Digital Impacts: How to Measure and Understand the Usage and Impact of Digital Content
Registration is now open for Digital Impacts: How to Measure and Understand the Usage and Impact of Digital Content, 20 May 2011, Oxford.
The question of how we can measure and understand the usage and impact of digital content within the education sector is becoming increasingly important. Substantial investment goes into the creation of digital resources for research, teaching and learning and, in the current economic climate, both content creators, publishers as well as funding bodies are being asked to provide evidence of the value of the resources they’ve invested in.
But how do we go about defining value and impact? Which metrics should we adopt to understand usage? When is a digital resource a well used resource?
This one-day event will explore these and other key issues and showcase the work of the JISC-funded Impact and Embedding of Digitised Resources programme. It will also launch the updated Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources (TIDSR), a best practice guide of different methods for evaluating usage and impact of digital resources produced by the Oxford Internet Institute.
The workshop is aimed at:
- content creators and publishers
- Information professionals and content managers in charge of maintaining and developing digital collections
- librarians, archivists and institutional staff involved in digitisation efforts
- researchers and research directors interested in learning about alternative methods of measuring impact
- representatives of funding and evaluation bodies
- early career researchers concerned about ways of demonstrating the impact of their online activities
- those interested in understanding the impact of distributing materials online
New JISC Funding for Digital Content and Educational Resources
HEFCE recently confirmed its capital funding for 2011-12, including the capital budget for JISC. This means that JISC are planning the next round of calls within it various teams.
Within the eContent Programme, there will be further funds for digitisation and content. Current thinking is tending toward the bullet points below
- Call for large digitisation projects, plus projects digitising material for Open Educational Resources Digitisation, plus embedding and innovation
- Projects up to 750k, of up to 18 months
- Funding to be made availble from late summer 2011
- Call published before Easter, submissions mid-June
- Town meetings will be arranged, physical or maybe virtual
- Which institutions will be eligible to lead bids, and the source of collections to be digitised are still to be decided
Please note that none of these details is confirmed. However, funding will be available and potential applications are advised to start planning outline projects.
Further information will be made available via this blog and also via the JISCmail list JISC-Digital-Content.
Details about all JISC calls are made via the JISC website and the mailing list JISC-Announce
Saucy seaside postcards online
The recently JISC-funded Cartoon Archive Digitisation project (CARD) has caught the attention of the press recently.
One of the collections that the University of Kent’s British Cartoons Archive will be digitising includes the Director of Public Prosecutions’ archive, which records the prosecution for obscenity of 1,300 cartoon seaside postcards between 1951 and 1961. The other comprises 14,500 political cartoons from British national newspapers and magazines between 2003 and 2011.
Dr Nick Hiley, who heads the Archive, was on BBC Radio Kent this morning talking about the historical importance of saucy seaside postcards (he speaks between 0:16.05-0:25.02).
Final IMPACT Conference on OCR, October 2011, The Hague
The final conference of the IMPACT project will take place on 24-25 October 2011 at the British Library in London, with the title:
“Digitisation & OCR: Better, faster, cheaper. Solutions of the IMPACT Centre of Competence and future challenges”
The IMPACT Project (Improving Access to Text) started on 1st January 2008 with the aim to significantly improve the accessibility of historical printed text. It planned to do this by pushing innovation in optical character recognition (OCR) and language technology for historical document processing and retrieval. IMPACT also aimed to remove the barriers that stand in the way of the mass digitisation of the European cultural heritage by sharing expertise and building capacity in digitisation across Europe.
In 2011 the IMPACT Centre of Competence will be launched, with the aim to make digitisation of historical printed text in Europe better, faster, cheaper, and provide tools, services and facilities for further advancement of the state of the art in this field.
Please join us for this two day conference to find out more about the project outputs and how you can use them in your own digitisation initiatives. Further details regarding this conference programme hosted by the British Library will become available later in the year. Registration is now possible at the following rates:
* Early bird rate of £100 GBP (max. 100 tickets), available until 1 July 2011
* Normal rate of £120 GBP, available from 2 July – 21 OctoberFor bookings, please visit: http://purchase.tickets.com/buy/TicketPurchase?agency=BRITISHLIB&organ_val=25385 and click October.
It is also still possible to give us input on the topics and speakers you would like to see at this conference through the IMPACT LinkedIn discussion: Final conference 2011 at http://tinyurl.com/5sjk789.
