JISC Digitisation Programme

The four thousand 18th and 19th century ballads that make up the Welsh Ballads Digitisation project at Cardiff University have gone live on a new website.

The project has made around 15,000 pages of rare Welsh ballads available online.  The collection also includes some of the ballads sung and available digitally.

The ballads give an unparalleled glimpse into Welsh society during the 18th and 19th centuries.

Cardiff University’s Dr Wyn James stated that the ballads:

“were the daily newspapers for the poor throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, and were sold cheaply and widely at markets, fairs, and villages.  They communicated news on local matters and overseas events of the day”.

The ballads launch has also attracted some interest nationally, with BBC Wales reporting on the story online.  To find out more you can visit the Ballads webpages at the National Library of Wales.

Over 2000 recordings by British and Irish Muscians have been digitised and made available online in a project by Kings College, London.

The Musicains of Britain and Ireland 1900-1950 project is allowing listeners and researchers to rediscover leading musicians who were once household names.

Most of the recordings are making their first public appearance since they came out on shellac over 60 years ago and are linked to a range of research resources about the history of recording to help people make the most of the collection.

The discs were selected specifically to highlight world-class British and Irish performers recorded between 1900 and 1950, especially artists neglected by the newly-formed EMI after the merger of the Gramophone Co and Columbia in 1931.

For more information about this project and to listen to some samples,visit the JISC webpages

All the tracks and many more are all available on the CHARM website.

This week saw the launch of the Serving Soldier project at Kings College, London.

The project is providing online access to unique original documents and photographs held by the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives.

The project takes the multi-faceted role of the soldier as its central theme: Exposing a proportion of little known material (hidden stories) and provide a body of material of contemporary relevance to researchers, students and today’s serving soldiers.

Furthermore, the project has also commissioned and produced a play which was performed at Shrivenham Officers training camp. 

The play entitled ‘Fighting Your Corner’ draws on historical collections (diaries, reports and first had accounts) relating to previous conflicts in Afghanistan.

‘How easily can treasure
buried in the ground, gold hidden
however skilfully, escape from any man!

Seamus Heaney (transl.) Beowulf

A new exemplar community collection is now live: Project Woruldhord.

The project  is trialling the processes and the community contributed collection (‘CoCoCo’) software being formed by the RunCoCo project.

The project is trying to collect any material that would be of help to people who wish to find out more about the Anglo-Saxon period of history and the language and literature.

The project is looking for images, audio/video recordings, handouts, essays, articles, presentations, spreadsheets, databases, and so on.

In particular it is hoped teachers/researchers will contribute teaching material they are happy to share with others.

The most important page to get started is:
http://poppy.nsms.ox.ac.uk/woruldhord

This takes you through the simple to use submission process where you can upload your object and provide some basic information about it.

If you have any questions please email the project:  woruldhord@oucs.ox.ac.uk

Despite the unbiquitous presence of moving image and sound in much of our daily lives, it has largely failed to make any impact in academic teaching, learning and research.

In an attempt to strengthen the role of film and sound in further and higher education, the Film and Sound Think Tank has recently launched a set of videos.

The films examine the role of audio and visual content in education, and how the protential of this media can be unlocked.

The fourth video is available on Vimeo:

JISC – Unlocking Artists’ Rights – JISC Film and Sound Think Tank

As an aside, it is interesting to note the number of views these videos have had in their short life on YouTube (one of the videos – Using Ausio in education – had 138 views).

While the numbers don’t necessarily tell us the whole story – how long were they viewed? – this may already signal the importance and levels of interest in this topic to the education community and beyond.

The first of this year’s releases of the John Johnson Collection: An Archive of Printed Ephemera has just been announced.

The publication is a series of fourteen specially commissioned essays that respond to a diverse selection of items from the John Johnson Collection.

These concise and illuminating studies – which have been contributed by Rob Banham, Troy Bickham, Robert Colls, Simon Eliot, D. J. Taylor, Michael Twyman and Mariana Warner – are available in the John Johnson Collection alongside digital facsimile images of the items to which they relate.

The complete list of essays is accessible via a link on the John Johnson Collection home page or by clicking the Responses link in the toolbar that appears at the top of every screen in the John Johnson Collection.

New Content

Facsimile images of more than 13,700 items have been added to the John Johnson Collection with this release, bringing the total number of scanned items to 62,421 (a total of 167,356 images), including more than 19,700 pieces of theatrical and non-theatrical ephemera from the Nineteenth-Century Entertainment category and more than 9,500 items from the Booktrade category.

Over 10,900 Popular Prints are now available in facsimile form, along with more than 20,700 items from Advertising and over 1,400 from Crimes, Murders and Executions.

Future Developments: Enhanced Records for Crime, Murders and Execution

Of the five major categories of material included in The John Johnson Collection, the Crimes, Murders and Executions section is one of the most popular and most often consulted, providing documentary evidence which supports research in various aspects of social history.

