Help us create digital collections, for the open web, by proposing UK alternative and underground press magazine titles in two broad subject areas:
- The struggle for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) civil rights and equality in Britain
- Second wave feminism in Britain
The deadline for submitting this information is: EXTENDED TO 16 APRIL 2018. Please download the call documentation and request form here: call document
The call is open to UK Higher Education and community-based libraries and archives.
Jisc is working with Reveal Digital, a US based open access publisher, on a project to make independent and alternative press collections available for teaching, learning and research. As part of the Independent Voices collection, Reveal Digital has already digitised 500,000 pages of content in the US by employing a “library crowd-funding” cost recovery-open access approach by which US libraries have contributed to the cost of digitisation of the collections. Access to the resulting collection is restricted to participating libraries until January 2019. In January 2019 the entire collection will be openly available on the public web. The resulting Independent Voices (IV) collection offers a rich melange of underground publication produced by Feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals and the New Left, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Latinos, and members of the LGBT community. Some of titles are already openly available.
Jisc’s Independent Voices UK initiative
Our collaboration with Reveal Digital has made the current IV collection available to UK Higher Education libraries for a fee. By utilising 50% of this fee and by matching the accumulated funds, Jisc now seeks to undertake the digitisation of material published in the UK. The material will, once digitised, be made available directly on public access.
12 Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) have purchased early access to Independent Voices. This has led to the accumulation of a limited fund of around £100,000 for digitisation activities, and we may look to identify further funding to digitise more content, if there is interest and demand in the academic community. We would like UK HE libraries and archives as well as non-HE and small independent or community archives/libraries to propose collections of material in two broad subject areas: post-1950s feminism (second wave) and the struggle for BAME civil rights and equality in Britain.
We recognise that this is a restricted set of material. We are interested in other categories such as punk zines, community newspapers and material produced by political groups, but we decided to make a start with these categories. We are still interested in hearing about other categories as we hope to continue digitisation once we have made a start with our initial categories.
UK HEI and independent, community libraries and archives can take part in this project (consortia are encouraged).
If you would like your collection to be considered for digitisation, please give us as much detail as possible by filling in the form in appendix A. If you would like to discuss your collection and proposal or if you need more information, please email Peter Findlay, Digital Portfolio Manager: peter.findlay@jisc.ac.uk by 2 February 2018.
