Lifestyle and fashion from the World of Kays
Whether it’s about “solid” working outfits or “dainty” ladies’ clothes, the changes in fashion and lifestyle over the past century have been reflected in the images from the Worcester-based Kays & Co mail order catalogue, which are being digitised by the JISC-funded World of Kays project.
Every day this week Project Manager Jennifer Waugh talks to Tony Fisher on BBC Radio Hereford and Worcester about the project and how we can see fashion evolving through the different decades of the 1900s.
You can listen live via the BBC website or listen again in iPlayer after the show. Monday’s feature (25 July) plays at 2h26mins into the show.
A gallery of images from Kays & Co is on the BBC web site .
The project is funded as part of the JISC eContent programme 2011 on Developing Community Collections.
An uphill struggle
These Minyong Adi men are leading a mithun (bos frontalis) to a sacrifice, conducted to cure an illness. Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf noted that this animal resisted fiercely and finally fell down exhausted before it was successfully brought to the place for its sacrifice.
From the School of Oriental and African Studies’ Fürer-Haimendorf collection
(Any blog readers currently constructing a bid for the JISC Content calls are reminded that programme managers Alastair Dunning and Paola Marchionni are available to answer queries.)
Crowdsourcing and Variant Digital Editions – some troubles ahead
Projects like UCL’s Transcribe Bentham and New York Public Library’s What’s on the Menu? have done groundbreaking work in engaging the public to transcribe their manuscript collections.
Crowdsourcing allows rapid, and it seems high-quality, creation of transcribed data from original documents. Transcribe Bentham has so far created 1,330 transcribed versions, and only a handful have been rejected for a lack of quality. Previously, such scholarly transcription would have taken considerable time and effort, spanning many years.
With notable successes like these, crowdsourcing is now becoming more familiar as an academic tool. But for certain datasets, particularly ones of considerable academic importance, this could bring some problems with crowdsourcing having the ability to create multiple editions.
For example, the much-lauded Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) are now beginning to appear on many different digital platforms.
ProQuest currently hold a licence that allows users to search over the entire EEBO corpus, while Gale-Cengage own the rights to ECCO.
Meanwhile, JISC Collections are planning to release a platform entitled JISC Historic Books, which makes licenced versions of EEBO and ECCO available to UK Higher Education users.
And finally, the Universities of Michigan and Oxford are heading the Text Creation Partnership (TCP), which is methodically working its way through releasing full-text versions of EEBO, ECCO and other resources. These versions are available online, and are also being harvested out to sites like 18th Century Connect.
So this gives us four entry points into ECCO – and it’s not inconceivable that there could be more in the future.
What’s more, there have been some initial discussions about introducing crowdsourcing techniques to some of these licensed versions; allowing permitted users to transcribe and interpret the original historical documents. But of course this crowdsourcing would happen on different platforms with different communities, who may interpret and transcribe the documents in different way. This could lead to the tricky problem of different digital versions of the corpus. Rather than there being one EEBO, several EEBOs exist.
But this is part of a larger problem. If there are multiple versions of the original content, then which one is the one you use? In fact it’s not only about the content. Which platform works quickest? Which gives the most ‘accurate’ search results? Which one provides enhanced tools for analysis? Which gives the best results for your particular area of research? Where do you send your students? Which one do you cite?
Most importantly, which one do you trust? And why?
In ‘traditional scholarship’, different editions of original documents would be published at, for example, 50 year intervals, and it would be part of the scholarly workflow to review and criticise such editions. The complexity and proliferation of digital resources radically changes this – not only are there more digital resources but the knowledge and skills needed to critically analyse a resource are considerably widened out.
At the moment, there are no immediate solutions for these challenges. But it’s clear that the potential of the Internet continues to fracture existing practices of scholarship – despite the care, attention, and research intelligence that has gone into creating EEBO, ECCO and their various platforms, the potential for academics, funders, publishers to push forward and develop new digital ideas mean that the notion of the Internet as a place where traditional scholarly practices can simply be repeated continues to disintegrate.
(Thanks to Ben Showers for reading over this)
New digital collections added to the JISC Content web site
A number of new digital collections for researchers, teachers and learners have been added to the JISC Content web site, including descriptions of Islamic manuscripts, virtual Darwin’s library and crowdsourced content on WW1 in Wales, flooding and early 21st Century life in Britain.
The JISC Content website provides an introduction and links to over 80 digital collections to help academics, students, researchers and librarians understand the wealth of resources available to them.
The collections span all subject areas across centuries and different formats, ranging from images, text, sound recordings, moving images, journals, newspapers, manuscripts, data and maps.
