JISC is looking for digital content projects interested in having links to their resources from two gateways, MediaHub and CultureGrid (and by extension a third, Europeana)
- MediaHub (currently in development for 2011) will provide access to image, video and audio resources in Higher and Further Education. It evolves from the Vision and Sound Portal at EDINA at the University of Edinburgh.
- Not too differently from MediaHub, Culture Grid is harvesting metadata and then linking back to digitised content in museums, libraries, archives within the UK. Much content is already available for searching, including material uploaded by the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS). The site is run by the Collections Trust,
- Europeana has similar aims to Culture Grid, but works right across Europe. All content from CultureGrid is automatically harvested into Europeana.
I’ve already talked informally with some JISC–funded projects about this, and a few have taken things forward themselves. JISC has small amounts of funding for projects who wish to tailor and export their metadata to such portals. The portals will then incorporate the metadata and provides links back to the original resource.
Collections must be based on discrete digital objects (i.e. a single image, movie or sound file), and have a stable URL to point at. Content for CultureGrid needs to be open access, whilst it can be gated or open for MediaHub.
If you are interested in exposing your content to these sources, then get in touch with me (Alastair Dunning) and we will take things from there. We are primarily interested in content funded by JISC, but are happy to consider other resources.