Digging into Data – Number of Letters of Intent Received
The JISC, along with the NEH, NSF and SSHRC are funding the Digging into Data challenge.
Applicants were inivted to send expressions of interest so that the funding bodies could ensure that potential project teams were working within the parameters of the programme. After an FOI (Freedom of Information) request, JISC can reveal that 91 letters of intent were received that included JISC as a funding source. Only two of those were considered outside the scope of the competition parameters.
Given the huge interest that this call has generated, JISC is now looking to try and organise extra funding for this competition.
£200k has been allocated at the outset (enough for funding 2 projects at the maximum of £100k each). Nothing has been confirmed as yet but it is hoped that this can be raised to £400 – £500k.
UK partners can apply for up to £100k; project teams as a whole may apply for 300k units, where 1 GPB or USD or CD equals a unit
The closing date for applications is the 15th July, and applications are sent via http://www.diggingintodata.org/
In terms of further cycles of funding for this programme, the funding bodies will review the situation in 2010 and then decide what future work there will be in this area.
Update on recent JISC e-Content calls
The JISC e-Content team has had plenty of calls and ITTs flying around recently. Here is where we are with them.
- The peer-review meeting for the JISC-NEH transatlantic collaboration grants has been held. 28 proposals were received, and these have now been whittled down to four. Assuming these four are ratified by the NEH Council in July, they will be announced at the end of July / start of August
- 47 proposals were received for e-Content 02/09 call, 19 under Strand A (Institutional Skills and Strategies) and 28 under Strand B (Clustering and Enhancing). We expect to be able to inform winners in late July
- 6 proposals were received for the call on the digitisation of Islamic Studies catalogues and manuscripts. Again, we expect to be able to inform winners in late July
- The deadline for the Digging into Data call is 15 July. Currently JISC have £200,000 available in total for this competition but are looking into ways into getting extra funding.
- Grant letters for the winners of the workshops on challenges and achievements in e-content and digitisation are currently being distributed, and the winners will be publicly announced in a week or two.
Special collections aren’t just curios
There’s an interesting and well-illustrated (in the print version at least) article on the variety and strength on special collections in UK universities in the 7 May version of the Times Higher.
However, in focussing on the special collections as single curios, the article rather downplays the Importance that such collections can have within education.
What is one person’s eccentric oddity may actually form the spine of somebody else’s research. Moreover, put different special collections together and you might get some very interesting relationships building up, and a critical mass of primary source material to inform innovative and engaging teaching and research.
The Discmap project, managed by the University of Strathclyde, is looking precisely at these issues, studying the special collections within the UK’s universities and then developing priorities for digitisation. Its final report is due for publication in early Summer 2009, and should provide interesting food for thought and how future digitisation within the UK is taken forward.
Thanks to University of California Riverside for the image.
JISC – NEH Phase 2 of transatlantic digitisation grants
JISC and the NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) have now received all the applications for the second phase of transatlantic digitisation.
As with the first phase, the quality of bids looks high. 28 applications have been received and it is likely that three or four of these will receive funding of up to £200,000 ($280,000) to be split between the project partners
The marking process is continuing over the next few weeks. Once the successful proposals have been agreed upon and ratified by the relevant funding agency committees, the winners will be announced. This is scheduled for early August
More digitisation funding for the National Library of Wales
The National Library of Wales is a step closer to realising its ambitious vision
to digitise the entire printed memory of Wales and ensure audiences across Wales and around the world can enjoy the mines of information held in the library’s collection
said Andrew Green, Librarian, as reported by BBC News in Historic newspapers to go online
The Welsh Assembly Government recently announced a grant of £2m to the National Library of Wales towards a digitisation project entitled Welsh Newspapers and Magazines Online, which will make freely available on the web about 300 titles of newspapers and magazines pre-dating the digital age.
This project follows from the succesful JISC-funded Welsh Journals Online digitisation project, which is making available the back-numbers of 50 key journals, both in English and Welsh, ranging from academic and scientific publications to literary and popular magazines.
Both projects are part of a much wider investment that the Library has committed to in order to digitise, and make freely available online, a critical mass of Welsh related content including Wales’ books, art works and documents, sound files, photographs and newspapers.
Funding for workshops on digitisation and e-content
JISC has just released a funding call for applicants to organise workshops related to achievements and challenges in digitisation and e-content. Applications may come from in- or outside the HE sector.
Potential topics that applicants can address pretty wide and include
- particular areas of technology (e.g. optical character recognition, 3D digitisation, visualisation);
- the relationship with digital content and a specific subject area (e.g. the availability and usefulness of digital resources for those studying the history of the performing arts, or subject areas deemed strategically important or vulnerable by the government);
- issues relating to content that falls under broader headings (e.g. mathematical journals, parliamentary records, medieval manuscripts, historic maps);
- other areas related to digitisation.
