JISC Digitisation Programme

JISC has recently funded seven new projects to explore the Impact and Embedding of Digitised Resources.

The aims of the programme are to:

• Facilitate institutions in carrying out an analysis of the impact of their digitised resources/collections that have been live for at least one calendar year.

• To develop strategies and practical solutions to ensure the increased use and impact of the resources in teaching, learning and research within higher education (HE)

The Projects

Below is some further information about the new projects.  This will be updated shortly with a JISC webpage for the projects and links to project webpages.

British History Online as a Case Study

Institute for Historical Research, University of London

This proposed project will use the Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources to enhance and broaden the British history Online (BHO) information on usage and impact of digital resources, thereby informing future development of BHO and contributing to its long-term sustainability and use in research, teaching and learning.

Dance Teaching Resource & Collaborative engagement Spaces (D-TRACES)

Coventry university

The D-TRACES Project (Dance teaching resource and collaborative engagement spaces) will exploit a unique and significant digital dance resource, the Siobhan Davies digital archive. Following a systematic analysis of user engagement and impact on the local student experience, the project will develop a model for embedding the digital archive within the Personal Development Planning (PDP) element of the undergraduate dance curriculum at Coventry University, thereby generating learning objects for much wider distribution.

Listening for Impact

University of Oxford

This project will perform a thorough, rapid analysis of the impact of the public Oxford Podcast audio video collection of 1800 scholarly items, launched in September 2008. By mixing technical innovations and user engagement it will increase discoverability and reuse of material within teaching, learning and research.

Embedding a vision of Britain through Time as a resource for academic, research & Learning

University of Portsmouth

A Vision of Britain through Time may be the worlds best local history web site, but in no way meets academic expectations for an on-line GIS: a comparison with the web sites created by the US National Historical GIS shows almost no overlap in functionality. This project will add enhanced statistical mapping, a custom mapping facility, and new data download facilities covering historic mapping, boundary maps and, crucially, statistics. These facilities will complement not duplicate existing download facilities at Edina and UKDA. Access to most new facilities will be Shibboleth controlled and restricted to UK HE users, to manage computational load and for copyright reasons.

The project will create a detailed report on a site with high and unusual usage patterns, and unusual success at income generation. One goal is simply to better measure specifically academic use.

SPHERE

Kings College, London

Stormont Parliamentary Hansards Embedded in Research and Education (SPHERE) will attempt to extend the work of LAIRAH and similar projects by developing new methodologies for assessing the value of digital resources, and will implement a series of measures to assess the use, value and impact of the digital scholarly resource, the “Historical Hansards”, and implement a series of practical approaches to embed the resource within teaching, learning and research.

Crime in the Community: Enhancing User engagement for Teaching & Research with the Old Bailey Online

University of Sheffield

The Old Bailey Proceedings Online is accessed by a wide community, but academic users have to date not fully exploited this resource and its advanced functionality in their teaching, learning and research. Crime in the Community will assess the ways in which this website is currently used, and generate a series of new tools and online facilities that will allow educationalists and researchers to make more effective use of the 120,000,000 words of highly tagged and accurately transcribed historical text available through the site.

HumBox Impact

University of Southampton

The JISC/HEA funded HumBox project developed a repository of OER materials for the humanities. The project was a collaboration between four Humanities HEA Subject Centres (LLAS, English, History and Philosophical and Religious Studies), and worked closely with the wider UK humanities community to establish what is now a flagship example of what can be achieved in a discipline through OER engagement.

The HumBox Impact project will undertake an analysis of the impact of the collection on contributors and the wider teaching audience and will investigate emerging working and sharing patterns.  HumBox Impact will use the findings from its study to: Develop strategies to ensure the increased use of the HumBox collection in HE; and develop tools (web site enhancements) to support new and emerging working patterns.

The Strategic Advisory Board on Intellectual Property (SABIP) have published a report this week entitled “The Economics of Copyright and Digitisation: A Report on the Literature and the Need for Further Research” .

The report undertakes a critical overview of the theoretical and empirical economic literature on copyright and unauthorised copying.

This report highlights two issues which are in particular need of further research in order to inform copyright policy:

• How does digital copying affect the supply of copyright works?
• Does the copyright system entail obstacles to desirable aspects of technological transition?

On the issue of copyright and digitisation the report states:  It is certain that digitisation will continue to alter the cost structure and demand for many copyright works and that new related products and services will emerge.

The full report is available to download.

SABIP would be grateful to receive any feedback you may have on the report.

