Winners of JISC e-content Programme

Funding letters have now been largely signed and JISC can announce the winners of its e-content Programme. The call was divided into two strands, the first to allow institutions to develop their skills and strategies for digitising and delivering their digitised content, and the second to maximise the use and benefits of existing digitised content.

Projects are starting from autumn 2009 onwards and all will be finished by February 2011.

Strand A – Institutional Skills and Strategies

LIFE-SHARE (Lifecycle Strategies and Architecture for Regional E-content), University of Leeds

• The LIFE-SHARE project will address institutional and consortial strategies and infrastructure for the creation, curation and preservation of digital content. Led by the University of Leeds, it will also work with the University of York, University of Sheffield and JISC Digital Media.

RunCoCo, University of Oxford – (Conditional award)

• Building on the work of the Great War Archive project, this project will encourage the formation of Community Collection projects, whereby projects are built across and by a broader community (education and public sectors) rather than focussed on a sinlge host institution.

Look here! University for the Creative Arts – (Conditional)

• Headed by the Visual Arts Data Service, this project will address how the digital life-cycle for content in the arts can be simplfied and embedded in institutional practice.

Centre of Competence for Heritage digitisation in the North of England, University of Manchester

• This project will investigate the feasibility of establishing a Centre of Competence for Heritage Digitisation, based within the University of Manchester, promoting best practice in object-centred digitisation.

Centre for Digital Asia, Africa and the Middle East, SOAS

• This project will see the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) establish a Centre for Digital Asia, Africa and the Middle East. The Centre will develop a digital collection, curation, preservation and dissemination strategy for SOAS.

OCRPodium, Kings College London

• OCRPodium will trial an open source approach to Optical Character Recognition, using the OCRopus software and embed OCR activities within flexible, semi-automated digitisation workflows for text-based material.

Strand B – Maximising the use of digitised content

Visualising China, University of Bristol – (awaiting funding letter)

• The Visualising China project will build on the digitisation work by the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Bristol and the 15,000 digital images which have been created, and 5,000 images available to search and browse with a further 7,000 having full meta-data, covering a date range of 1870 to 1950.

Mapping Crime beyond the John Johnson Collection, University of Oxford

• The Bodleian Library proposes to map between the crime material available through The John Johnson Collection: an Archive of Printed Ephemera and other online resources containing related material or source information.

Connected Histories, University of Sheffield – (conditional)

• Connected Histories will create a federated search facility for a wide range of distributed electronic resources relating to early modern and nineteenth-century British History.

Grass Portal, University of Sheffield

• Grasses are the fuel that feeds human civilization, and a major focus for international research as food security and natural ecosystems come under threat from rising populations and climate change. The GrassPortal will be a world-class ecological data facility for grasses and science investigating this area.

CEDAR (Clustering and Enhancing Digital Archives for Research), University of East London

• Led by the University of East London (UEL) CEDAR will further enhance and embed the East London Theatre Archive (ELTA) into three popular Theatre Studies programmes at Royal Holloway, Nottingham and Sheffield universities.