JISC Digitisation programme funding call: pre-announcement

The JISC Digitisation programme is pleased to announce that a new funding call will be issued shortly, towards the end February-beginning March 2009.

The call will focus on 3 key themes:

1) institutional skills and strategies, including activities aimed at embedding digitisation into institutional strategies and practices, eg development of institutional skills, policies and capacity to perform digitisation; creating, or building on existing, institutional infrastructure, workflows and processes to streamline digitisation; developing partnerships and collaborative models at regional or other levels aimed at carrying out digitisation in a more cost effective way, for example by reaching economies of scale, or capitalising on institutions’ own particular areas of expertise in different aspects of digitisation activity, and through fostering knowledge exchange and sharing of good practice;

2) enhancing existing online digital collections in order to increase their current use, including enhancing interfaces, enriching existing metadata, improving resource discovery mechanisms, for example by making use of Web2.0 networks and functinalities or search engine optimisation, promotion and marketing activities within relevant research and teaching communities as well as embedding resources into teaching and learning;

3) clustering of existing online digital collections, in order to create critical mass of content and increase its current use, including bringing together collections which have been identified as being complementary from a thematic, chronological or format point of view or making use of existing platforms and services to deliver digital content through a variety of entry points. This may involve merging the metadata or technical infrastructure for related resources; developing cross-search functionality; exploiting Web2.0 methodologies such as data mash-ups to ‘cross-fertilise’ the content in existing resources.

A total funding of just over £2m will be available, and projects will be expected to start in September 2009 and be completed by March 2011.

Higher and Further education institutions based in England and Wales only will be able to apply as lead institutions. However, partnerships are welcomed.

More information on the funding call will be available through this blog as well as the JISC web site.