JISC Digitisation Programme

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
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The British Library archive of 19th-century newspapers is now available to the general public on a per per view basis. Over 2m pages of newspapers were digitised as part of the JISC’s Digitisation Programme

The HE and FE version of the same content was launched in Autumn 2007 and remains freely available to the tertiary education community. This version is available via institutional gateways

The British Library is currently completing a second phase of digitisation, and another 1m pages of historic newspaper content will be made freely available to HE and FE in autumn 2009.

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.

The philosopher, linguist and novelist Umberto Eco described libraries as a form of repository, or bank, which served to secure the written word and the treasures of the text.

The essential nature of the library, even today, is therefore one of contradiction: where the traditional processes of cataloguing and classification act to hide and ‘lose’ books as much as they reveal and allow access to books.

Such a view seems appropriate in the week that the British Library seems to have ‘mislaid’ 9,000 books.

A recent article  in the Guardian highlighted that visitors to the British Library discovered

Renaissance treatises on theology and alchemy, a medieval text on astronomy, first editions of 19th- and 20th-century novels, and a luxury edition of Mein Kampf produced in 1939 to celebrate Hitler’s 50th birthday

were all apparently missing.

And I suspect that this is a situation that almost all libraries, special collections and archives can sympathise with.

What is interesting about this case is that the digitisation of such precious texts represents an opportunity to not only preserve these texts and the knowledge  they contain, but also to open up access for everyone who might be interested in these works. 

While there are often financial, infrastructural and ideological barriers to digitising such material, it is hard to imagine a better illustration of why digitisation is such an important part of an institutions practices.

A year ago the Library of Congress asked members of the public to tag and describe two sets of approximately 3000 historic photos using Flickr, the photosharing website.  The LOC reports that within the first 24 hours of the project starting Flickr recorded 1.1 million total views on the account, with 3.6 million views a week later, and have had 10.4 million views on Flickr up to October 2008.  Very impressive figures indeed!

The project was able to stimulate interest not only in the images themselves, and it would appear from the report that the academic and public community were surprised by the depth of cultural and historic resources available at the library.  But the project was also able to prompt interest in web 2.0 technologies and foster an interest in the library and its diverse resources and collections.

The LOC reported that the project pilot had the following outcomes:

10.4 million views of the photos on Flickr.

79% of the 4,615 photos have been made a “favorite” (i.e., are incorporated into personal Flickr collections).

More than 15,000 Flickr members have chosen to make the Library of Congress a “contact,” creating a photostream of Library images on their own accounts.

7,166 comments were left on 2,873 photos by 2,562 unique Flickr accounts.

67,176 tags were added by 2,518 unique Flickr accounts.

4,548 of the 4,615 photos have at least one community-provided tag.

Less than 25 instances of user-generated content were removed as inappropriate.

More than 500 Prints and Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC) records have been enhanced with new information provided by the Flickr Community.

More information about the project and the full report can be found at the LOC’s Prints and Photographs reading room. There was also a very interesting article in the New York Times exploring tagging and descriptive metadata in Flickr and Wikipedia.

One of the unexpected benefits of mass digitisation is that it frees up library shelf space; being able to access primary materials and journals online means that librarians no longer need to dedicate precious space to often bulky or fragile objects. Recent JISC-funded digitisation, for example, has allowed many universities around the UK to either put in storage or dispose of some historic newspapers and parliamentary papers.

Some interesting evaluation could be done on the benefits this brings; not only in terms of space saved but in staff time saved in being able to quickly point users towards the networked resource.

For instance at the University of Exeter, librarian Martin Myhill reckons that 280m of shelf space was freed up when the 18th- and 19th- Century Parliamentary Papers went online. Time was also saved by being able to direct users to the website instead of library staff having to take users to the microfilm or print versions,
which were also far more difficult to navigate.

But NB – librarians have to be confident that they will be able to access the replacement digital content in perpetuity! If access to the digital content is likely to be inhibited by rising subscription costs or digital preservation then librarians will wish to keep the original material freely available – another good argument for developing digital content along the open access model.