Don’t Take Alcoholic Drinks on Mondays
1916 poster, published by the National Organising Committee for War Savings
Taken from the collection, Imperial War Museum: Posters of Conflict – The Visual Culture of Public Information and Counter Information, hosted by the Visual Arts Data Service. The image also featured on the facebook page for Europeana
Digitisation in Europe – The New Renaissance
The European Union’s Comite’ des Sages recently published The New Renaissance, a proud call-to-arms for the digitisation of Europe’s cultural heritage.
There are plenty of questions it raises and some of the recommendations will be very difficult to put into practice. But as a lofty statement of intent it’s a powerful document and very welcome, focussing hearts and minds on the task of digitisation. Some of its broad aims overlap with the recent Inspiring Research, Inspiring Scholarship document published by JISC.
At the heart of the recommendations is the desire for far greater commitment to digitisation from the member states of the EU. It urges the individual governments to fund the digitisation of out of copyright works. It will be interesting to see how this pans out in the UK.
Other interesting parts of the document include
- Creation of European legal instruments to ease the orphan works problem
- Securing Europeana’s position as the central point for European digitised culture
- Private-sector digitisation should be encouraged but not result in paywalls for end users. Out of copyright content should be freely available
- Europeana should evolve as a service for depositing and preserving digitised content. It should be funded by the EU.
- Metadata should always be freely available for re-use
There are plenty of issues which touch on JISC’s attitudes and plans for digitisation. I shall try and blog on them over the next few weeks.
Want Google to get interested in digitising your collection?
Google have a form you can fill in.
It’s as simple as that – definitely more straightforward than a JISC proposal (!)
Does the digital humanities need more digitisation?
There was a time, perhaps back in the early misty years of the twenty-first century, when the completion of big digitisation projects would be greeted with whoops and cheers from the nascent digital humanities community.
Enthusiastic mailing list emails would trumpet how much easier scholarly access would be and librarians breathed a sigh of relief and undergraduates would no longer turn up with their grubby paws to look at special collections. Early instances of the Digital Resources for the Humanities conference would showcase happy parents, showing off their digital babies to adoring well-wishers. Everyone cheered! Research had suddenly got many times easier.
These days, digitisation projects are maybe not ten a penny, but the arrival of another set of digitised documents is taken with a shrug of the shoulders. “Another boring digitisation project … but how does that really change things?”
And you can understand why. There have been so many digitisation projects over the past decade, that any new arrivals are smaller drops in an already significant well. Equally, the innocent joy of digitisation has evaporated – maintaining online resources requires continued technical and editorial input and a bit of financial help to keep them afloat.
Perhaps more crucially, simply creating new digital objects does not necessarily equate with new research horizons for the arts and humanities.
In fact, the fear of those who wish the humanities to explore new methodological approaches is that straightforward digitisation projects actually discourage such novel exploration.
By simply recreating documents in electronic form, digitisation reinforces existing (and therefore conservative?) forms of scholarship based around analysis and understanding of single texts and documents, rather than pushing the boat out to new forms of analysis.
Yet there are some powerful arguments against such a way of thinking.
Outside academia, the whole world of content has turned digital – music via iTunes, newspapers on mobile devices, films via the Web etc. Anything that’s not in digital form feels anachronistic. There is an irresistible force towards the digital; not being digital is a powerful statement of deliberate neglect. Those in charge of special collections, for example, cannot afford to fall into the trap.
Furthermore, we have hardly digitised anything. The diagram in the NY Times about the quantities still to be digitised in the US National Archives is taking on iconic status. The tiny percentages in play show how Google’s digitisation, with its focus on books to detriment of other materials, is just a drop in the ocean.
And besides the statistical reasons for continuing with digitisation, there are more nuanced, qualitative reasons. By ceasing such activities, we risk creating an ossified and very imbalanced canon of what has been digitised – new research interests remain marginalised in the absence of access to source material. Students, expecting to find everything on the web, steer back to working with the material that has already been digitised.
In a wider sense, the creation of digital content is inevitable. If you want to do anything new you need new digital material, even if it’s digitisation in a loose sense – creating a database or records, typing out some inscriptions or plotting locations on a map.
So we need to make sure that there is still room for digitisation to happen, for new digitisation projects to feed into new research angles and to open up new learning possibilities for students. But if we do keep digitising, we need to do so in an open, sophisticated way, making sure that the data that is created does not just allow for ‘traditional’ forms of scholarship.
So I would argue for more digitisation, but open digitisation in a way that allows for new methodologies. Create open content, re-useable content, sophisticated platforms. Expose raw data and allow it to be interpreted and re-interpreted. Allow content to be mashed-up and joined up and analysed with other content. Create content that can be used by those who want to use ‘traditional’ methodologies and also those who want to explore the new avenues that digitised content permits.
