JISC Digitisation Programme

JISC is holding an online town meeting for those interested in the applying for funding in the latest eContent call

The town meeting is on Tuesday 21st June and starts at 11am.

The town meeting is being run via some software called Elluminate / Blackboard Connect. This is free and particpaints should follow this link to initiate their session – http://bit.ly/iizinj

Delegates are advised to test software and hardware before the start of the session and advice is provided by Elluminate

The agenda for the day is the following

• Protocol for using Elluminate
• Introduction and Background to the Call
• Outline of the Three Strands
• Key Issues to Consider
• Bid Writing Tips
• Question and Answer sessions will be interspersed throughout the agenda

Also, don’t forget to contact Alastair Dunning or Paola Marchionni to book a surgery session, even if only for a general chat about your application. We’re likely to be able to help strengthen your bid. We have an extra day lined up to add to the original three.

• Wednesday 22nd June (Alastair Dunning and Paola Marchionni)
• Friday 24th June (Alastair Dunning and Paola Marchionni)
• Wednesday 29th June (Paola Marchionni)
• Tuesday 5th July (Alastair Dunning)

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

As noted in a previous blog post, JISC is currently writing the request for proposals for applications related to the next round of content funding. Subject to approval by the relevant JISC subcommittee, there will be three strands.

Over the next few days, we’ll jot down some of the issues related to each of the three strands that will go to making up the overall call.

First off, Strand B) Large-Scale Digitisation

Issues that applicants will need to address will include the following:

Aggregation and Partnership

How are applicants working with others to help create an aggregated mass of content? How are other partners helping reach audiences or deliver online experiences that univerisites working by themselves could not achieve

Usage and Institutional Support

How will the resource being created develop a user base that will help impact on research and teaching at a national level? Will the institution leading the project show support for the resource in the long term, embedding it in teaching and research practice.

Access, IPR and Business Models

What is the business model that will support the resource in the long term? Are there complex IPR issues that must be addressed early on?

Metadata

Will the metadata from the project be made openly available? Will metadata be easily harvestable, findable and re-usable by other sources? Will innovative methodologies like geo-tagging, natural language processing and APIs be used? Or other forms of innovative metadata creation?

Impact and Evaluation

Will the project have means of evaluating usage and impact embedded from the start of the project? Will they be able to react and respond to the results of such analysis once the initial project has ended?

Note: Strand B is likely to be open to any UK cultural or educational organisation who has content of note to higher and further education

We’re still not in a position to give precise details on the forthcoming call for JISC digital content (and the hoped for early publication of details last month proved a little optimistic). However, we’ve been given permission to publicise the following.

Subject to confirmation from the appropriate JISC subcommittee, there will be three strands within the JISC Digital Content call.

A) Digitising for Open Educational Resources – digitising primary and other scholarly material for embedding in open access Open Educational Resources. Note there will also be a separate JISC OER Phase 3 programme.

B) Large-Scale Digitisation – Creating or extending high-impact, sustainable digital resources for research and teaching, according to a variety of business models.

C) Clustering Digital Content – Bringing together existing digital content from a variety of sources to create or extend high-impact resources for research and teaching.

Strand B is likely to be open to any UK cultural or educational organisation who has content of note to higher and further education

We are currently writing the Requests for Proposals.

The call is likely to be issued in early June. It may well be joined up with calls from other areas JISC covers. Closing date is likely to be early August.

For those waiting to receive news of their proposals to the JISC Calls for Enhancing Digital Content, Developing Community Content or Rapid Digitisation, the is the timetable we are aiming to follow, illness, weather and the JISC Review notwithstanding.

Friday 7th January – All marks received from peer reviewers

Wednesday 19th – Panel Meeting for JISC Call 11/10.
Strand A (Enhancing Digital Content) and Strand B (Developing Community Content)
Thursday 20th – Panel Meeting for JISC Call 16/10, Rapid Digitisation

w/b Monday 31st January – Finalise details of successful and unsuccessful projects after any comments from peer reviewers unable to attend panel meetings

w/b Monday 31st January – Email successful and unsuccessful projects

w/b Monday 7th – Send off grant letters

w/b Monday 7th – Announce winners.

March 1st – Projects start

JISC has now received all the submissions for its content calls. The number of bids was significantly higher than expected.

• 11/10 Strand A – Enriching Digital Content – 35 bids (Up to 5 projects likely to be funded)
• 11/10 Strand B – Developing Community Content – 57 bids (Up to 6 projects likely to be funded)
• 16/10 Rapid Digitisation – 45 bids (Up to 7 projects likely to be funded)

Proposals are now being disseminated to markers. The panel meetings to discuss the marks take place in mid January, and so are JISC are aiming to inform winners of the calls in late January / early February.

JISC is looking for digital content projects interested in having links to their resources from two gateways, MediaHub and CultureGrid (and by extension a third, Europeana)

• MediaHub (currently in development for 2011) will provide access to image, video and audio resources in Higher and Further Education. It evolves from the Vision and Sound Portal at EDINA at the University of Edinburgh.
• Not too differently from MediaHub, Culture Grid is harvesting metadata and then linking back to digitised content in museums, libraries, archives within the UK. Much content is already available for searching, including material uploaded by the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS). The site is run by the Collections Trust,
• Europeana has similar aims to Culture Grid, but works right across Europe. All content from CultureGrid is automatically harvested into Europeana.

I’ve already talked informally with some JISC–funded projects about this, and a few have taken things forward themselves. JISC has small amounts of funding for projects who wish to tailor and export their metadata to such portals. The portals will then incorporate the metadata and provides links back to the original resource.

