JISC Digitisation Programme

As an addition to its successful Freeze Frame digitisation project, JISC asked the University of Cambridge’s Scott Polar Research Institute to explore what was needed to export their collection of 20,000 digitised images to portals such as Europeana and Flickr, as well as to commerical image providers.

The request led the Institute to a full-scale overhaul of they managed and exported their images, and the report on the JISC website provides plenty of useful detail on their thinking behind the change, plus some recommendations for others in similar circumstances.

Some of the key findings from the full report (pdf file) are :

• Metadata is often created in the context of a single, localised website rather than for re-use on other sites.
• Creating shareable metadata needs much greater attention to keywords, credits and rights.
• Institutions that are serious about exporting their content need to build rigourous image management processes to avoid data export becoming a laborious manual task.
• Development of such systems can then also help provide sophisticated management of internal processes.
• Personnel and structures at the portals often change making it difficult for content providers to build working partnerships.
• Evaluating the success of exporting metadata or content to others’ portals is a particularly tricky business.

Some innovative projects have started introducing games to their digital resources in order to enhance their metadata

The Galaxy Zoo astronomy site has just launch a new game which allows users to help suggest how galaxy collision and mergers took place.

Google Image Labeller has been around for a few years; you are randomly paired with another user, and you then work as a team to try and come up with words to decribe images that Google has harvested.

More recently, the Brooklyn Musuem expanded on their Web2 features by coming up with the Tag! You’re It! and the Freeze Tag games, giving people a fun way to interactive with their collections online

Precise and trusted metadata is time consuming and often a little boring to create. Any process, as typified by these games here, that can reduce the cost and the boredom should be explored a little more.

The Archival Sounds Recordings website had recently introduced a new facility to allow users to explore their digitised sounds via maps.

Instead of relying on browsing or searching via keyword, users can now click on the customised Google Map, which reveals sound recordings related to a particular place. This is particularly useful for collections that have a broad range of sources, such as soundscapes, accents or natural history recordings.

The work is part of a larger project JISC has funded to make digitised content searchable via geographic means. Involving EDINA, the University of Edinburgh, and three digitisation projects, the project is evaluating and testing what works and what doesn’t when you identify and then visualise geographical place names form large textual data sets.

More details on the project are available from the JISC website.

There’s plenty of discussion about things like APIs (application programming interfaces) and concepts of opening up data, but to the non-initiated this can all seem rather confusing and overly technical.

However, as those who have created digital projects continue to look for new ways to expose their content to the widest possible audience, APIs offer a way to give access to whole of your collection so that others can come up with new ways of exploiting it. Often, it’s people outside your organisation who can come up with imaginative ways of using your content in ways you had never imagined.

This could include other parties

• using your subject metadata to build a harvesting search engine over a number of collections related to a specific theme
• using all your metadata related to dates and time to build a timeline
• analysing your descriptive metadata to build a tag cloud

And once an API is set up, you spend a lot less time responding to queries from people who wonder if they can hold of your data for their own projects. They just go straight to the interface and question the data they need. They then build interfaces around this data, that will drive more users to your website.

There are two really helpful blog articles that help describe this better.

1. Mike Ellis’ interview with the Brooklyn Museum, who have just published their API
2. The interview with the DigitalNZ (New Zealand) team, who have done some radically innovative ideas in how to get their nation’s content used.

(Thanks to Mag3737 for the Flickr photo)

Standards for digital content such as file formats or metadata aren’t sexy. But they are crucial – without them resource discovery is impeded, functionality is diminished and long-term access is imperilled.

But implementing standards is not just a matter of a ‘Stalinist’ top-down mandate. Within in a project, service or an organisation standards impinge on all kinds of other issues – staff skills, costs of hardware, tools and software available, different end-users amongst others.

Alastair Dunning gave a talk at the Strategic Content Alliance’s event at Edinburgh, illustrating how standards need to be thought of as existing in an organic, shifting environment. Choosing to adopt an standards is not a straightforward matter – the ramifications of choosing any standards need be thought through.

It was followed up with a round table, also involving Brian Kelly from UKOLN.

The presentation is available from Slideshare. Details of the event as a whole, where along with standards, content licensing and sustainability models for digital content were discussed and debated in detail, will be available from the SCA blog.

As part of its Digitisation Programme, the JISC appointed consultant Hervé L’Hours to assist the 16 projects in defining their metadata requirements. In particular, Hervé looked at issues relating to technical / preservation metadata and how these were being built into project workflows.

The bulk of this work took place between June and November 2007.

Hervé’s work involved a number of strands, from which various materials are being made publicly available

• A workshop for the projects on various issues related to metadata, in particular on the METS model for content repackaging. Presentations from this workshop can be downloaded.
• Content packaging for complex objects. The METS model (PPT, 653kb)
• Metadata tools, Ed Fay (PPT, 913kb)
• An overview of the metadata ‘position’ of each of the 16 projects in the Digitisation Programme, with reference to standards chosen, staff skill sets and planned workflows. A public summary of this document is being produced for Spring 2008.
• A metadata template for digitisation projects, providing any digitisation workflow with a comprehensive framework to work through and ensure the appropriate aspects of metadata are being addressed. Again, this template can be downloaded.
• JISC Metadata Template for Digitisation Projects (RTF file, 253kb)

Hervé was also asked to provide assistance to each of the projects, reviewing their metadata policies and offering guidance where required. For some projects with more experience or reasonably straightforward workflows this was a ‘light touch’; for others, especially those importing complex legacy metadata, more involved help was given.