JISC Digitisation Programme

When the University of Cambridge, with help from the University of Sussex (and JISC funding), released its Newton Papers, there was widespread acclaim for the resultant website, but also some criticism of their use of Creative Commons.

Some bloggers (here and here) asserted that the (seventeenth-century) documents are out of copyright and therefore should be labelled as public domain.

It seems a common sense argument, but this ignores the actual state of UK and the complexity of digitising fragile material.

UK Copyright law implies that digitised images can create their own copyright, if the digitisation is of high-quality.* A quick snap with a cameraphone of an ancient document does not accrue copyright; but a complex procedure involving conservation, handling, colour calibration, adjusting lighting conditions, careful focussing does create copyright in the resultant digital image. The contextual infrastructure to actually deliver the Digital Library also required serious investment of time and money.

Thus in the case of Newton Papers, Cambridge do have a right to assert Creative Commons over their digitised versions of the papers.

It also should be noted that the Cambridge licence used is still very liberal – as long as you don’t make money from it and attribute the source you can use it in any way you want, including creating derivative images. A few years ago, it was a very rare university that would have gone near such an open licence.

* However, it should be noted that this implication has never been tested in a UK courtroom. It was tested in the USA (in the Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. case), but the result in favour of Corel is not binding in the UK. The dispute between the Wikimedia Foundation and the National Portrait Gallery is also interesting in this respect.

The OER projects in the JISC Content programme 2011-13 recently attended a workshop on “Introduction to Open Educational Resources (OER)”, organised by the Open Unviersity’s SCORE team.

All projects focus on the digitization of primary material from special collections covering a variety of subjects, from fashion design to architectural drawings and microscopic rock slides. Each project also produces a number of OERs by packaging, or “cooking up”, the “raw” digital assets for embedding in HE courses as well as for wider use and re-use.

Paraphrasing the HEFCE report on online learning, the first speaker, Andy Lane, got the audience thinking about what “Collaborate to Compete” meant to them within the context of creating and making available Open Educational Resources for students and teachers.

A stimulating discussion followed; here are some of the highlights:

• all of the projects recognised the benefits of working in partnership, in particular for the opportunity it offers to bring together content from different HE institutions as well as from other domains, such as the private or heritage sector

• individual academics are on the whole happy to collaborate with colleagues from other institutions, even if their own institutions might be seen as competing with each other within a particular subject discipline

• following from the above, it was noted that competition among universities belonged more to the institutional level or the “marketing” department, and individual teachers perhaps felt that pressure less

• sometimes, however, people felt they had to collaborate because they “were told” to do so – not least by funders

• competition is felt more strongly within the research community than the teaching community, but there were different views on this

• collaboration had to allow for institutions to retain their own identity, especially when creating joint outputs such as OERs and making content available more broadly

• although making open content available reflected positively on an institution’s status and sense of identity, it was recognised that from a student’s point of view open content in itself wouldn’t necessarily constitute a reason for selecting the institution where to study, especially as “open content” would be available to them anyway

• recognition that there is a range of “openess” when we speak about content, and while institutions are willing to make some of their content openly available they will also jealously protect other content – the decision often based on potential revenue generating models, such as selling courses outside of the formal HE sector

• “content” was likened to the music industry: what is valuable (=attracts students = makes money) is not the content itself (= music), after all students will find some content or other somewhere, through more or less legal means, that they will be able to use, but the way content is experienced by students.

So, is content king, on its own? It seems not.

The way content/OER is used within an institution – what teachers and students do with it, how it is integrated within the curriculum to engage students, promote active participation, encourage peer working and interaction, enhance learning opportunities and ultimately the student experience as part of a community within a particular institution – is what makes the difference.

And this difference has quite a bit to do with where institutions will compete.

One of the largest and strangest archives in the UK is the collection of the British Geological Survey. Its mammoth collection store, just outside Nottingham, holds thousands of fossils but also pallets and pallets of rocks samples, often taken as samples prior to oil drilling.

JISC has recently funded the Survey to lead a nationwide project to begin a UK fossil collection, including the 3D digitisation of some of the most relevant pieces.

The fossil is placed on the turntable, and the same piece of hardware takes a 2D image (via a digital lens) and 3D image (via a laser). The 2D image has captured colour whilst the 3D image have captured texture and shape, but only from a single viewpoint.

So the turntable then turns a set number of degrees, and more 2D and 3D images are taken until 360
degrees are completed.

The digitisation operator then has a suite of images to merge together.

There is some manual cleaning up (e.g. removing the turntable from the image) and then the operator clicks at similar points on related images.

From this, the software can merge the images together to form a single 3D digital object.

The project aims to digitise 4,000 fossils as part of its JISC funding. They will be made openly available via a variety of formats, allowing users to inspect them online (via Adobe 3D PDFs), download them for use in their own software (such as the open source MeshWeb) or even recreate the fossils using 3D printers.

