What’s your priority for digitisation?
A new online discussion forum has recently launched in order to gather people’s feedback on digitisation priorities for special collections.
Current debates raise issues such as what defines a special collection, how to determine digitisation priorities, user needs in research & teaching, and a provocative “Devil’s advocate” thread to provide a platform to air “contrary positions”.
Everybody can join the forum at http://forums.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/
This online forum is part of the DiSCMap project (Digitisation in Special Collections: mapping, assessment, prioritisation), funded by the JISC Digitisation Programme. DiSCMap seeks to produce a “top priority” list of special collections held within the UK Higher Education sector for potential future digitisation, based primarily on the needs of researchers and teachers.
Through the working of the forum, the DiSCMap project will also investigate the potential of online environments in assisting the delivery of research project outputs, and its usefulness for encouraging more and freer discussions at both national and international level.
DiSCMap is being carried out by the University of Strathclyde, Centre for Digital Library Research, in partnership with Manchester Metropolitan University, Centre for Research in Library and Information Management.
Eighteenth-Century Resources Online – Scholarly Opinions
JISC, along with publishers ProQuest, Cengage and Adam Matthews Digital, were involved in a couple of round table sessions at the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference at Oxford University.
The sessions were designed to get feedback from the scholarly community on resources such as ECCOand the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera
The presentation given by Alastair Dunning of JISC is included here. Below that are some of the key points made by the academics present, and there is a longer pdf document to download with extended notes, which also includes some of the key resources in the area.
Key Feedback from the Roundtable Sessions
- Repeated call for standardised interfaces – “Every car I drive may be different, but I still know how to drive it without thinking. Why should it not be the same for website interfaces?”. There was also strong support for an eighteenth-century portal.
- Digitisation taken for granted – The advantages of having digital editions online (“you can work without putting your socks on”) are so obvious that there is little need to argue for them
- We need to know what’s there – “Does EEBO really contain every early English book? Or are there gaps that are not obvious to researchers and undergraduates?”
- How do we stop the digital divide – “Scholars from less wealthy institutions should not be isolated because their library cannot afford the subscription cost”
- Comparative video - for instance, InView (due to launch in Spring 2009) is providing comparative videos, which allow users to see how different media outlets have covered the same historical event – something the BBC obviously cannot do by itself.
- Unique content- Newsfilm Online (the full version of which is due to launched on October 3 2008) will have content simply unavailable to the BBC. To choose at random – news items relating to Bird Flu, the Twin Towers attack or, from early Gaumont Screen reels, highlights from England Australia cricket matches, and also film rushes which never made it to the TV screen.
- NewsFilm Online will also provide a different editorial viewpoint, delivering content from media sources such as ITN and Reteurs, rather than the Beeb.
- Both the JISC-funded projects will be making their content freely available to the HE and FE communities, not just for streaming but to download, remix and re-edit. The flexibility to allow users to do what they want with such video clips is vital if users are to exploit the resources in as many ways as possible.
- It’s also worth remembering that the BBC, however impartial, sees the world via a British lens. Perspectives from other countries are supplied by digitisation projects by the National Archives in the United States, or various national bodies in the Netherlands, France or Norway.
- Additionally, the BBC is more news-focussed, and, although the BBC seems to represent a huge mass of content, it is only a drop in the ocean of what could be digitised and made available online.
- So for example, the Performance Shakespeare collection, which is part of Film and Sound Online and the Arts on Film Archive can focus on performing arts content not readily available from the BBC archives.
- identify priority collections for potential digitisation housed within UK HE’s libraries, archives, museums as well as faculties and departments
- assess users’ needs and demand for special collections to be digitised across all disciplines, including the life and physical sciences as well as the arts, humanities and social sciences
- produce a synthesis of available knowledge about users’ needs with regard to usability and format of digitised resources
- provide recommendations for a strategic approach to digitisation within the wider context and activity of leading players both in the public and commercial sector
Download the full feedback from the session – 18th-century-resources-feedback-jan-2009.pdf
Web 2.0, IPR and digital preservation: new JISC resources
Two new resources have been recently launched by JISC as guidance on how to deal with IPR issues in Web2.0 content and on digital preservation, including preservation of user generated content.
The free Web2Rights online diagnostic tool addresses the confusion often found when dealing with IPR in its relation to Web 2.0 within education, and provides a step-by-step user guide to ensure the protection of both their and others’ copyright in using, deploying and repurposing content.
The six minute animation below explains some of the main concepts based on three different user scenarios.
The new handbook created by JISC’s PoWR project (Preservation of Web Resources) offers a wealth of tips and information for web managers, data professionals and those making decisions concerning the long-term preservation of online resources.
With such vast quantities of digital data available on or via the Internet, the PoWR handbook encourages institutions to see the requirement for coherent preservation strategies. Key issues include prioritising what to keep, how to keep it, which preservation policies to implement, the consequences of preservation decisions and how to provide sustainable access for the future.
Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources
In a previous post earlier in the year, Measuring the impact of digitised resources (12/6/2008), we announced the work that the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) was about to embark upon of identifying use and usage patterns of five JISC-funded online resources and devising meaningful metrics for the measurement of the impact of digitised scholarly resources.
This is a crucial tool for those interested in digitisation, providing much needed evidence and analysis of how digital resources are actually making a difference
At a recent JISC Digitisation programme meeting, Eric T Meyer and Katherine Eccles provided some background on how the OII is planning to carry out the work and the mixture of quantitative and qualitative measures they will take into consideration to gain some understanding of the use of such resources.
