JISC Digitisation Programme

The JISC Digitisation Conference was held at the St David’s Hotel and Conference Centre in Cardiff on 20/21 July 2007. It gathered together some of the leading digitisation projects, funding-bodies, publishers, archives, libraries and many of the key thinkers in the area. There was an international delegate list, drawing in representatives from the UK, France, Germany, Italy, the US, Canada and elsewhere.

The full report, including details of all speakers’ presentations, is available to download as a PDF file (303kb).

The aim was to discuss the key issues affecting those engaged in digitisation and draw conclusions about how best to take these issues forward. Numerous topics were proposed, debated and argued over through the course of the two days; below are the five issues which most regularly surfaced during the conference.

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The £22m JISC digitisation programme is making available a wide range of vital scholarly resources to UK education and research. Programme manager Alastair Dunning talks to Philip Pothen about what the programme is delivering and why the recent international conference in Cardiff represented an important landmark both for the programme and for wider attempts to make available scholarly resources of national importance.

Listen to the podcast

Justin Champion, Professor of the History of Early Modern Ideas at Royal Holloway, was due to give the keynote speech on e-content and its impact on learning, teaching and research on the second day of the conference. Unfortunately, he couldn’t make it. However, he has passed on the narrative of the talk he would have given and here’s a flavour of what he has to say:

One of the themes of what I want to say today, is that there needs to be joined up thinking about ongoing plans for creating new product – librarians, educational development academics, technologists, school teachers, as well as university professors need to engage, argue and most importantly imagine effective processes of learning and research.
There is then an absolutely virtuous circle of connection between the invention of new teaching practice, transformations in both the conduct and dissemination of scholarship, and the provision of a cyber-infrastructure underpinning such activities. Like any virtuous circle however, the difficulty is, knowing where to start.

Read the presentation in full here: Digital scholarship is the inevitable future of the humanities and social science by Justin Champion

Peter B Kaufman is president and executive producer of Intelligent Television in New York. At the conference he gave two fascinating presentations: Business models and sustainability; and the opportunities offered by online video. If you missed them – or want to refresh your memory – we’ve got the pdfs of the narratives of his talks, plus the accompanying Powerpoint presentations. Click on for the links.

PDFs:

Video and education narrative

Business models narrative

Powerpoint presentations

Business models

Online video

These materials can be used under the Creative Commons 3.0 licensing guidelines.

The JISC digitisation conference was opened by Carwyn Jones, now Counsel General and Leader of the House in the Welsh Assembly Government (you can read the live blog of his well-received speech here). He also gave a short interview to JISC’s Philip Pothen before the speech, and it is now available to listen to as a podcast. At the time, Carwyn Jones was Minister for Education, Culture and the Welsh Language and in this podcast of the interview he gives his thoughts on the importance of ICT to Welsh education and explains how the Welsh Assembly Government is working to widen access to digital resources to support education and the promotion of Welsh culture and language.

Listen to the podcast here

Powerpoint presentations from both days of the conference can be found on the main conference archive page. If you are a speaker and your presentation is not listed, please send it over to us and we’ll include it.

Please do fill in the Feedback Form and, of course, leave comments and continue the debate here on the blog.

Simon Tanner sums up the last three days in just five words: collaboration, visibility, invisibility, mass and tomorrow.

Collaboration: the hardest thing we do – sitting down and committing institutions to work together and achieve common goal – not easy – underlying thread is that it matters and is taken seriously by everybody here and participates strongly

Visibility: how do we lobby better, say what is being done by this community matters – need to take away the message that the users are interested in the content, driven by content not by who is providing it – content is king in this sense – making it visible is very important

Invisibility: user does not want to have to worry about how they get to the content – just want it to be there – want tools to be invisible – real challenge is how to make the content and some of the brands visible and therefore values but at the same time make the process as invisible as possible

Mass: take the word on both usages – mass as in a lot of something but also in its physics sense – density. How dense is that mass? and look at the fact that there is a lot of density in this digitisation programme – a lot of content is unique, important and valuable even if not a million pages

Tomorrow: spent last two days talking about what will happen next – important that have that focus on tomorrow but do not allow the present to become the enemy of the future, not to become constrained by the now – want to take from today ‘what are you going to do tomorrow’? The blog, the networks you’ve created will still be there – look to the future and see tomorrow as a fresh field to take these projects into.

With Sarah Porter, David Dawson, Emma Beer, Brian Kelly, David Dawson and Julian Ball

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Digital capture and conversion of text – overcoming the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) challenges

Paul Ell (moderator), Director, Centre for Data Digitisation and Analysis, Queen’s University Belfast
Aly Conteh, Head of Digitisation, British Library
Julian Ball, Project Manager, University of Southampton
Martin Locock, National Library of Wales
Aly Conteh

The British Library perspective – have digitised 3m pages of newspapers from 17, 18th and 19th centuries and just about to digitise our fourth century – also digitising 25m pages of 19th century pages in conjunction with Microsoft – doing about 1m pages a month

Challenges we’ve seen:

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