A couple of JISC funded content projects have recently gone live, and they are worth having a look through as they provide excellent examples of good interfaces for digital content

One is the papers of Isaac Newton, a joint project between Cambridge and Sussex, whilst the other is Locating London’s Past, which involves Sheffield, Hertfordshire, the Institute of Historical Research and the Museum of London.

The Newton Papers are digitised to a beautifully high resolution, and have viewing facilities that allow users to view individual pages but also to get the sense of a collection of papers through which one can turn pages. Cambridge are also using a Creative Commons licence. Clicking on teh download link brings up a pop-up box that allows.

http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/newton

Locating London’s Past exploits a range of data related to early modern London. It’s a more complex tool than the Newton papers, but they’ve handled the ability to integrate and mash up different data soruces (e.g. trial reports, tax reports, and archaeological finds) via Google Maps.

http://www.locatinglondon.org/

As part of its initial work in digitising its huge collection of historic newspapers, the British Library received two tranches of funding from JISC to digitise 3m pages from its Colindale repository.

As part of a three-way project involving the BL, JISC and the publishers Gale-Cengage, these newspapers have been made available in two different ways. One interface is the newspapers.bl.uk interface, open to the general public, who can pay for access to the newspapers. The other interface allows for direct access via your university, public library or other institution

Since the JISC-funded projects ended, all universities and colleges in the UK have been able to sign up for free access and search the newspapers via this second interface.

More recently, the British Library has signed a contract with the firm brightsolid that commits the latter to digitising around 40m pages of the BL’s newspaper collection, and distributing them via different channels

Today marks the launch, by the British Library and brightsolid, of The British Newspaper Archive. At the moment, this includes some of the JISC funded content plus other newspapers digitised by brightsolid.

With time it will grow to include all the JISC content but also millions of pages digitised by brightsolid and also acquired from other newspapers that have microfilms of their contents

Access to the new site is currently via subscription (e.g., £79.95 per year) or micropayment

JISC will be in negotiation with the British Library about gaining access to the new content.

For all UK universities and colleges free access to the 3m pages funded under the JISC project remains via the Gale Cengage interface.

It’s great to see the Europeana Collections 1914-18 project get under way, bringing together sizeable digital collections from a range of European librares, and focussing them on a particular theme – in this case World War One

The concept of clustering of digital content on a particular topic has been on the radar for a while. And when content can be clustered from across an entire contient the ‘utopia’ of critical mass draws ever nearer.

But what will be interesting about this Europeana project is to see how the content will be made available. Simple search and browse facilities will be useful, but will only partially cater for scholarly needs. To ensure that what is provided is more than something that could be done via Google search, other facilities need to be included. These could include

• Textual and visual pattern searching; comparing similar texts and images
• Extractions of entities such as names, places, currencies
• Visualisation of metadata and extracted entities along spatio-temporal lines
• Developement of APIs to allow others to build interfaces on top of the digitised material
• Download for other text and data mining purposes
• Interaction with other social media tools such Zotero, delicious to allow for bookmarking and citiations

The licencing issue will be also interesting. The more open the content is, the more likely it is to be used, and the easier it will be to mee the advanced scholarly needs. But will it be possible to harmonise a licencing framework across several libraries?

The business model will also require thought. The use of Europeans provides a sustainable technical infrastrutcure, and this is great place to start from. But it is just as vital to keep adding new content and provide editorial sustainability, so that users return to the site.

How will new content be added to this Europeana portal when new matieral is digitised around Europe? Or indeed existing content such as the First World War Poetry Archive or The Serving Solider? And how will the tools and appearance be refreshed?

The NAM project at the University of the Arts, London is bringing together the photographic archives of Phillip Jones Griffiths, aspect of the film archive of Stanley Kubrick, and the journalistic archive of Phillip Knightley in an interactive multimedia resource that looks at the resonances of the conflict in Vietnam today. It then gets students working with the archives, developing their own commentaries based on the primary sources.

This video piece was created by Alex Milan Tracy as part of his research into Agent Orange for his MA in Photojournalism & Documentary photography.

The project will be completed early next year, with more content from the archives and students made available under a number of licences.

Boutiques, Shopping Malls and Specialist Shops
(or put your content where the users are, not where you are)

This presentation looks at why content owners such as universities, museums, archives etc need to deposit their digitised matieral not just on their own bespoke websites, but also the popular websites such as Google, Flickr, Wikipedia and others.

What would a UK Digital Collection look like? A glittering digital library or museum, with informative stunning, collections that represent the UK? A series of artworks, scientific discoveries, images, poems, documents, performances and programmesthat have played an essential role in shaping and informing UK society.