In particular, JISC is looking for events that can
- incorporate relevant expertise from other countries within Europe;
- provide evidence and clear articulation of existing and potential benefits of digitised content to research and teaching;
- provide a roadmap incorporating current achievements and outlining future directions.
The maximum amount for each workshop is £8,000. The timetable is tight. Bids need to be in by 8th May, and the workshops take place between June and September 2009.
The full call is available from the JISC website
Funding for digital heritage questions
The AHRC have teamed up with British Telecom to provide funding related to digital cultural heritage
Plenty of the questions relate to issues relevant to the JISC Digitisation Strategy
From the briefing paper on the AHRC website, it says the research questions of interest are:
• How can the availability and accessibility of heritage sites/cultural collections be enhanced across time and space through digital technology?
• What do audiences at/visitors to heritage sites want and need such
technology to do? How does this vary at local, national and international
levels?• How does specific technology influence the ways in which we interpret
heritage environments e.g. artifacts/exhibits/landscapes?• What are the legal issues around digital heritage e.g. digital rights,
ownership, authority?• How can we ensure that use of technology in digital heritage does not
exclude certain user groups?• How can we enhance the end-to-end experience of visiting a heritage
environment i.e. from the initial discovery of a site to visit through to
further exploration and investigation after a visit has been made?
Funding Opportunity: Rapid Innovation Grants
The Information Environment team has just released a new call for Rapid Innovation Grants. Further details of the call are below:
JISC invites institutions to submit funding proposals for grants to fund technical rapid innovation projects addressing priority areas.
Proposals are sought under the following priority areas:
- Mashups of open data
- Aggregating tags and feeds
- Semantic web/ linked data
- Data search
- Visualisation
- Personalisation
- Mobile Technologies
- Lightweight Shared Infrastructure Services
- User Interface Design
Bids for projects dealing with other areas that are relevant to the Information Environment are also welcomed.
Funding of between £15,000 – £40,000 for 6 month projects for up to 30 projects is available
The deadline for receipt of proposals in response to this call is 12 noon on Wednesday 22 April 2009.
Funding is available for projects starting in early-mid June 2009 for 6 months. All projects must be complete by 30 November 2009.
Further information can be found in the full Call
EU Funding for Digital Libraries and Content
The EU recently held a meeting in Luxembourg to inform potential applicants about their the ICT Policy Support Programme.
25million Euros have been allocated to the digital libraries strand with the specific objectives of
- Developing services to improve the usability of Europeana
- Aggregating content for Europeana
- Digitising content for Europeana
- Open access to scientific information
- Use of heritage content for education
For those wanting further detail on the call, Kate Fernie produced a report on the meeting on behalf of JISC.
JISC Digitisation programme funding call: pre-announcement
The JISC Digitisation programme is pleased to announce that a new funding call will be issued shortly, towards the end February-beginning March 2009.
The call will focus on 3 key themes:
1) institutional skills and strategies, including activities aimed at embedding digitisation into institutional strategies and practices, eg development of institutional skills, policies and capacity to perform digitisation; creating, or building on existing, institutional infrastructure, workflows and processes to streamline digitisation; developing partnerships and collaborative models at regional or other levels aimed at carrying out digitisation in a more cost effective way, for example by reaching economies of scale, or capitalising on institutions’ own particular areas of expertise in different aspects of digitisation activity, and through fostering knowledge exchange and sharing of good practice;
2) enhancing existing online digital collections in order to increase their current use, including enhancing interfaces, enriching existing metadata, improving resource discovery mechanisms, for example by making use of Web2.0 networks and functinalities or search engine optimisation, promotion and marketing activities within relevant research and teaching communities as well as embedding resources into teaching and learning;
3) clustering of existing online digital collections, in order to create critical mass of content and increase its current use, including bringing together collections which have been identified as being complementary from a thematic, chronological or format point of view or making use of existing platforms and services to deliver digital content through a variety of entry points. This may involve merging the metadata or technical infrastructure for related resources; developing cross-search functionality; exploiting Web2.0 methodologies such as data mash-ups to ‘cross-fertilise’ the content in existing resources.
A total funding of just over £2m will be available, and projects will be expected to start in September 2009 and be completed by March 2011.
Higher and Further education institutions based in England and Wales only will be able to apply as lead institutions. However, partnerships are welcomed.
More information on the funding call will be available through this blog as well as the JISC web site.