JISC Digitisation Programme

JISC has recently published its 02/10 call, entitled ‘Deposit of research outputs and Exposing digital content for education and research.’

Strand II, focussed on exposing digital content, may well be of interest to digitisation projects.

Often digitisation projects develop specific interfaces so that their users can search and browse through the digitised collections.

However, the recent advent of concepts such as linked data and APIs allows for content to be exposed and made available in other ways, thus allowing other users to builds tools, integrate other data, and provide novel methods of visualisation as well as allowing for machine driven discovery and representation of the resources

This call provides an opportunity, therefore, for digitisation projects to expose their content, this allowing users new and ways of exploring the content.

David Flanders (d.flanders @AT@ jisc.ac.uk) is the relevant JISC member of staff who can provide more information.

The European Community recently held a meeting in Luxembourg to inform potential applicants about their the ICT Policy Support Programme.

30 million Euros have been allocated to the digital libraries strand which aims to improve accessibility, use and preservation of Europe’s rich and diverse cultural and scientific heritage.

The call is broken up into six objectives, three focussing on cultural content and Europeana.  The other three focus on ’scientific’ information and the wider issues surrounding digital libraries.

Three objectives relate to Europeana:

• Coordinating Europeana

• Enhancing/Aggregating content in European

• Digitising content for Europeana

Three more objectives relate to further actions in the wider area of digital libraries:

• Access to European Rights

• Information / Registry of Orphan WorksOpen access to scientific information

• Statistics on cultural heritage digitisation activities

For those wanting further details on the call, I have produced a report outlining the details of the call.

The Arts and Humanities Research Council has released details of the winners of its ‘Digital Equipment and Database Enhancement for Impact’ scheme.

21 projects have been funded at a value of just over £4m.

Dr GP Earl £232,575.00
School of Humanities, University of Southampton
Reflectance Transformation Imaging Systems for Ancient Documentary Artefacts

Professor J Ellis £332,520.00
Department of Media Arts, Royal Holloway, University of London
Consolidated Moving Image and Sound Database Framework

Dr BA Fennell £334,574.00
School of Language and Literature, University of Aberdeen
Language and Linguistic Evidence in the 1641 Depositions

Professor RS Fensham £347,592.00
Dance Film and Theatre, University of Surrey
Digital Dance Archives (DDA): cross-collection interactivity and enhanced user engagement with dance resources

Professor PH Gray £111,768.00
School of History and Anthropology, The Queen’s University of Belfast
Documenting Ireland: Parliament, People and Migration, 18th-20th Centuries (DIPPAM)

Mr C Harrison £182,135.00
Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford
The Elements of Drawing: Enhancement and Dissemination for Impact

Professor AF Hartley £159,293.00
School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Leeds
IntelliText – Intelligent Tools for Creating and Analysing Electronic Text Corpora for Humanities Research

Dr E Leach £191,189.00
Music Faculty, University of Oxford
DIAMM: Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music

Dr AA Marsden £139,505.00
Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts, Lancaster University
Digital Arts Innovation Laboratory (DAILab)

Dr A Mazel £120,679.00
School of Arts and Cultures, Newcastle University
Rock Art Mobile Project

Dr M Melaugh £260,179.00
INCORE, University of Ulster
Visualising the Conflict: Immersion in the Landscape of Victims and Commemoration in Northern Ireland

Dr DT Murphy £109,606.00
Electronics, University of York
The Virtual Acoustics and Auralization Database

Dr D Obbink £113,487.00
Classics Faculty, University of Oxford
A Collaboration between Classics and Astrophysics: An Advanced Multispectral Imaging Laboratory Optimised through Crowd-Sourced Statistical Analysis

Professor W. R. Owens £100,778.00
Department of Literature, The Open University
Developing an International Digital Network in the History of Reading: collaboration between the UK Reading Experience Database and invited partners.

Mr D Pritchard £139,531.00
Digital Design Studio, Glasgow School of Art
Enhancing Engagement with 3D Heritage Data through Semantic Annotation

Professor JD Richards £141,771.00
Department of Archaeology, University of York
ADS+: Enhancing and Sustaining the Archaeology Data Service digital repository

Professor TP Schofield £262,673.00
Bentham Project, University College London
The Bentham Papers Transcription Initiative

Professor D Tudhope £109,802.00
Faculty of Advanced Technology, University of Glamorgan
Semantic Technologies Enhancing Links and Linked data for Archaeological Resources (STELLAR)

Dr C Watts £136,498.00
English, Birkbeck College
Voiceworks Digital Song/Text Project: a collaboration between Birkbeck Centre for Poetics, Wigmore Hall & Guildhall School of Music & Drama

Mr K Woolford (Conditional award) £487,794.00
School of Media, Film and Music, University of Sussex
Motion in Place Platform

Professor A Yarrington £61,462.00
Department of History of Art, University of Glasgow
Mobilising ‘Mapping Sculpture in Britain and Ireland, 1851-1951′ (Mobilising Mapping)

Last week it was announced that HEFCE would be making funds available for some of the JISC funding calls that had been postponed.

e-Content currently has a call out on Developing Community Collections.  Strand II of this call has been on hold while HEFCE made their decision on funding.

It has been announced that funds are now available to continue this work, and Strand II will now be continuing, albeit with a slightly revised timetable for submission and project start times.

The revised deadline for submission of proposals will be the 15th March 2010,  with projects starting in May 2010.

Further information about the revised timetable for this work is available on the JISC website. 

As you have probably seen, JISC has frozen its current and future funding calls for ‘capital-funded’ projects but not ‘core-funded’ projects.

The current call within the BCE and e-Content programmes for Developing community content draws its funds from both capital and core funding.

For those planning Strand I bids (Rapid user innovation), the call is still open and JISC will still be expecting proposals by 8th February.

For those planning Strand II bids (Co-development of content), the call is currently frozen. JISC is expecting the funding situation, for this and other calls, to become clearer by the end of January or the start of February. Applicants within affected strands are advised to put their proposals on ice for the moment, and await further information. Hopefully, there will be greater clarity at the start of February.

If you have further queries, please address them to funding@jisc.ac.uk. JISC has now also prepared some questions and answers.

The JISC call for developing community content has now been published on the JISC website.

Brief details about the call were mentioned in a previous blog post.

Questions about the nature of the call can be sent to Alastair Dunning; and questions about the application process can be sent to Avalon McAllister.

Following the success of projects such as the University of Oxford’s Great War Archive, JISC have continued exploration into the concept of community collections, that is digital resources that are created or enhanced by both user groups inside and outwith traditional academic audiences.

1914 Christmas ‘Comforts tin’ and card, from the Great War Archive

This was followed up the report by Chris Batt Consulting, Digitisation, Curation and Two-Way Engagement, which looked at some of the key strategic issues in creating and curating under such a model.

JISC will be continuing this work by publishing a call for projects undertaking the development of community content. It will be a joint call between the JISC Digitisation & eContent, and the Business and Community Programmes. Around £400,000 will be made available, for funding projects up to £75k each.

There will be two strands. Details are also on the JISC roadmap.

Strand A) Rapid Innovation – Rapid enhancement of existing digital resources to provide for greater engagement with previously untapped audiences
Strand B) Content development – Building new digital collections, or significant extending existing collections, via community engagement

The call will be published in December 2009, with a closing date for proposals likely to be the very end of January 2010.

Potential applicants may also be interested in the follow on project by the Great War Archive team at the University of Oxford. Entitled RunCoCo, the project will be helping to share and establish best practice in the development of community collections.

The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) have recently announced £4m worth of funding for digital projects. This is a welcome development, particulary in the light of the fact that the AHRC has had no dedicated funding for ICT work since the cessation of its Resource Enhancement scheme.

It has two particular strands, and projects can range from £50k to £1m

• supporting the purchase and associated implementation costs of leading edge digital equipment, resources or facilities.
• development of AHRB/C funded digital research outputs to ensure that they remain at the cutting edge of technological developments, are compatible with requirements for long-term sustainability and/or to enhance the accessibility of these resources to a wider range of audiences and broaden their usage and impact.

The closing date for bids is the 5th November. Further details are available on the AHRC website

For those wishing to see a list of the projects funded under the AHRC’s Resource Enhancement Scheme, there is a list available amongst the larger list of UK digitisation projects.

As Phase 2 of the JISC Digitisation Programme draws to a close, we continue to get plenty of calls asking when Phase 3 will be starting, with great enthusiasm for more of the same.

At present, JISC has no funds for a third phase of work on the scale of the previous two phases (totalling £23.5m).

However, JISC is still keen to fund innovative digitisation work in the future, and we are currently making the case for how to get such funds.

So, if you are looking for funds for your own collections then don’t throw the ideas away. Continue to make a noise about them, think of innovative ways in which they could be used digitally, and this will all help the case for further digital work.

An AHRC doctoral studentship is available at the Oxford Internet Institute starting this fall. The studentship provides full fees and maintenance for eligible UK students, or full fees for eligible EU students.

The area of study is Librarianship, Archives and Records Management, which is broadly defined and includes information communities and the use and management of information in all forms and in all contexts; all aspects of archive administration and records management; all aspects of information policy in the information society; information systems; systems thinking; systems development; information retrieval (including interfaces and gateways); preservation and conservation of recorded information including Film archiving.

The deadline for application is 3 July 2009.

For more information please see the AHRC Postgraduate Studentship 2009 information sheet
.