But that word ‘represents’ is a really thorny one. Who decides what the key items are? How do you reflect Britain’s and Northern Ireland’s myriad interests and communities? Do you focus on the long history or concentrate on the twentieth century? How is something selected that appeals to countless cultural and political groups but still retains a sense of Britishness (whatever Britishness is)? Like all histories, there is no neutral point of view.

Moreover, should such a Collection represent the width and holdings of UK cultural and educational institutions, or should it be drawn from the large national libraries and archives? And how is a balance achieved between the UK’s four nations? And should material be drawn from institutions outside the UK?

(Try thinking about this for yourself – I got stuck thinking about the Bayuex Tapestry)

Perhaps an even more question concerns the audience – Who would the Collection be for? For secondary schools? For undergraduates? For researchers? For the general public(s)? For an international audience?

Plenty of different international and national bodies are tackling these questions – the World Digital Library, Europeana, http://www.france.fr/, Digital New Zealand, the Digital Public Library of America, Trove. In the UK we have the admirable Culture Grid and the BBC, along with JISC and others, have been considering an ambitious Digital Public Space.

Looking through all these projects, it seems clear they most are moving away from worrying about this issue. Trying to mimic, however unconsciously, a pre-digital notion of an archive with a defined set of collections seems to create unnecessary boundaries in the Internet age.

What is much more appealing is a framework within which different indiviudal, communities, organisations can work, contribute and engage. A more open kind of place where there are fewer difficult top-down decisions about what content should be in there (those old pre-digital worries) and more thought given to how that content can be shared, discovered, used and curated (the digital worries of today and tomorrow).

Such a place has its foundations in an infrastructure that is flexible and allows people to add content, and then builds different ways of accessing for different audiences on top – to present a series of UK digital collections rather than just a single entity. Thinking about a UK Digital Collection doesn’t quite work on the World Wide Web.

Having said all that, let’s not ditch the concept of a UK Digital Collection without any further thought. The notion appeals to politicians and the media, and they tend to be very useful channels for getting funding and generating interest. But if we do have that conversation we need to make sure that it’s not just a highlights package of UK society and history, but that our valuable content is situated within an infrastructure that allows us to build many sustainable UK digital collections, rather a restrictive pre-digital one-off Collection.

The recent projects that JISC has funded as part of its Content Programme contain a fascinating range of materials – archives relating to the 18th-century Board of Longitude, the UK’s collection of fossils and reports documenting the health of modern London.

But the fascination of such an eclectic range of sources could also be construed as a weakness – the programme shows little deliberate join-up between the material being digitised.

This is very much a result of JISC’s approach; an open call, with each project being judged on its educational and technical merit, as part of a balanced portfolio of subjects and approaches.

An alternative strategy would be for JISC to, in consultation with the community, select a small number of strategic themes and request proposals only related to those themes, e.g. climate change, immigration to Britain or the history of European integration.

If four or five projects were funded in each of these themes, the opportunity to develop a critical mass of material is much greater. Many successful digitised resources (e.g. Early English Books Online – now available via the JISC Historic Books platform, or the Old Bailey Online) have succeeded by drawing material from diverse physical archives, but ensuring a focus on a particular community of practice.

But such an approach creates a number of challenges.

Above all, there exists the thorny question of what to focus on. A few years ago, JISC commissioned the Discmap survey in an attempt to marry researcher needs with outstanding non-digitised special collections in the UK. The report makes interesting reading (pdf), but only serves to show the breadth of both undigitised collections and researcher needs.

Alighting on particular fields, therefore, creates some specific risks. For instance by working with particular topics, one alienates whole reams of both curators, and researchers and teachers, whose fields have been excluded. For JISC, this has a remit to work with the whole HE community, this is an important factor.

Innovation is also important to JISC – indeed, its part of its very raison d’etre – and JISC wants to fund projects that integrate innovative practices into their digitisation. Experience has shown that innovation germinates in unexpected places. Sometimes bigger, well-established institutions – the type of place that would be more likely to play a role in ‘strategic’ digitisation – cannot innovate in the way the younger, more nimble organisations can .

Finally, developing strategic digitisation also entails partnerships. Working with others is great and helps create better digital resources, but they need time to grow and flourish. But when forced, they are more largely to cause friction, to the detriment of any joint output. In a landscape where there are plenty of large-scale organisations who need to achieve their own strategic goals, forging such broader partnerships can difficult.

Despite all that, the notion of a a critical mass being developed via a strategic approach remains appealing, especially if associated with a larger notion of a UK Digital Collection.

And JISC’s recent call in relation to World War One, and its completed programme of work in Islamic Studies, start to address this – seeking proposals that will pull together digitised content on a particular theme.

As funding tightens this is a discussion that will continue – do we want the creation of digital content to be focused on a select area and done in great depth or do we want a broad approach that creates a wider constituency of curators and users, but perhaps without the same intensity?