JISC Digitisation Programme

New funding for eContent is available from JISC in the following areas:

Strand A: Digitisation for Open Educational Resources (OER)
Release of digitised educational content for use and re-use on an open access basis through digitisation of special collections and subsequent creation of Open Educational Resources (OERs) for embedding in teaching and learning.
Funding available: £1m; 8-12 projects between £75,000 and £125,000 each
Duration: November 2011-January 2013

Strand B: Mass Digitisation
Mass digitisation of special collections and other analogue material of educational use that meets the needs of, and are of benefit to, learning, teaching and research.
Funding available: £3.4m; 7-9 projects between £150,000 and £750,000 each
- Duration: November 2011 – July 2013

Strand C: Clustering Digital Content
Bringing together existing, but currently scattered, digital content in innovative ways.
Funding available: £1m; 6-8 projects between £100,000 and £150,000 each
- Duration: November 2011 – January 2013

An online briefing event will take place on Tuesday 21 June 2011 at 11am. The participant link for this is: http://bit.ly/iizinj. Bidders are strongly encouraged to attend this briefing, although a recording will be made available after the event (link for recording: http://bit.ly/mS0AXi). The online briefing event will take place using Elluminate Live! Bidders are strong advised to view the hardware and software pre-requisites for Elluminate Live! by visiting http://www.elluminate.com/support.

For more information please see the JISC web site

The JISC-funded Welsh Voices project has provided content for a new gallery of images on the BBC web site commemorating the 92nd anniversary of Armistice Day.

The Dead Man's penny was awarded in recognition of the death of a loved one on active service during World War One.

Welsh Voices is part of the JISC Developing community content programme which aims to establish partnerships between the Higher Education sector and community groups, organisations and the general public in order to curate or create new digital content for the benefit of all groups.

The first of this year’s releases of the John Johnson Collection: An Archive of Printed Ephemera has just been announced.

The publication is a series of fourteen specially commissioned essays that respond to a diverse selection of items from the John Johnson Collection.

These concise and illuminating studies – which have been contributed by Rob Banham, Troy Bickham, Robert Colls, Simon Eliot, D. J. Taylor, Michael Twyman and Mariana Warner – are available in the John Johnson Collection alongside digital facsimile images of the items to which they relate.

The complete list of essays is accessible via a link on the John Johnson Collection home page or by clicking the Responses link in the toolbar that appears at the top of every screen in the John Johnson Collection.

New Content

Facsimile images of more than 13,700 items have been added to the John Johnson Collection with this release, bringing the total number of scanned items to 62,421 (a total of 167,356 images), including more than 19,700 pieces of theatrical and non-theatrical ephemera from the Nineteenth-Century Entertainment category and more than 9,500 items from the Booktrade category.

Over 10,900 Popular Prints are now available in facsimile form, along with more than 20,700 items from Advertising and over 1,400 from Crimes, Murders and Executions.

Future Developments: Enhanced Records for Crime, Murders and Execution

Of the five major categories of material included in The John Johnson Collection, the Crimes, Murders and Executions section is one of the most popular and most often consulted, providing documentary evidence which supports research in various aspects of social history.

The Bodleian Library and ProQuest are enhancing this material, with the help of JISC e-Content funding, by mapping individual records to the appropriate entries in a number of external online resources that contain references, citations or other related material, thereby offering users the scope to explore more easily themes and narratives encountered in the John Johnson Collection.

The project will guide researchers to other information directly related to their line of enquiry, and allow them to build connections or follow trails between different resources.

The resources that the project will link to are:

• Old Bailey Proceddings Online
• Harvard law School Library’s digitised broadside collection: Dying Speeches and Bloody Murders
• Newgate calendar
• Bodleian Library’s digitised catalogue of broadside ballads.

 More information is available about the project on the JISC website for this project.

I recently blogged about the launch of the University of Exeter’s Digital Collections Online.

Some of the amazing images that were digitised and added to the repository demand to be highlighted in more depth.

With all the hype about Tim Burton’s new Alice in Wonderland film, it seems appropriate to highlight the amazing collection of images that the archive holds on film and cinema (and the optical and visual more generally).

