New British Library newspaper archive
As part of its initial work in digitising its huge collection of historic newspapers, the British Library received two tranches of funding from JISC to digitise 3m pages from its Colindale repository.
As part of a three-way project involving the BL, JISC and the publishers Gale-Cengage, these newspapers have been made available in two different ways. One interface is the newspapers.bl.uk interface, open to the general public, who can pay for access to the newspapers. The other interface allows for direct access via your university, public library or other institution
Since the JISC-funded projects ended, all universities and colleges in the UK have been able to sign up for free access and search the newspapers via this second interface.
More recently, the British Library has signed a contract with the firm brightsolid that commits the latter to digitising around 40m pages of the BL’s newspaper collection, and distributing them via different channels
Today marks the launch, by the British Library and brightsolid, of The British Newspaper Archive. At the moment, this includes some of the JISC funded content plus other newspapers digitised by brightsolid.
With time it will grow to include all the JISC content but also millions of pages digitised by brightsolid and also acquired from other newspapers that have microfilms of their contents
Access to the new site is currently via subscription (e.g., £79.95 per year) or micropayment
JISC will be in negotiation with the British Library about gaining access to the new content.
For all UK universities and colleges free access to the 3m pages funded under the JISC project remains via the Gale Cengage interface.
Clustering content Europe wide
It’s great to see the Europeana Collections 1914-18 project get under way, bringing together sizeable digital collections from a range of European librares, and focussing them on a particular theme – in this case World War One
The concept of clustering of digital content on a particular topic has been on the radar for a while. And when content can be clustered from across an entire contient the ‘utopia’ of critical mass draws ever nearer.
But what will be interesting about this Europeana project is to see how the content will be made available. Simple search and browse facilities will be useful, but will only partially cater for scholarly needs. To ensure that what is provided is more than something that could be done via Google search, other facilities need to be included. These could include
- Textual and visual pattern searching; comparing similar texts and images
- Extractions of entities such as names, places, currencies
- Visualisation of metadata and extracted entities along spatio-temporal lines
- Developement of APIs to allow others to build interfaces on top of the digitised material
- Download for other text and data mining purposes
- Interaction with other social media tools such Zotero, delicious to allow for bookmarking and citiations
The licencing issue will be also interesting. The more open the content is, the more likely it is to be used, and the easier it will be to mee the advanced scholarly needs. But will it be possible to harmonise a licencing framework across several libraries?
The business model will also require thought. The use of Europeans provides a sustainable technical infrastrutcure, and this is great place to start from. But it is just as vital to keep adding new content and provide editorial sustainability, so that users return to the site.
How will new content be added to this Europeana portal when new matieral is digitised around Europe? Or indeed existing content such as the First World War Poetry Archive or The Serving Solider? And how will the tools and appearance be refreshed?
Using archives on Vietnam war
The NAM project at the University of the Arts, London is bringing together the photographic archives of Phillip Jones Griffiths, aspect of the film archive of Stanley Kubrick, and the journalistic archive of Phillip Knightley in an interactive multimedia resource that looks at the resonances of the conflict in Vietnam today. It then gets students working with the archives, developing their own commentaries based on the primary sources.
This video piece was created by Alex Milan Tracy as part of his research into Agent Orange for his MA in Photojournalism & Documentary photography.
The project will be completed early next year, with more content from the archives and students made available under a number of licences.
Boutiques, Shopping Malls and Specialist Shops
Boutiques, Shopping Malls and Specialist Shops
(or put your content where the users are, not where you are)
This presentation looks at why content owners such as universities, museums, archives etc need to deposit their digitised matieral not just on their own bespoke websites, but also the popular websites such as Google, Flickr, Wikipedia and others.
What would a UK Digital Collection look like? Or why we don’t really need one.
What would a UK Digital Collection look like? A glittering digital library or museum, with informative stunning, collections that represent the UK? A series of artworks, scientific discoveries, images, poems, documents, performances and programmesthat have played an essential role in shaping and informing UK society.
But that word ‘represents’ is a really thorny one. Who decides what the key items are? How do you reflect Britain’s and Northern Ireland’s myriad interests and communities? Do you focus on the long history or concentrate on the twentieth century? How is something selected that appeals to countless cultural and political groups but still retains a sense of Britishness (whatever Britishness is)? Like all histories, there is no neutral point of view.
Moreover, should such a Collection represent the width and holdings of UK cultural and educational institutions, or should it be drawn from the large national libraries and archives? And how is a balance achieved between the UK’s four nations? And should material be drawn from institutions outside the UK?