Librarians, e-resources managers and information professionals can promote this rich content to students, researchers and teachers by incorporating the interactive JISC Content widget or promotional banners into their web pages, VLEs or portals.
Some examples of how the University of East London Library and Learning Services have used the widget and banners are:
- Library and Learning Services page
- Library and Learning Services Netvibes page
- Research Support Portal
- Library and Learning Services database page
- Library News page
All collections in the JISC Content web site have been either funded through the JISC eContent and Digitisation programme or licenced by JISC Collections.
Birth of modern China image archive launches today
Visualising China, the JISC-funded digital archive of images on the history of China 1850-1950 launches today.
Boys in military uniform
There are a number of interesting features on this web site which was put together by the University of Bristol:
- separate collections (Historical Photographs of China from the University of Bristol; the Sir Robert Hart Collection from Queen’s University, Belfast; and Joseph Needham’s Photographs of Wartime China from the Needham Research Institute, Cambridge) are clustered together offering users a seamless search
- existing web based content is also integrated in the search results from sources such as the Google Books library of China-related publications
- visualisation of data in different ways such as through a timeline, geographical map and concept map that allows to explore the images according to themes
- users can contribute information to the images thus enriching the content of the archive
- researchers can organise images on to their own workbenches, download low-resolution images, and explore the collections by word searches, date ranges, photographer, people depicted, maps and classification terms
- last but not least, the web site solicits feedback through a cute feedback form which doesn’t consist of the typical online questionnaire but invites people to suggest, and rate, ideas, pose questions, report problems and give praise.
My praise is definitely: well done to the Visualising China team!
JISC-funded resources – how sustainable are they?
It’s been a couple of years since the end of the JISC’s Enriching Digital Resources programme.
The programme funded 25 projects, 24 of which were either digitising new content or enriching and clustering existing digtial resources.
Given the concern JISC has for sustaining digital resources, we thought it we be good to run a quick survey to see how the resources were bearing up after a couple of years. Was the content still on the Internet, and could it still be used?
Details on the methodology (admittedly quite rough and ready) are included further below, but here are the results, classified according to (an equally rough and ready) JISC Sustainability Index. The index ranks how usable a resource is for educational use – it does not judge the quality of the content, but rather the functionality and interface of the website that houses the content.
The results are largely pleasing.
- 88% of the resources are considered in state good enough for use for teaching and research
- 50% of the resources are considered either in a good or excellent state
- 0% of the resources has disappeared from the Internet
- 12% of the resources have one or two significant problems that would probably put off use in teaching or research
It’s good to see that none of the resource have disappeared from the Internt. Equally encouraging is the fact that 88% of the resources are at least good enough for educational use, if not better.
Nevertheless, that there are 12% of resources failing the test is a little disappointing. We’re not highlighting which projects failed the test, but sometimes the errors were very straightfoward and could be solved quite quickly, e.g. the link to the search page not working.
This demonstrates that just a basic level of engagement by the creators with their resource once project funding has ceased may well be enough to keep the resource usable. Equally, a few minor tweaks would be enough to raise a site from being usable to being good.
The overall results are charted here, with each column representing the number of resources classified under each heading of the Sustainability Index
Methodology
3 programme managers (with varying degrees of engagment with the original JISC programme) from JISC went through each of the 24 resources rating them according to the JISC Sustainability Index. The results from each manager were then averaged out and the result assigned to each of the resource.
The index is below.
0 – Content with this rating means that it was not possible to locate on the Internet
1 – Content was only located with difficulty; major flaws with accessing data and running services
2 – Content was located but serious technical flaws militate against its use. Or, content may be out of date. Users very unlikely to persevere.
3 – Content located and usable. There may be minor flaws in the technical side of things. There may also be poor design or a lack of documentation that may hamper its long-term use.
4 – Content located and usable. Generally reasonable design and documentation. May not have been updated since project launch
5- Content located and usable. Good design and documentation. Content or platform appears to have been updated since launch.
Report on Parliamentary Metadata
The varied history of the constituent parts of the United Kingdom means it has a rich array of parliamentary sources, relating to not just the UK, but Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Various publishers, researchers and academic units have created resources such as the ProQuest Parliamentary Papers and the Stormont Papers of Northern Ireland
Richard Gartner, of King’s College London, recently organised a workshop looking at issues in defining parliamentary metadata, comparing practice, with a view to creating common standards to allow for interchange of between different parliamentary resources.
The workshop report looks at the potential creation of a Parliamentary Metadata Language, based on XML, and the related work on controlled vocabularies that would need to be done.
Download the report on Metadata for Online Parliamentary Records (pdf format)