But he’s right that certain trends in digital humanities are insurgent and radical. In this era of technology patent wars, and the walled-garden approach to tech sharing represented by the Apple and Android app stores, even something as apparently neutral as a commitment to open source has a political/ideological undertow. That it can’t be reduced to a manifesto is neither here nor there.

Of course, there are more strands to the digital humanities than the ones Fish is talking about, and you’re perfectly correct to say that it’s a field of emerging traditions (a nice phrase, and a nice way of thinking about it), but again, I don’t see any major disagreement between your views. I don’t, for instance, see him calling for any developments or technologies to be thrown away.

There certainly is an argument against NC – if you aren’t selling the images, why not allow commercial use? But to say that no one should be allowed to digitise out-of-copyright materials in order to earn revenue would seriously limit the amount of content that is digitised and available (e.g. Early English Books Online, Eighteenth Century Books Online, Early European Books Online, etc.). By the same argument, what publisher would create an edition of Shakespeare’s works if they couldn’t then sell the book?

If they had only published ineptly-produced images of public domain items they would still have a right to assert their copyright, for instance, even if a court would be likely to find that the images were in the public domain if the issue were ever contested.

this is a commercial project, so income generation is the priority for the British Library. It does get a bit confusing as 10 years ago there was lots of joint working on Newsplan to ensure that newspapers were made available, especially in local libraries and institutions, and there are still those who see these as a logical continuation. The world has moved on though and co-operation appears to be a luxury. I was at a meeting with librarians about the Newsplan project and when asked what provisions there would be for libraries we were told by the BL representative that this had not been included as they were only concerned about themselves and it was up to others to negotiate.

JISC funded a number of institutions to digitise stuff, but the content is then owned by the institutions. It is also up to them to sort out long-term sustainability of access. If some of them do so through complicated routes such as this one can’t blame JISC. I understand your disappointment, but the BL should be the target of your ire – or the companies who insist on competing in a way that disadvantages their customers.

It’s not actually a JISC decision to create a second interface. That’s a separate contract between the BL and brighsolid, and while there is some overlap between the content, the new interface does include some new digitised papers

As mentioned in the blog post, JISC will be in discussion with the British Library about gaining access to the new content

Alastair

Here in Wales, as opposed to in London, the value of a national [Welsh] ‘collection’ is more obvious, since it’s linked to powerful (positive) notions of identity, language and politics. Britishness, on the other hand, for good or ill, is now unravelling as rapidly as it was invented (as described in Linda Colley’s ‘Britons’): your phrase ‘whatever Britishness is’ is revealing. ‘Englishness’ may be equally problematic.

It’s worth adding, though, that for us legal deposit libraries a ‘national [UK] collection’ has a real and present meaning – and a legal duty we cannot escape. (With luck this duty will soon extend to digital publications throughout the UK.)

Having said all that I’ve been sceptical for some time about the ’showcase’ or ‘exhibition’ view of digitisation, whether nationally conceived or otherwise (what you call a ‘highlights package’). It seems to me that digitisation should have two roles: it should take its (important but subordinate) place in other programmes and projects, eg research projects, where appropriate; and/or it should continue to hold a starring role as ‘big digitisation’.

The latter approach seems to be consistent with the traditional role of a large general research library: to provide a large, miscellaneous and free reservoir of knowledge to a wide variety of users, without imposing a preconceived view of which fish will appeal or which fishing method the anglers will prefer. In the 21st century this has to be digital/online if the library is not to transmute into a museum.

In Wales we have a well established programme called the ‘Theatre of Memory’, which aims to give free online access to the entire print output of Wales, within copyright restrictions. Big digitisation is critical to this large ambition, and the National Library, with financial support from JISC, the Welsh Government and others, has already treated millions of pages of journals and newspapers, in and out of copyright. Re-use rules will be liberal, and we have no circumscribed user groups in mind.

The National Library is also a contributor to the ‘People’s Collection’, a distributed collection of digitised cultural objects from all over Wales, which allows users to upload their own material to the site (and do various other interactive things) as you advocate.

So, as you say, a ‘UK Digital Collection’, whatever that may be, needs to take account of a wide range of pre-existing collections and services. It can’t begin with a tabula rasa.

It’s not an area I have any detailed knowledge of, but my impression is that many of our national collections were built around a core that was originally private in some way – and certainly many have incorporated private collections over time.

Why did this private->public shift happen? What were the triggers that led to collections being opened up to the public? Was it pure philanthropy, or were there underlying economics that meant this shift had to happen for the collection to persist?

I may be off track here, I just have a gut instinct there are lessons to learn, and parallels to draw.