The Bodleian Library and ProQuest are enhancing this material, with the help of JISC e-Content funding, by mapping individual records to the appropriate entries in a number of external online resources that contain references, citations or other related material, thereby offering users the scope to explore more easily themes and narratives encountered in the John Johnson Collection.

The project will guide researchers to other information directly related to their line of enquiry, and allow them to build connections or follow trails between different resources.

The resources that the project will link to are:

• Old Bailey Proceddings Online
• Harvard law School Library’s digitised broadside collection: Dying Speeches and Bloody Murders
• Newgate calendar
• Bodleian Library’s digitised catalogue of broadside ballads.

 More information is available about the project on the JISC website for this project.

I recently blogged about the launch of the University of Exeter’s Digital Collections Online.

Some of the amazing images that were digitised and added to the repository demand to be highlighted in more depth.

With all the hype about Tim Burton’s new Alice in Wonderland film, it seems appropriate to highlight the amazing collection of images that the archive holds on film and cinema (and the optical and visual more generally).

The image of Alice included in this piece, is taken from a box of slides that come originate in a Magic Lantern Collection.

This pre-cinematic invention used a series of slides that were projected onto a wall.   Smallscale shows were put on by  travelling lanternists using a candle to project the images.

Occassionally visual tricks were employed to engage and capture the audiences attention – not dissimilar to our ongoing fascination and the appeal of 3D at the movies!

But, the link between the past and present is not the only value of digitising and making these collections available online.

The collection held by Exeter is fascinating, not only for what it can tell us about the history of cinema and film;  but also how the edges of each object and collection of objects touch upon, and overlap with other areas of study and research.

Many of the slide collections are incredibly rich resources for researchers and students looking not only at, for example,  cinematic history, but also the subject matter and content of the images and objects themselves.

Magic lantern slides cover subject areas including,  astrology and zoology offering a rare and primary source glimpse into Victorian culture and ideas.

The project has attempted to provide preliminary pathways through some of the content by creating ‘curated’ collections and e-learning packages centred around certain themes.

It seems this collection cannot help but cross new boundaries and inspire new ideas and avenues of thought.

 The Codex (Centre for Digital Excellence) project at the University of Manchester recently visited National Trust Petworth House in Sussex to digitise a medieval Chaucer manuscript.

The project aims to establish partnerships with museums, libraries and archive repositories throughout the region, and beyond, to develop and test collaborative models for digitisation.

This was the projects first visit to a collection to photograph and digitise a collection, and also gave the team at Petworth House a chance to ask the team questions and watch them work.

The event was captured by the BBC and includes an interesting piece of film with the curator at Petworth House.

Tuesday 16th March saw the launch of Exeter University’s Digital Collections Online.

Delivering images and digital objects from Exeter’s most prestigious research collections, including over 2000 images showcasing Victorian culture, openly available for teaching and research.

The website includes e-learning packages to help embed the collections use within the university’s teaching, learning and research.

Highlights of the collection include historic popular culture images from Queen Victoria  to Alice in Wonderland.

The Launch was preceeded by a workshop on the Digital Futures of Special Collections.

Partly as a response to the Enriching Digital Resources programme, the workshop examined many of the issues Special Collections and Archives face in delivering digital resources to users in the twenty-first century and beyond.

Some of the themes that emerged from the presentations and discussions are worth sharing:

• Students don’t care where (physically) an object is stored: they simply want access, whenever they need it. Linked to this is:
• Objects must be easy to use and find: especially for students who will often take the path of least resistance in searching for content.
• The digital doesn’t replace the physical, instead it facilitates a dialogue between the object and its simulacra.
• Metadata is not dead, yet.  Descriptions allow users to find the objects.  But how do we overcome shortages of resources and expertise to enrich metadata?
• As much as possible content should be shared and set free.  There are many challenges to this, but where possible this should be the norm, not the exception.  This may also help answer the issue of enriching metadata.
• Sharing and opening up content is not a loss of authority or power… rather it is empowering others.

There were many others, some of which may inspire future blog posts, but these were the ones that stuck with me.

The workshop was collaborative and challenging as anything worthwhile should be, and it seems a fitting vehicle to launch a new online digital collection.

The Pre-Raphaelites online resource  has won the BETT Award for best digital collection and resource bank after being recognised as one of the UK’s leading educational websites.

Further details of the award can be found on the Birmingham City Council’s website.

This latest accolade follows earlier victories in the BIMA (British Interactive Media Association) and DADI (Drum Award for Digital Industries) Awards.

This continued acknowledgement of the websites design and usability helps highlight the importance of making these areas an integral part of a projects planning and execution.

Key features of the site include:

• full record information for each image
• zoom-in function, to allow users to examine images in great detail
• browse and advanced search
• background resources on the Pre-Raphaelite movement and artists
• exemplars of learning resources, such as “Gender and Sexuality”, as well as the facility for teachers to create their own
• personal collection, a functionality which allow users to group and theme images from the collection as well as take part in online discussions

The Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource was funded by the JISC Digitisation programme and created by the Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery.