Winning Projects – JISC Content Call 06/11

23 projects have been selected as part of the JISC Content Programme for 2011-13.

The project are formed into three strands of work, detailed below.

——–

A total of 18 proposals were received for Strand A which supported digitisation and creation of Open Educational Resources (OER). The peer review panel selected 9 projects for funding.

Open University, Histology and histopathology: virtual microscopy online, £101,078

• The project will assemble sets of digital images and microscope slides for the study of histology and histopathology from four project partners. These will be presented through a virtual microscope and placed on an OpenLearn server so that they will be accessible on-line from any web-browser.

University of Southampton, OpenLIVES (Learning Insights from the Voices of Emigrés from Spain), £124,931

• This project will digitise resources documenting the migration experiences of Spanish emigrés. The content will be developed as open education resources for a range of teaching and learning contexts in humanities and social sciences on topics such as migration, life history, employability skills, research skills, language learning.

University of Leicester, Manufacturing pasts: industrial change in 20th Century Britain, £102,740

• This project will benefit students, lecturers and public organizations with a stake in Britain’s industrial past by creating a range of open educational resources which use the city of Leicester to illustrate the changing experience of British manufacturing and its impact on urban society, landscape and environment across the twentieth century.

The Open University, UKVM (United Kingdom Virtual Microscope), £114,912

• The aim of this project is to create the United Kingdom Virtual Microscope (UKVM) for Earth science as a freely accessible on-line open educational resource. Using the UKVM, students will zoom, pan, and rotate specimens in variable light conditions, helping to develop their classification and identification skills without need for high cost microscopes and thin section preparation facilities.

University of Surrey, Context, Culture and Creativity: Enriching e-Learning in Dance (CCC-EED), £122,391

• The CCC-EED project aims to create and embed OERs which enhance student-centred learning, and maximize the use of enriched digital resources and collections in the Dance education sector (HE, FE, and schools). University of Surrey academic staff will collaborate with staff in the National Resource Centre for Dance to design enriched e-learning packages.

University of Sussex, Observing the 1980s, £94,654

• Observing the 1980s seeks to make available the writings of 10-15 respondents to the Mass Observation Project during the 1980s, together with 25 complete interviews from the significant Oral History Collections at the British Library. The project will also include selections from the extensive pressure group and ephemeral material from this period currently housed at the University of Sussex Library.

University for the Creative Arts, Zandra Rhodes Digital Study Collection, £110,000

• The project pilots an Open Educational Resource for embedding in teaching and learning based on the initial digitisation of 500 of the fashion designer Zandra Rhodes’ most iconic and landmark pieces that cover the entire period of her creative career to date.

University College London, OBL4HE, £123,231

• OBL4HE will develop a series of e-learning resources based on the innovative use of objects held in UCL’s Museums & Collections and the University of Reading’s Museum and Special Collections. The resources will represent a range of disciplines, but will be linked by their interdisciplinary approach and specific use of Object Based Learning (OBL).

Birmingham City University, Architect US (Architecturally Useful Scholarly) Resources, £125,000

• The project will create innovative resources featuring contemporary designs from diverse leading UK architectural practices and embed them into teaching practice at both Architecture and Construction & Property Schools at different institutional project partners.

—————

Winners of Strand B (Mass Digitisation) of JISC Content Call 06/11

68 proposals were received by JISC and peer reviewers selected 7 projects for funding. It goes without saying that the standard of applications was very high – the peer review meeting covered over 20 proposals that were all of a quality sufficient to receive JISC funding.

Stuart Dunn, King’s College London, Digital Exposure of English Place-names, £673,269.46

• This project will digitize the entire 86 volume corpus of the Survey of English Place-Names, the ultimate authority on historic place-names in England, and make its 4 million forms available via the JISC-funded Unlock service, along with vigilantly curated crowd-sourced contributions from the expert community.

Michael Peter Alfred Howe, British Geological Survey, Nottingham, GB/3D Fossil Types Online, £691,068

• The project represents the collaboration between several major British organisations to create a single, freely accessible online database of type specimens of British fossil species, with images, including stereopairs (anaglyphs), and downloadable 3D digital models. It is the first major collection of 3D models and anaglyphs available for unrestricted free download.

Grant Young, Cambridge University, Navigating 18th Century Science and Technology: the Board of Longitude, £376,308

• The Board of Longitude archive documents the 18th-century government sponsored competition to solve the critical problem of safe navigation at sea. The competition attracted hundreds of submissions from the whole cross-section of society, from the greatest scientific minds of the day through to amateurs and eccentrics, and the resultant archive charts the development of science and technology throughout the century, captures its concerns and politics, and charts the expansion of the British Empire through the great voyages of discovery, acquisition and trade.

Christy Henshaw, Wellcome Library, Medical Officer of Health Reports for Greater London 1848-1972, £277,248

• This project will create a major new free online dataset covering public health in London from the mid-19th century to the late-20th century. The project focuses on the printed reports of the Medical Officers of Health in Greater London between 1848 and 1972, a collection rich in textual information and statistical data covering every aspect of health and sanitation in the metropolis.

Andrew Wilson, Bradford University, Digitised Diseases, £749,966.40,

• Digitised Diseases seeks to bridge the gap between modern clinical medicine and the use of historic medical collections by digitising pathological skeletal specimens from world renowned archaeological collections in Bradford and London, primarily using textured 3D laser scans. The project will specifically focus on specimens with those chronic diseases that affect the human skeleton for which many of the physical changes are often not readily observable, even within clinical practice.

Neil Forbes, Coventry University, New Connections: the BT e-Archive, £744,873

• The modern age has been shaped by telecommunications, and the history of Britain’s leading role in the development of this technology and its impact on society is contained in the internationally-important BT Archive. Coventry University, in collaboration with BT Archives, proposes to catalogue and digitise the archive and develop a searchable online archive of photographs, images, documents and correspondence held by British Telecom plc.

Elizabeth Bradshaw, British Oceanographic Data Centre, Rescue of historical UK sea level charts and ledgers, £181,559

• The aim of this project is to digitise and scan historic analogue chart and manuscript sea level records held in the archive of the British Oceanographic Data Centre and to make these records available to the wider community. These unique and valuable records include tide gauge ledgers stretching back to 1853. These form a unique and irreplaceable resource which will aid understanding of sea level change, and, if made widely accessible, can be utilised for a variety of educational purposes.

————-

23 proposals were received by JISC for its Strand C of it 06/11 Content Call on Clustering Content. The following 7 proposals were selected by the peer reviewers for funding. (* marks a conditional award)

Manuscripts Online: Written Culture from 1000 to 1500, Michael Pidd, University of Sheffield, £109,612

• Manuscripts Online will be a a sister site to the JISC‐funded Connected Histories (1500‐1900) website and will extend the model of data clustering and federated searching developed by providing access to written and early printed primary sources for the period 1000 to 1500.

ENGrich, Tim Bullough, Liverpool University, £149,009

• The ENGrich project will create a structured system for existing online teaching and learning resources in Engineering disciplines, ranging from static images to interactive animations. The completed set of resources will be used to help innovative and value-added teaching.

Old Maps Online: Finding and referencing historical mapping as a platform for research and teaching, Humphrey Southall, Portsmouth University, £139,900

• Old Maps Online will construct a portal for finding historic maps based on locality and period covered, not just title and publisher; and therefore of value for anyone studying the past, not just cartographic historians. Geo-referenced map metadata will be assembled from the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the National Library of Scotland and A Vision of Britain through Time, all in the UK; the New York Public Library, Harvard University and the David Rumsey Collection in the US; and selected European collections. Best practices for defining persistent Uniform Resource Identifiers for historic maps will be created and shared.

Integrated Broadside Ballads Archive, Alexandra Franklin, University of Oxford, £145,244

• The University of Oxford will integrate existing resources for the study of the English folk song and printed ballad tradition. Resources to be clustered are: a corpus of nearly 30,000 ballads, many of them unique survivals, printed between the 16th and 20th centuries, in Bodleian Library collections; nearly 5,000 largely pre-1700 ballads from the University of California’s online resource; and the Roud Broadside and Folk Tune Indexes, comprehensive indexes of the song tradition and references to songs, based at the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library.

Linking Parliamentary Records through Metadata, Richard Gartner, Kings College London, £138,087.85 *

• This project will allow for the first time the federated searching and browsing of UK and Ireland Parliamentary papers by defining and implementing a unified metadata strategy for historical and contemporary parliamentary digitisation projects. The project will define a generic XML schema for parliamentary metadata, define controlled vocabularies for key components of this metadata, and produce a platform for a union catalogue of these materials based on the records created.

Online Veterinary Anatomy Museum Nick Short, The Royal Veterinary College, £128,339

• The Online Veterinary Anatomy Museum (OVAM) will provide access to a comprehensive set of online veterinary anatomical resources from UK veterinary schools and other institutions. These will be aggregated and arranged in an environment which will make them easily discoverable and usable by a range of different learners.

Stepping into Time, Catherine Emma Jones, Portsmouth University, £106,453 *

• Stepping TIme explores the mechanisms of linking and clustering historic data related to World War 2 bomb damage maps using geography and time. This will be achieved through the development of a geo-mobile application which overlays the real world with historical data views relating to bomb damage.