This information, along with a brand new KB video on IMPACT, is also available from the IMPACT website: http://www.impact-project.eu/home/
Digitisation uncovers Suffolk witches
A 350-year-old notebook describing the execution of innocent women for ‘consorting with the Devil’ has been published online by The University of Manchester’s John Rylands library as part of the JISC funded Centre for Heritage Imaging and Collection Care (CHICC) project.
The notebook was written by Puritan writer Nehemiah Wallington who describes how a supposed coven of witches lived in the Suffolk village of Manningtree.
Unfortunately for them, Manningtree was also home to the Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins, notorious for his brutality against women.
In 1645 the Witchfinder General examined one of the suspected witches Elizabeth Clarke for ‘devil’s marks’ like warts or moles.
Under torture, Elizabeth then named other women as witches including her own daughter Rebecca, who later confessed to being a witch.
19 women were eventually hanged, though Rebecca was saved thanks to her confession.
The witchcraft trial is just one of the fascinating episodes contained in Wallington’s notebook, one of only seven remaining out of the 50 he wrote, which documents his attitudes to life, religion and the civil war.
Through the eContent programme, JISC has supported the John Rylands Library in setting up the CHICC project to investigate how the right business models can help them maintain and further develop their digital assets.
One more award under the JISC Rapid Digitisation Call 16/10
An additional project joins the list of the winning proposals under the JISC Rapid Digitisation call 16/10.
Early Music Online, Royal Holloway, Stephen Rose, £75,521
This is a pilot project that will digitise 300 volumes of the world’s earliest printed music from holdings at the British Library, and make them publicly accessible via the internationally-recognised RISM UK music database hosted by Royal Holloway, University of London.
These volumes contain approximately 10,000 musical compositions, which will be individually indexed. The digitised content and metadata will be linked to the British Library Integrated Catalogue and COPAC, in order to maximise the exposure and discoverability of these sources of unique international importance.
Some tips on writing a successful bid
Having recently announced the winning projects for the latest eContent (Strand A and Strand B) and Rapid Digitisation calls, as Programme Managers we’ve also had to provide feedback to the unsuccessful bids we received, many of which were nonetheless of a high quality.
While going through the process, some common “feedback” patterns emerged, which might be useful to bear in mind when writing a bid for the next round of funding – whenever that might be.
As when buying a car we would expect it to have some basic components without much questioning (four wheels, a steering wheel, lights, seats and so on), it goes without saying that in a bid one would expect to see addressed all the relevant sections mentioned in the call (aims and objectives, methodology, project management, risks, dissemination, evaluation, sustainability and so on).
That said, the following are a number of issues that markers tended to highlight as problematic in many unsuccessful applications:
- need for more clarity and detail on what a project is proposing to do, who is doing what, when and how. Often these things are clear in the mind of the writer but not so for an “outsider” to the project, so it’s always a good idea to have an application read by somebody else as well before submitting it;
- importance of the proposed work: again, while this may be self-explanatory to those writing a proposal mainly because of their subject area expertise, it is fundamental that the value of a project is well articulated and a strong case made for why this particular project should be funded – as opposed to any other competitor project. For example, why is a particular collection important to digitise? Who is it for? How will it benefit teaching, learning and research? What are we missing out at the moment from this collection not being easily available? And what could users do, that they can’t do now, with the collection once it’s online and accessible to them?
- any supporting evidence of current use or need for the proposed work will add weight to the application, and strengthen its case for funding – rather than more generic statements such as “this resource will improve teaching and learning…”;
- impact: as a funding body, it is important for us to see that investing in a project doesn’t only benefit the institution receiving the grant – although obviously they are the main beneficiaries – but that the work is of relevance, or potential relevance, to the wider community and that through the right dissemination it can cascade through the sector, be it through case studies, exemplars, toolkits, the resource itself, technologies…Also, aligning a project strategically both within the host institution and through external links to other relevant organisations, networks and initiatives helps show that a project is well placed within its area of work;
- stay within scope of the call: this is perhaps not one of the most common failings, but it does happen that sometimes a project is perfectly valid but it’s just not in line with the requirements and the scope of that particular call, and a lot of effort in writing the bid has been wasted.
Having said this, sometimes bids which are of a very high caliber might still not get funded and this might be due to a variety of factors, such as limited funds, the overall funding portfolio, the right mixture of projects and institutions …
When a call for funding is issued, JISC Programme Managers usually have time to discuss any project ideas, so please don’t hesitate to get in touch before embarking on writing a full proposal.