JISC Digitisation Programme

JPEG 2000 for the practitioner – a one-day seminar

A free seminar to explore and examine the use of JPEG 2000 in the cultural heritage industry will be held at the Wellcome Trust.

The seminar will include specific case studies of JPEG 2000 use. It will explain technical issues that have an impact on practical implementation of the format, and explore the context of how and why organisations may choose to use JPEG 2000.

Although the seminar will have an emphasis on digitisation and digital libraries, the papers will be relevent to a range of research and creative industries.

Places are limited to 80 attendees. Papers will be made available online after the event.

Further Details:

• Tuesday 16 November 2010

• 9am – 5pm

• Wellcome Trust, 215 Euston Road, London, UK

This seminar is hosted by the JPEG 2000 Implementation Working Group and the Wellcome Library.

Contributors:

Please submit the title and a brief abstract of your proposed paper and a bio of the speaker/s to c.henshaw@wellcome.ac.uk by October 4, 2010.

Delegates:

If you would like to attend please email your name and the name of your institution to c.henshaw@wellcome.ac.uk by 1 November, 2010.

The Visualising China Project is hosting a one-day workshop in Bristol on Tuesday 21st September, with presentations and discussion on the topic of cross-searching distributed, interrelated, online resources.

Presentations will include:

• The Visualising China project which currently harvests data linking to two large, separate image collections.

• Connected Histories project will present their experiences in cross-searching more than 10 online datasets.

The workshop will tackle topics such as harvesting protocols (including OAI-related solutions), presentation layer problems/solutions such as for ranking search results, and scalability/sustainability issues in cross-searching.

The workshop is also interested in receiving more recommendations for speakers and topics for discussion.

If you have suggestions and/or wish to attend please contact Nikki Rogers as soon as possible: nikki.rogers@bristol.ac.uk.

Date: Tuesday 21st September 2010

Venue: ILRT, Bristol

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.

You can now follow all the JISC innovation projects as they are funded and added to our PIMS database.

Still in an experimental stage, the feed allows all newly funded projects to appear on the Twitter feed: @jiscprojects

Follow new JISC projects here: http://twitter.com/jiscprojects

Please bear in mind this is still an experimental service, but it will be smoothed out and improved in the coming weeks.

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

The AHRC funded project Jane Austen’s fiction manuscripts represent the first significant body of holograph evidence surviving for any British novelist.

They represent every stage of her writing career and a variety of physical states: working drafts, fair copies, and handwritten publications for private circulation.

Digitization enables their virtual reunification and will provides scholars with the first opportunity to make simultaneous ocular comparison of their different physical and conceptual states, facilitating intimate and systematic study of Austen’s working practices across her career.

Many of the Austen manuscripts are frail; open and sustained access has long been impossible for conservation and location reasons.

The digital edition will include in the first instance all Jane Austen’s known fiction manuscripts and any ancillary materials held with them.

Visit the project website for more information.

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 second strand of Grant 13/09: BCE, e-Content & Digitisation programmes: Developing community content aims to build new digital collections, or transform existing collections through genuine co-creation with specific external communities.

Below are the five winning projects from strand II of this call (two are currently conditional awards):

OurWikiBooks

(Conditional Award)

University of Manchester (Alexandria Walker)

This project will undertake co-development, with teachers and GCSE and A-level students, of a new digital collection of key concerns and knowledge in computing education.  In the process, the project will build a community that collaboratively creates digital collections of imaginative educational materials for use in learning and teaching computing, with this content being made available to the computing education community in the UK and worldwide.

My Leicestershire

University of Leicester (Ben Wynne)

This project will create a base digital archive comprised of historical texts from the University of Leicester Library’s Special Collections complemented by video recordings from MACE, oral history recordings from EMOHA and private collections of historical photographs of ‘ghost signs’, buildings, bridges and other architecturally significant sites from across the county.

Media and Memory in Wales, 1950-2000

(Conditional Award)

University of Aberyswyth (Dr. Iwan Rhys Morus)

This project will collect and archive oral testimony relating to the age of television in Wales.  It will solicit memories of significant televisual moments in politics and culture.  By focussing on four distinct geographical and linguistic communities, it will seek to provide a spectrum of memories that represent a national collective memory of television in Wales.

Welsh Voices of the Great War Online

University of Cardiff (Gethin Matthews)

This project will work with the families of those in Wales who fought, or otherwise served, in the First World War in order to collect and make available online the range of artefacts that are held in private hands.   The results will be presented via the People’s Collection website, a Welsh Assembly Government funded project.

Community Cafe Projects

University of Southampton (Alison Dickens)

The project will address the scarcity of up to date, online resources for community languages.  The aim of the project is to co-create a community collection of online language and cultural materials which will significantly enhance existing materials to support community languages.