(Try thinking about this for yourself – I got stuck thinking about the Bayuex Tapestry)
Perhaps an even more question concerns the audience – Who would the Collection be for? For secondary schools? For undergraduates? For researchers? For the general public(s)? For an international audience?
Plenty of different international and national bodies are tackling these questions – the World Digital Library, Europeana, http://www.france.fr/, Digital New Zealand, the Digital Public Library of America, Trove. In the UK we have the admirable Culture Grid and the BBC, along with JISC and others, have been considering an ambitious Digital Public Space.
Looking through all these projects, it seems clear they most are moving away from worrying about this issue. Trying to mimic, however unconsciously, a pre-digital notion of an archive with a defined set of collections seems to create unnecessary boundaries in the Internet age.
What is much more appealing is a framework within which different indiviudal, communities, organisations can work, contribute and engage. A more open kind of place where there are fewer difficult top-down decisions about what content should be in there (those old pre-digital worries) and more thought given to how that content can be shared, discovered, used and curated (the digital worries of today and tomorrow).
Such a place has its foundations in an infrastructure that is flexible and allows people to add content, and then builds different ways of accessing for different audiences on top – to present a series of UK digital collections rather than just a single entity. Thinking about a UK Digital Collection doesn’t quite work on the World Wide Web.
Having said all that, let’s not ditch the concept of a UK Digital Collection without any further thought. The notion appeals to politicians and the media, and they tend to be very useful channels for getting funding and generating interest. But if we do have that conversation we need to make sure that it’s not just a highlights package of UK society and history, but that our valuable content is situated within an infrastructure that allows us to build many sustainable UK digital collections, rather a restrictive pre-digital one-off Collection.
Strategic or Open Digitisation?
The recent projects that JISC has funded as part of its Content Programme contain a fascinating range of materials – archives relating to the 18th-century Board of Longitude, the UK’s collection of fossils and reports documenting the health of modern London.
But the fascination of such an eclectic range of sources could also be construed as a weakness – the programme shows little deliberate join-up between the material being digitised.
This is very much a result of JISC’s approach; an open call, with each project being judged on its educational and technical merit, as part of a balanced portfolio of subjects and approaches.
An alternative strategy would be for JISC to, in consultation with the community, select a small number of strategic themes and request proposals only related to those themes, e.g. climate change, immigration to Britain or the history of European integration.
If four or five projects were funded in each of these themes, the opportunity to develop a critical mass of material is much greater. Many successful digitised resources (e.g. Early English Books Online – now available via the JISC Historic Books platform, or the Old Bailey Online) have succeeded by drawing material from diverse physical archives, but ensuring a focus on a particular community of practice.
But such an approach creates a number of challenges.
Above all, there exists the thorny question of what to focus on. A few years ago, JISC commissioned the Discmap survey in an attempt to marry researcher needs with outstanding non-digitised special collections in the UK. The report makes interesting reading (pdf), but only serves to show the breadth of both undigitised collections and researcher needs.
Alighting on particular fields, therefore, creates some specific risks. For instance by working with particular topics, one alienates whole reams of both curators, and researchers and teachers, whose fields have been excluded. For JISC, this has a remit to work with the whole HE community, this is an important factor.
Innovation is also important to JISC – indeed, its part of its very raison d’etre – and JISC wants to fund projects that integrate innovative practices into their digitisation. Experience has shown that innovation germinates in unexpected places. Sometimes bigger, well-established institutions – the type of place that would be more likely to play a role in ‘strategic’ digitisation – cannot innovate in the way the younger, more nimble organisations can .
Finally, developing strategic digitisation also entails partnerships. Working with others is great and helps create better digital resources, but they need time to grow and flourish. But when forced, they are more largely to cause friction, to the detriment of any joint output. In a landscape where there are plenty of large-scale organisations who need to achieve their own strategic goals, forging such broader partnerships can difficult.
Despite all that, the notion of a a critical mass being developed via a strategic approach remains appealing, especially if associated with a larger notion of a UK Digital Collection.
And JISC’s recent call in relation to World War One, and its completed programme of work in Islamic Studies, start to address this – seeking proposals that will pull together digitised content on a particular theme.
As funding tightens this is a discussion that will continue – do we want the creation of digital content to be focused on a select area and done in great depth or do we want a broad approach that creates a wider constituency of curators and users, but perhaps without the same intensity?