Unlocking e-content and enhancing education and research opportunities – an academic perspective.
Matthew Steggle, Lecturer, Sheffield Hallam University
Hope to bring the user perspectives from a bigger picture. Will offer five principles about what academics do and don’t like about digitisation projects. I’m primarily a teacher and researcher and only secondarily involved in digitisation.
Mass digitisation and its impact on cultural heritage, education and research communities
OR
How do we make a lot of stuff useful to a lot of people?
Chris Batt, Chief Executive, Museums, Libraries and Archives Council
A lot of stuff is easy, a lot of people is possible but useful is a bit more tricky… What struck me from yesterday’s Symposium is that it was very much a discussion from the inside and there is a need to step back and look at the outside, the outer landscape of where we are now. Risk that if we don’t do that we are looking at the engine without knowing what the car is doing.
JISC Strategy and mass digitisation: Malcolm Read, Executive Secretary, JISC
Would like to present the wider context. Digitisation is just one of many things we find and do not fund it in isolation. We have two digitisation programmes running. We spent £10 million on the first round. To get the money you have to make a case about 18 months before it comes in. At that time transatlantic network connectivity was enormously expensive and great cause of concern. I argued that we need the money for that. By the time the money arrived, the cost of that was virtually nothing. At the end of the request I had said that if there was any spare money then digitisation was a good thing to do. There turned out to be £10m of spare money!
Carwyn Jones, Minister for Education, Culture and the Welsh Language
On behalf of the Welsh assembly it is a great pleasure to welcome you all now. I know that it’s an important conference – it’s important to stay in the forefront of learning, sharing experiences and learning from elsewhere.
I was a student at Aber, left in 1988, and was blessed that on my doorstep was the National Library of Wales. But you had to be at least a third year student to enter it, you were led into a back room, would make a request to see certain documents and in time they would be provided… to access medieval documents was almost impossible. And with good reason – they are fragile and wouldn’t be given to those who would not treat them with respect.
But now many of those documents are now online and we are witnessing a democratisation of research. Many more documents will be available in the future than in the past. These are exciting times we live in.
Around 130 leading figures from education, research, cultural heritage, public broadcasting and industry in the UK and beyond are gathering in Cardiff for two days for a conference on digitisation which will showcase national and international digitisation initiatives – including JISC’s £22m digitisation programme – and explore the potential for cross-sectoral cooperation in this area.
The two-day conference opens this morning with a speech from Carwyn Jones, Minister for Education, Culture and the Welsh Language in the Welsh Assembly Government. With Wales having established an international reputation for the digitisation of online materials for educational and cultural use, the location of the conference and the presence of the minister will, say organisers, support the conference’s stated aim to showcase the best in international digitisation initiatives.
Read the full press release…
A VIP guest list of leading figures from education, research, cultural heritage and industry in the UK and beyond are meeting today in Cardiff for the first part of the JISC Digitisation Conference 2007: The e-Content Policy and Strategy Symposium. Read the programme and follow the discussions on the Strategic Content Alliance blog.
Are you on Facebook? We’ve created a group for the JISC Digitisation programme and conference. Look under groups for ‘JISC Digitisation Programme’, then click ‘request to join group’ on the right hand side under the digitisation arrow. If you’re not already on Facebook and would like to join, go to www.facebook.com and follow the registration instructions.
The first version of the JISC Digitisation Strategy is available to read here: Digitisation Strategy and we are hoping that it will be further refined and developed as a result of input from the conference and delegate comments. We have also highlighted some discussion points as a focus for the discussion and these should be read before commenting.
JISC Digitisation Strategy: points for debate
Q1) Please comment on the JISC approach to developing a digitisation
strategy?
Q2) Please comment on any implications of the JISC digitisation
strategy on education and research in the UK and/or abroad?
Q3) Do you agree with the JISC’s methodology and prioritisation of
collections for digitisation?
Q4) Please comment on the JISC’s main drivers in aspiring to create
digital collections?
Q5) Do you agree that the JISC should continue to maintain, increase
or decrease it digitisation activities?
Q6) What other drivers or factors do you consider the JISC take into
account as it continues to develop it’s digitisation strategy that meets
the needs of education and research in the UK and/or abroad?
Q7) What additional comments do you have regarding the digitisation
strategy?
Some suggestions for reading in advance of the Symposium and Conference can be found here: suggested reading
Biographies of the speakers have now been added to the conference information here: speaker biographies, and linked from the Conference programme and Parallel session sign up. If you are a speaker and do not have a biography listed, please email it over or add it yourself (Surnames A-M, Surnames N-Z).
These resources are housed on the Conference Wiki and to edit pages you will need the password provided in your delegate Joining Instructions. The password should be all lowercase.If you have lost or forgotten it, or require help with the wiki, please email michellepauli@gmail.com. The wiki is best edited in Firefox or Explorer.