these issues would help strengthen the current digital crowdsourcing phenomenon and ensure that it’s not a short-lived bubble.

The following is an image taken from the Centre for Heritage Imaging and Collection Care project at John Rylands Library, University of Manchester.

The images is one of many beautiful hand painted plates of birds, created between 1891 -98.  The image is a result of the project working with the Folio Society to create a facsimile of Sharps Birds of Paradise from the Rylands collection.

More can be discovered on the project’s blog.