For Jisc’s HE content team it’s all about providing the best resources, information and training to support the delivery, purchasing, creation and discovery of digital archives and libraries. We work closely with our members to improve resources for teaching, learning and research in UK Higher Education.
We provide Historical Texts, a key research resource where you can access 460,000 texts including: Early English Books Online, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, the UK Medical Heritage Library and British Library’s 19th Century Books.
Our Journal Archives resource provides access to over 1,000 historic journals including: The Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) Journals Archive, Periodical Archive Online, British Periodicals 1&2 and Spare Rib.
More information about all these services and our projects can be found on the projects and resources page of this blog.
We have developed a popular training course for making your digital collections easier to discover. This is to help in developing techniques to increase the reach of your digital collections, optimise them for discovery and evaluate their usage and impact.
Working with colleagues across Jisc, we also undertake R&D and innovation activities to identify potential new products and resources for our UK higher education members. Additionally, we are active in many networks in support of thought leadership and knowledge sharing. All this is about achieving more strategic and coordinated approaches to the acquisition of digital archival collections from publishers and working with our members to develop new approaches to digitising their own special collections.
We achieve this with advice from our Digital Archival Collections advisory group which is made up of library and archive leaders and practitioners and has representation from our key stakeholders, RLUK and SCONUL.
Our Historical Text advisory board ensures that the resource develops in line with current and future needs of teachers, learners and researchers.
For more information or to enquire about our work you can email peter.findlay@jisc.ac.uk or paola.marchionni@jisc.ac.uk (please note it can take us a little while to respond but we will endeavour to get back to you as soon as is practical).