The image of Alice included in this piece, is taken from a box of slides that come originate in a Magic Lantern Collection.

This pre-cinematic invention used a series of slides that were projected onto a wall.   Smallscale shows were put on by  travelling lanternists using a candle to project the images.

Occassionally visual tricks were employed to engage and capture the audiences attention – not dissimilar to our ongoing fascination and the appeal of 3D at the movies!

But, the link between the past and present is not the only value of digitising and making these collections available online.

The collection held by Exeter is fascinating, not only for what it can tell us about the history of cinema and film;  but also how the edges of each object and collection of objects touch upon, and overlap with other areas of study and research.

Many of the slide collections are incredibly rich resources for researchers and students looking not only at, for example,  cinematic history, but also the subject matter and content of the images and objects themselves.

Magic lantern slides cover subject areas including,  astrology and zoology offering a rare and primary source glimpse into Victorian culture and ideas.

The project has attempted to provide preliminary pathways through some of the content by creating ‘curated’ collections and e-learning packages centred around certain themes.

It seems this collection cannot help but cross new boundaries and inspire new ideas and avenues of thought.

Archiving for the Future: using archives to enhance learning and teaching in drama and theatre studies

Event Description:

This event is being organised in conjunction with the Institute for Performing Arts Development at the University of East London and the CEDAR (Clustering and Enhancing Digital Archives for Research) project: a unique approach to clustering and enhancing digital theatre archives through a collaboration between UEL, Royal Holloway, Sheffield and Nottingham universities as well as Kings College, London.

The day will consist of a series of presentations of good practice in using digital archives with undergraduate and postgraduate students.

It will include an opportunity for delegates to experiment and reflect on the use of archives for their own practice.

The target audience for the event is: drama/theatre studies lecturers, researchers, theatre historians, digital and web-practitioners, archivists, library and learning support service staff.

Topics covered will include:

• The use of the East London Theatre Archive for undergraduate theatre students;
• The connection between archives and web-based platforms for learning;
• Making archives ‘living’ through the user-interface.

The event aims to provide an opportunity for the sharing of teaching pedagogies and an open forum for the discussion of methodological and other concerns.

More details are available from the event Programme

The 14-15th October saw the first Programme Meeting for the 11 new projects that from the new e-Content Programme.

The meeting is an opportunity for projects to meet each other and share ideas and inspirations, as well as an opportunity for programme managers to meet all the projects in one space.

Meeting the Projects

The day began with a JISC Quiz and the projects delivering a 3 minute presentation outlining the work they’re doing.

These included the fascinating GrassPortal which demonstrated how being able to plot the spread of invasive grasses can help save rare topical forests from fires, through to Connected Histories  which used the example of William Payne of Bell Yard to show the importance of being able to bring together disperate historical resources for the benefit of researchers and teachers.

Embedding and Sustaining Projects

Hilary Grierson from Strathclyde University gave a very imformative presentation on how projects can align the work they are doing to institutional strategies.

JISC and Project Management

After lunch Poala Marchionni, JISC Programme Manager, gave a presentation on what JISC expects from projects and what projects can expect to recieve from JISC.  

Alastair Dunning, JISC Programme Manager, then gave a very innovative presentation on some of the lessons learnt from the phase two digitisation projects.  These lessons include: Cool URLs; design for websites, and usability testing.

Alastair’s presentation can be found here.

Comms and Marketing

Finally, Jane Charlton, JISC Communications Coordinator, gave a presentation on Communication and Marketing for the projects, and what support and guidance JISC can give projects.

To find out more about the 11 projects that make up the eContent Programme you can visit the eContent webpage.  

A recent workshop held on the 9th September 2009 at the Open University discussed the issues that surround mathematical content in digital form.

Bringing together leading mathematicians and practitioners involved in the digitisation of mathematical content, the workshop addressed areas such as: collaboration, standards, improving practice,  and reuse of software, in relation to mathematic content in electronic form.

The workshop had three aims:

• Content related technical problems in supporting eLearning in mathematics
• Standards related to digitisation of mathematics research literature, and:
• Formulas and equationsin otherwise non-mathematical content

The workshop has now produced a range of slides and video and a final report which are available from the Workshop website.