Collections must be based on discrete digital objects (i.e. a single image, movie or sound file), and have a stable URL to point at. Content for CultureGrid needs to be open access, whilst it can be gated or open for MediaHub.

If you are interested in exposing your content to these sources, then get in touch with me (Alastair Dunning) and we will take things from there. We are primarily interested in content funded by JISC, but are happy to consider other resources.

Following on from yesterday’s blog post about the Enriching via Collaboration and Developing Community Content strand of funding, JISC has added a further tranche of funding in its eContent and Digitisation programme.

This is for Rapid Digitisation projects. A total of £400k funding is available, and it is expected that 6 to 7 projects will be funded.

A call for this will be published in October, and more information made available via the Digital Content Partnerships event on 28th October – for which see the preceding blog post.

JISC has recently funded seven new projects to explore the Impact and Embedding of Digitised Resources.

The aims of the programme are to:

• Facilitate institutions in carrying out an analysis of the impact of their digitised resources/collections that have been live for at least one calendar year.

• To develop strategies and practical solutions to ensure the increased use and impact of the resources in teaching, learning and research within higher education (HE)

The Projects

Below is some further information about the new projects.  This will be updated shortly with a JISC webpage for the projects and links to project webpages.

British History Online as a Case Study

Institute for Historical Research, University of London

This proposed project will use the Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources to enhance and broaden the British history Online (BHO) information on usage and impact of digital resources, thereby informing future development of BHO and contributing to its long-term sustainability and use in research, teaching and learning.

Dance Teaching Resource & Collaborative engagement Spaces (D-TRACES)

Coventry university

The D-TRACES Project (Dance teaching resource and collaborative engagement spaces) will exploit a unique and significant digital dance resource, the Siobhan Davies digital archive. Following a systematic analysis of user engagement and impact on the local student experience, the project will develop a model for embedding the digital archive within the Personal Development Planning (PDP) element of the undergraduate dance curriculum at Coventry University, thereby generating learning objects for much wider distribution.

Listening for Impact

University of Oxford

This project will perform a thorough, rapid analysis of the impact of the public Oxford Podcast audio video collection of 1800 scholarly items, launched in September 2008. By mixing technical innovations and user engagement it will increase discoverability and reuse of material within teaching, learning and research.

Embedding a vision of Britain through Time as a resource for academic, research & Learning

University of Portsmouth

A Vision of Britain through Time may be the worlds best local history web site, but in no way meets academic expectations for an on-line GIS: a comparison with the web sites created by the US National Historical GIS shows almost no overlap in functionality. This project will add enhanced statistical mapping, a custom mapping facility, and new data download facilities covering historic mapping, boundary maps and, crucially, statistics. These facilities will complement not duplicate existing download facilities at Edina and UKDA. Access to most new facilities will be Shibboleth controlled and restricted to UK HE users, to manage computational load and for copyright reasons.

The project will create a detailed report on a site with high and unusual usage patterns, and unusual success at income generation. One goal is simply to better measure specifically academic use.

SPHERE

Kings College, London

Stormont Parliamentary Hansards Embedded in Research and Education (SPHERE) will attempt to extend the work of LAIRAH and similar projects by developing new methodologies for assessing the value of digital resources, and will implement a series of measures to assess the use, value and impact of the digital scholarly resource, the “Historical Hansards”, and implement a series of practical approaches to embed the resource within teaching, learning and research.

Crime in the Community: Enhancing User engagement for Teaching & Research with the Old Bailey Online

University of Sheffield

The Old Bailey Proceedings Online is accessed by a wide community, but academic users have to date not fully exploited this resource and its advanced functionality in their teaching, learning and research. Crime in the Community will assess the ways in which this website is currently used, and generate a series of new tools and online facilities that will allow educationalists and researchers to make more effective use of the 120,000,000 words of highly tagged and accurately transcribed historical text available through the site.

HumBox Impact

University of Southampton

The JISC/HEA funded HumBox project developed a repository of OER materials for the humanities. The project was a collaboration between four Humanities HEA Subject Centres (LLAS, English, History and Philosophical and Religious Studies), and worked closely with the wider UK humanities community to establish what is now a flagship example of what can be achieved in a discipline through OER engagement.

The HumBox Impact project will undertake an analysis of the impact of the collection on contributors and the wider teaching audience and will investigate emerging working and sharing patterns.  HumBox Impact will use the findings from its study to: Develop strategies to ensure the increased use of the HumBox collection in HE; and develop tools (web site enhancements) to support new and emerging working patterns.

JISC has just announced funding for its Grant call 7/10: e-Content and Digitisation programme: Impact and Embedding of digitised resources.

Funding of up to £150,000 is available for projects addressing the impact and embedding of digitised resources.  It is anticipated that 4-6 projects will be funded and the maximum funding for any one project is £40,000.

Proposals are not limited to previously funded JISC projects.

The deadline for receipt of proposals in response to this call is 12 noon on Friday 9 July 2010.

The call aims to:

• Facilitate institutions in carrying out an analysis of the impact of their digitised resources/collections that have been live for at least one calendar year.

• To develop strategies and practical solutions to ensure the increased use and impact of the resources in teaching, learning and research within higher education (HE)

This call is in response to a number of important studies and pieces of work attempting to asses the impact and usage of digital resources, including the impact study carried out on the phase I JISC digitisation projects.

Projects must start in October 2010 and complete by March 2011.