Alastair Dunning recently presented on JISC’s digitisation sustainability processes at a funders’ forum discussing policies on the long-term maintenance of digital resources. The presentation is available here.

Various bodies were represented at the meeting including Arts Council, Big Lottery Fund, Canadian Heritage Information Network, Institute of Museum and Library Services
Internet Archive, Ithaka, Centre for Research Libraries, Cornell University and the Danish Agency for Libraries and Media

Some of the key points are listed below:

* Increasing need for resource creators need to work with business development and knowlege transfer offices within universities so as to come up with creative ways of deriving value and developing income. The funding raised by the eBird project (http://ebird.org/) might not be replicable by everyone but its ways of finding multiplie incomes sources are fascinating
* But those projects that are unlikey to derive external income need to work harder at aligning themselves with institutional strategies
* Sponsorship of digital resources is underused (the $20k the eBird gets from Zeiss is interesting)
* Greater need for transparency of costs
* Is there any role for funding bodies in giving loans instead of grants? Could funding bodies operate more like Venture Capitalists?
* All parties need to work harder at reducing the costs of digital projects
* Do funding bodies need to work more closely with institutions rather than just individual project teams? Can centres of innovation for business development in this area be constructed?

At the event “Why pay for content?” organised by the Publishers Association, representatives from the publishing sector, JISC, and academics, put across opposing views on whether we should pay to access content on the internet or it should be freely and openly accessible to everybody. The content in question referred mainly to textbooks and research/reference material for higher education.

However, about 10 minutes into the debate, the opposing speeakers seemed to agree on one fundamental point: the question posed, “Why pay for content?”, was not the right one.

Rather, we should be asking “Who should pay for content?”.

Some key issues from the presentations and debate that emerged were:

• there was general agreement that for the creation and online delivery of high quality, authoritative content, someone has to pay (commercial publishers, government funding, authors, users), somewhere along the food chain

• the view was put forward that the “free at the point of use” model was the preferred one, but still somebody had to pay, at some point

• business models that are being experimented with by open access initiative, have tended to shift the cost of content to the delivery of “added extras” or “value added ” features (eg print on demand, delivery of content in different formats or for different platforms, various degrees of personalisation etc…), while basic content accessible on screen comes for free (see eg Flat World Knowledge )

• if somebody has to pay, then how much should content cost? Commercial publishers agreed that the economics of different sectors would determine this, based on how much value (ie quantified positive outcomes) the purchase of high quality content would bring to one’s business

• why aren’t academics depositing their research outputs into open access repositories even if research into this suggests they are not opposed to it? Views ranged from the need to provide researchers with more stimuli or financial rewards to deposit, to mandating it, to allowing for more experimentation (not clear in what, though…)

• a commercial publisher advanced the notion that there is still not enough evidence that free access will deliver more impact, rather the “brand” has proved to be more effective in delivering impact, so it’s not a matter of business models per se

• the landscape is varied and paid-for content and “free” content coexist and will do so for, at least, the medium term future

The issues are many, and the jury is still out on what delivery and sustainability models will eventually prevail.

But in one thing there seems to be consensus: in the majority of cases there is a cost to the creation of high quality, authoritative and reliable content.

In a recent article, An Awfully Big Adventure: Strathclyde’s Digital Library Plan, published in Ariadne magazine, Derek Law describes the university’s plan to achieve excellence in league tables and innovation in teaching by focusing “on technology and by extension on e-content” while at the same time make savings on space, utility bills, and other Estate costs.

A substantial capital budget of £2.5 million has been authorised for the purchase or creation of digital material and a recurrent increase of £800,000 agreed for e-journal and e-book purchase. In return the Library has agreed to clear the equivalent of half the space on each of its six floors. This space will be re-used principally as teaching space. This in turn will allow consolidation of the Law, Arts and Social Sciences Faculty in a separate building and the removal of teaching space elsewhere, so reducing the size of the estate, and by extension utilities and other costs. The library collections will be digitised where possible, consolidated into rolling stack where usage merits it and disposed of where there is no real merit in retaining back runs of journals readily available electronically.

While university libraries, like other university departments and all the rest of us, are being asked to tighten their belt when it comes to budgetary decisions, investment in e-content might actually provide a more strategic and focussed long term solution for the survival of an effective library service.

At yesterday’s JISC Conference, Derek Law reitereated that what the University of Strathclyde’s Library has done is not particularly new, other libraries have been doing it too, but the difference is that Strathclyde made “content”, and investment in content, one of their USP.

Blogs, viedo streaming, tweets, interviews, photos and more about the JISC Conference can be found on the JISC Conference web pages.