JISC Strategy and mass digitisation: Malcolm Read, Executive Secretary, JISC
Would like to present the wider context. Digitisation is just one of many things we find and do not fund it in isolation. We have two digitisation programmes running. We spent £10 million on the first round. To get the money you have to make a case about 18 months before it comes in. At that time transatlantic network connectivity was enormously expensive and great cause of concern. I argued that we need the money for that. By the time the money arrived, the cost of that was virtually nothing. At the end of the request I had said that if there was any spare money then digitisation was a good thing to do. There turned out to be £10m of spare money!
Had no difficulty persuading the finding bodies to get money for the second tranche. We don’t just want to do bulk digitisation – we also want to support digitisation of non-text material and how best to access and manage resources like that; and how resources can link together. Also placed a greater emphasis on uses for students and not just research aspects. We hope there will be a third tranche so thinking about earmarking any future funds for exposing some of the special collections that UK higher education holds. Strategically increasingly important with moves of China to much more mass higher education provision and how this might impact on overseas students coming into UK higher education. So a kind of marketing.
Much of our resources tend to be focused on the humanities as easier for sustainability as historical documents do not need to be updated. But we do have JISC Collections which considers subscription-model resources which may change from year to year such as science papers.
Our repositories work: we’re beginning to build institutional repositories to house output such as papers but also research data and learning materials.
The bigger e-content picture: lots of content out there and much of it not owned by the sector at all. We’re committed to working with MLA, NHS, BBC, libraries and defining and working across an environment of content and the driver behind it is economies of scale but also to try to broaden the access. At the moment a student leaving school might no longer have access to content they had at school, they might get different access at college or university but then leave there and lose access again when they start work. In the NHS many people are involved in higher education and further education and depending which hat they wear depends which resources they can access. We want to develop a common approach to the management and availability of resources across these sectors.
So we have set up the Strategic Content Alliance. Stuart Dempster heads that up and will bend your ear at some point.