JISC Digitisation Programme

JISC has just selected 25 diverse projects at UK universities that are going to receive £1.8m of funding in the ‘Enrich Digital Resources’ programme. The support has been allocated to projects designed to benefit both researchers and learners, to improve existing digital content and to digitise new materials for sustainable access in the future.

The projects will use innovative technologies to create vibrant learning and research resources which serve to enhance or revitalise Britain’s scholarly and cultural heritage. They are broad reaching in scope, varying from using podcasts to improve access to Newton’s influential scientific texts to creating a digital archive to reflect the social change in East London arising from hosting the Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2012.

’Enrich Digital Resources’ will run from October 2008 until 2009, after which all the enhanced or completely new digitised content will be freely available via the Internet, in efforts to be as useful as possible to international research and learning communities.

The full list is available from the JISC website.

There is also a Google Map of the projects and their lead institutions.

The second release of the JISC-funded John Johnson Collection: An Archive of Printed Ephemera, a collaboration between the Bodleian Library and ProQuest, is now available at http://johnjohnson.chadwyck.co.uk and http://johnjohnson.chadwyck.com.

The project reported that “usage Statistics for the John Johnson Collection resource during the first two months since the launch (March 2008) have been extremely encouraging [...] The number of sessions in this period is roughly a quarter (23%) that of the total number of sessions within UK institutions of one of ProQuest’s leading humanities databases during the same period.”

The new release includes additional content in the five categories of material represented in the collection – Entertainment, the Booktrade, Popular Prints, Crimes, Murders and Executions and Advertising – as well as improved search screens.

For example, the new Crimes, Murders and Executions category-specific search screen includes additional fields for Criminal, Victim and Crime, as well as a set of checkboxes that allow the user to restrict searches according to the sentence passed. This makes it easy to find ephemera relating to a particular crime, for example highway robbery or sedition, or particular forms of punishment, such as the death penalty.

In this podcast interview, David Tomkins, Project Manager at the Bodleian and Peter White, Project Manager at ProQuest, talk about what ephemera is, what makes the John Johnson Collection special, their partnership and the challenges around digitising ephemera.

Listen to the podcast

The Great War Archive web site, part of the JISC-funded First World War Poetry Digital Archive project, is a powerful example of how communities can be galvanised in the creation of a unique and poignant online resource for the benefit of the wider public.

An article on the Times Higher Education Supplement “From no man’s land to a people’s memorial” reported on how thousands of people contributed their “digital memories” of WW1 to the web site by uploading their own scans of items such as diary extracts, images and even matchboxes.

Although the submission period has now closed, people can still upload their material on the project’s Flickr group, details of which are on the Great War Archive web site.

In a podcast recorded earlier this year, before the launch of the Great War Archive, Kate Lindsay, Project Manager for the First World War Poetry Digital Archive discusses this exciting development, along with the other unique features of the collection.

Listen to the podcast

Five digitisation projects are to be awarded funding of around £600,000 ($1,150,000) under a transatlantic collaboration between JISC and the US National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).A call for proposals issued last November invited scholars in England and the USA to collaborate on digitisation, the aim of the £600,000 ($1,150,000) programme being to unite scholarly collections split between the two countries, explore innovative approaches to digitisation and match expertise in one country with collections to be digitised in the other.

The funded projects are:

• The St Kitts-Nevis Digital Archaeology Initiative (Southampton University / Thomas Jefferson Foundation)
• The World Wide Web of Humanities (Oxford Internet Institute / Internet Archive)
• Shakespeare Quartos Archive (Oxford University / Folger Shakespeare Library)
• PhiloGrid (Imperial College / Tufts University)
• Concordia (King’s College London / New York University)

Read on to find out more about the projects

You can also listen to a podcast from the JISC/NEH launch event at King’s College London about issues in international digitisation, including interviews with key figures in the collaboration.

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The recent LIBER-EBLIDA workshop on digitisation of library material in Europe explored some important challenges facing national and university libraries across the continent as they attempt to join together to deliver a “European Digital Library”.