If we do this, then we ensure that more digitisation means better teaching and research.
Updated guidelines from US Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative
From Susan Manus, Library of Congress
The Federal Agencies Digitization Guidelines Initiative (FADGI) has now released an update and redesign of the website, available at: http://www.digitizationguidelines.gov/. In addition to improved navigation throughout, it is now easier to access the major document outlining best practices, the “Technical Guidelines for Digitizing Cultural Heritage materials” (http://www.digitizationguidelines.gov/guidelines/digitize-technical.html). There are currently 15 federal agencies actively involved in this initiative, the most recent to join was the National Park Service. Other interested agencies are welcome to contact us for information on participating in the initiative.
FADGI is divided into two working groups, “Still Image” and “Audio Visual”, with documentation, presentations, and publications relevant to each. In addition, there is a comprehensive glossary of over 200 digitization-related terms available on the site (http://www.digitizationguidelines.gov/glossary.php)
Since the site’s launching in 2007, there have been several sub-groups formed to focus on key areas such as metadata issues, archival color, recorded sound and moving image. The site will be updated on a regular basis to reflect new documents and activity.
Australia’s top batsman at the British Library Sound Archive
Blogpost taken from the British Library’s Sound Recordings Blog
Richard Ranft, Head of Sound and Vision at the British Library, writes:
Legendary cricketer Sir Donald “the Don” Bradman (1908-2001), who was once named the “greatest living Australian” by former Prime Minister John Howard, and acclaimed by Wisden as the 20th century’s greatest cricketer, here shows off another cricket record. But not on the pitch – on the keyboards.
A skilled piano player who grew up in a musical household, he was a boy soprano in his school choir, composed music and made several records (his grand-daughter Greta inherited The Don’s love and talent for music and is one of South Australia’s pre-eminent classical singers).
Here the Don plays solo “Old Fashioned Locket” and “Our Bungalow of Dreams” on a 78 rpm shellac disc, Colombia DB270, recorded in England in the Colombia Record studios during the 1930 cricket tour to England:
http://sounds.bl.uk/View.aspx?item=024M-1CS0028982XX-0200V0.xml
The A-side of the disc, labelled “How it’s done – a friendly chat”, features Bradman discussing cricket, including differences between Australian and English cricket:
http://sounds.bl.uk/View.aspx?item=024M-1CS0028982XX-0100V0.xml
Timetable for current JISC Content calls
For those waiting to receive news of their proposals to the JISC Calls for Enhancing Digital Content, Developing Community Content or Rapid Digitisation, the is the timetable we are aiming to follow, illness, weather and the JISC Review notwithstanding.
Friday 7th January – All marks received from peer reviewers
Wednesday 19th – Panel Meeting for JISC Call 11/10.
Strand A (Enhancing Digital Content) and Strand B (Developing Community Content)
Thursday 20th – Panel Meeting for JISC Call 16/10, Rapid Digitisation
w/b Monday 31st January – Finalise details of successful and unsuccessful projects after any comments from peer reviewers unable to attend panel meetings
w/b Monday 31st January – Email successful and unsuccessful projects
w/b Monday 7th – Send off grant letters
w/b Monday 7th – Announce winners.
March 1st – Projects start
Measure the Value of Culture and Content
The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) recently released a report they commissioned, entitled “Measuring the Value of culture”
At first, I was surprised by the complete absence of the digital within the report (there were no mentions of the words ‘Internet’, ‘digital’ or ‘online’) Surely the advent of museum websites, digitisation, smartphone tours, and born-digital art all call for different ways of measuring culture?
But in actual fact, the report was agnostic about the definition of culture. Its focus was more on the economic measurement of culture, with the specific concern of how the cultural sector can convince central government of its worth via sophisticated economic evaluation.
The report then focussed on the various economic methods that could be used as evaluation for culture, however it may be defined.
It led me to think a bit more about the factors that we might use for measuring digital content in higher education. In the Measuring the Value of Culture report, the focus was on economics, because economics was the language that would allow the cultural sector to engage central government in its arguments.
But for digital content (Open Educational Resources, open data, digitised resources etc), it might not be necessary to revert to an economic language. Rather it depends on who we need to convince of the content’s worth. And for this crucial decision makers what are the key measurements they will react to? Student satisfaction? Lecturer satisfaction? Increase in student numbers? Better student marks?
JISC has already published its Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources and there is current work taking place on OER Impact. Yet I wonder if these projects go far enough in not just defining methods of measurement, but considering who these measurements might actually be aimed at.
As the Measuring the Value of Culture report emphasised, there is a need for central government to provide firm guidelines on measuring cultural value. JISC needs to do the same, ensuring that its projects creating digital content have firm guidelines for their self-measurement, and providing them with tools to do so.