Quantitative Measures include:
• Webometrics
• Analytics
• Log file analysis
• Scientometrics / bibliometrics
• Content analysis of media coverage
Qualitative Measures include:
• Stakeholder interviews
• Resource surveys
• User feedback analysis
• Focus groups
• Questionnaires
One of the interesting things that emerged from their presentation was the need not to “obsess” too much about any particular indicator at any given time (eg, no need to look at web stats every month), but to consider a range of indicators collectively at regular intervals in time, in order to identify patterns over a longer duration of time.
The work will culminate in the creation of a Toolkit for the the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources, which will be disseminated in Spring 2009.
Presentation (PDF) on the Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources.
Yesterdays’s Headlines …. Televised News Online
NewsFilm Online, launched last week, contains 60,000 digitised clips from the archives of ITN and other news sources.
It’s an incredibly rich resource, featuring news stories relating to events such as the Suez crisis in 1956, Nelson Mandela’s first interview in 1961, the moon landing in 1969 and the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997.
For the moment, it’s fun just exploring some of the content that is there.
But it will be interesting to see how the resources get used in the educational community.
Video has not had a great take up in teaching and learning – is this because of the content, or because of the medium? How NewsFilm Online is used will give us much more evidence in this area.
(Note the videos can only be accessed by those in UK university and college sector.)
Will a BBC video archive swamp everything else?
Various events earlier in the summer gave the BBC the chance to parade their plans to digitise their entire back archive of televisual material. (Although it’s interesting to note there is little info on this on the BBC site itself, particularly on its archive pages).
The plans are not new. Back in 2006, there were reports about this as well.
As often happens when the BBC gets involved, other providers are might be a little nervous about the effect of this.
With the power of the BBC brand and its related marketing strength, and the undoubted brilliance of technologies like the iPlayer, does this not mean that all users, irrespective of background, go straight to the BBC for their video content, rendering the offerings of other content providers somewhat useless?
Other content providers, such as JISC-funded projects like Newsfilm Online or InView will certainly have to work harder at persuading users to visit their site. However, compelling reasons do exist for getting those users to come.
So that all goes to show there are plenty of reasons for users to work with video content beyond that made available via the BBC (which it should not be forgotten is only talking about these plans for digitisation at the moment).
But other content providers need to have focussed marketing and communications plans to ensure users are aware of this.
Communities and online collections
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.
Requirements for digitised resources in Islamic Studies
Following the designation of Islamic Studies as a strategically important subject by the UK Government in June 2007, JISC commissioned a review of user requirements for digitised resources for researchers and teachers within higher education working in the field of Islamic Studies.
The University of Exeter carried out the study and in their final report made a range of recommendations:
• The creation of a authoritative gateway to Islamic Resources
• Develop digitised catalogues of Islamic manuscripts and related research material such as recent theses;
• The commissioning of a feasibility study into the creation of a corpus of interactive online education materials, which could also be hosted by the national gateway
• Continuation, and increase, of the subsidies for major online reference works in Islamic Studies.
• The archiving of the websites of UK Islamic organisations
• Subsidising the acquisition of an online collection of research monographs in Islamic Studies, should such a collection be developed by a commercial organisation.
Read the full report on User Requirements for Digitised Resources in Islamic Studies (Word) or (PDF).
Is academia ready for Web 2.0?
As part of its development, the Pre-Raphaelite Resource digitisation project recently commissioned an audience research study to consult users about whether the inclusion of Web 2.0 features on a resource of this type would be useful or important to the education community. The report indicated that:
“there is some readiness among the education community for Web 2.0 technologies but only in the context of academia as a status-conscious, competitive environment. Whilst there are clear benefits to be achieved from providing teachers and students with the opportunity to share ideas in the context of stimulus artefacts, many hold reservations about ‘giving away’ their intellectual property.”
Some interesting points to note:
• Social networking features are perceived by both HE students and lecturers as primarily for pleasure rather than for work, although for younger students, the boundaries between work and life are increasingly blurred
• Content is still king: to be a truly useful research tool, students and lecturers need to know that a resource has been created for them and has scholarly merit, and reliable and relevant content
• Wikipedia was singled out by both FE and HE interviewees as being particularly unreliable, and yet highly popular;
• The features most associated with a Web 2.0 approach (rate, comment, upload, blog and send to friend) were commonly described with reference to social networking or e-commerce sites and were largely considered non-academic and therefore inappropriate for the Pre-Raphaelite online resource.
The study was carried out by Illumina Digital.
Read the Pre-Raphaelite Resource project: Audience Research Report;
Appendix 1; Appendix 2; Appendix 3; Appendix 4; Appendix 5
Prioritising Digitisation
One of the most difficult aspects of developing a digitisation strategy is deciding how you will prioritise your digitisation work
Fragile manuscripts, fading newspapers, valuable coins, hidden audio recordings, historical texts and the like all clamour for the right to be digitised first.
The JISC Digitisation Programme recognises this is a difficulty and therefore issued an ITT, along with the Research Information Network, to look into the matter: PRIORITISING DIGITISATION: ESTABLISHING USERS’ NEEDS FOR DIGITISED CONTENT IN UK HE INSTITUTIONS.
Invitations are now invited for proposals.
The aims of the study are