In this podcast interview Paul Ayris, librarian at University College London and a senior figure in these European developments, depicts a fragmented European digitisation landscape and calls for more strategic pan-European vision and leadership. He asks a number of challenging questions of the library community, including how the role of libraries has to be re-thought not just as custodians of collections but also as learning and social spaces.

Ayris points out how Google has changed the way people think of, access and use resources, and libraries can learn from more direct and innovative models of introducing change.

In the UK, JISC is providing an infrastructure and leadership in funding digitisation projects and encouraging collaborations.

A look through the currently funded JISC digitisation projects will reveal how these collections differ from the type of digitisation Google is doing, by focusing on special collections with a variety of different formats and types of material, spanning centuries, and with a high degree of curatorial input.

The £22m JISC digitisation programme is making available a wide range of vital scholarly resources to UK education and research. Programme manager Alastair Dunning talks to Philip Pothen about what the programme is delivering and why the recent international conference in Cardiff represented an important landmark both for the programme and for wider attempts to make available scholarly resources of national importance.

Listen to the podcast

Google has quickly become a key player in the digitisation of scholarly resources. In this podcast two librarians – Richard Ovenden of the Bodleian Library at Oxford University and Mike Keller at Stanford University – who are both working with Google to digitise large parts of their collections, talk to Philip Pothen about the opportunities and the challenges of working with the private sector to digitise important scholarly resources.

Listen to the podcast

Chris Batt is the Chief Executive of the Museum Libraries and Archives Council, a key partner of JISC’s in the Strategic Content Alliance, a cross-sectoral body looking to widen access to online content for all citizens of the UK. In this podcast he talks about the work of the MLA, the Strategic Content Alliance and why the public sector is crucial to any attempts to create an information landscape that has quality and the needs of its users at its heart.

Listen to the podcast

The JISC digitisation conference was opened by Carwyn Jones, now Counsel General and Leader of the House in the Welsh Assembly Government (you can read the live blog of his well-received speech here). He also gave a short interview to JISC’s Philip Pothen before the speech, and it is now available to listen to as a podcast. At the time, Carwyn Jones was Minister for Education, Culture and the Welsh Language and in this podcast of the interview he gives his thoughts on the importance of ICT to Welsh education and explains how the Welsh Assembly Government is working to widen access to digital resources to support education and the promotion of Welsh culture and language.

Listen to the podcast here

Lord Rix – the actor-manager Brian Rix of Whitehall farce fame – his wife Baroness Rix (the actress Elspet Gray) and Roland and Claire Muldoon, theatre pioneers with the New Variety group at the Hackney Empire, were among more than 100 guests from showbusiness and education at the launch of the East London Theatre archive at the University of East London (UEL).

Listen to a podcast from the launch to find out more, and to hear an interview with Lord Rix and Roland Muldoon.

The project, one of 22 in the JISC digitisation programme, will create a digital resource of some 15,000 endangered artefacts and collections from the rich resources held by a number of theatres and theatre bodies in East London that have made a significant contribution to the development of theatre studies and the perfoming arts.

Lord Rix, Chancellor of UEL, which is the project’s lead institution, thanked JISC for its funding of the project, which, he said, “will ensure that valuable historical resources will not only be preserved but made available for all to see and use.”

The event also marked the bequest of the Hackney Empire archive to the University of East London, a resource which will be part of the digital archive. Other theatres and theatre bodies which are part of the project include the Half Moon Young People’s Theatre, the Victoria and Albert Museum Theatre Collections, the Theatre Royal Stratford East, the Theatre Museum and Wilton’s Music Hall.

Speaking at the event, Professor Andrew McDonald, Director of Library and Learning Services at the University of East London, said the project would make accessible otherwise inaccessible resources: “We’re confident that the digital archive will become a resource of national and international significance and will make this vital part of our shared heritage available to all.”

Find out more about the project at the East London Theatre archive project page