For all the successes of digitisation, it’s still a long, slow route from scanner to published article (or even monograph). Your team can create a rich, engaging website, but it takes plenty of time for scholars to start to work with the new material. It slips slowly into their ideas and interpretations, perhaps helped, perhaps … Read more
Scots Words and Place Names, run at the University of Glasgow, engaged the Scottish public via a variety of channels (direct contact with schools, a website, Facebook, Twitter) to enrich understanding of the uses and meanings of words and place names in Scots. The final report, just published, has some interesting findings This crowdsourcing project … Read more
The Internet first strengthened then destroyed the idea of a canon of art history. Early Internet dreamers saw the possibility of the utopian virtual museum, drawing together all the world’s great masterpieces to present a coherent narrative of the history of art. But the very proliferation of images that appeared on the web demonstrated the … Read more
(Prompted by a tweet from Tim Hitchcock, this is a series of short blog posts on imaginary / future resources in the Digital Humanities) When charting the history of the west, churches, cathedrals and abbeys provide spectacular material evidence. Their art, architecture and archives not only formed notions of aesthetic beauty but are testament to … Read more
The excerpt below is from the Intellectual Property Office website. The planned Exchange will be of great interest to those digitising orphan or in copyright works, hopefully leading to a acceleration of the process of rights clearance. On 22 November Business Secretary Vince Cable announced the appointment of Richard Hooper to lead a feasibility study … Read more
Stanley Fish recently published a blog post in the NY Times with the grandiose title, The Digital Humanities and the Transcending of Mortality. The article is engaging; it seems to sharpen the knife for the Digital Humanities but then decides not to stick it in (although that might be to follow) What strikes me about … Read more
After over four very happy years, I’m moving on from JISC to a new role in the Netherlands. It’s been a privilege to work with colleagues in one of the most innovative educational funding bodies in the world, and also with a broader community of researchers, librarians, teachers, archivists, policy wonks and web geeks. While … Read more
When the University of Cambridge, with help from the University of Sussex (and JISC funding), released its Newton Papers, there was widespread acclaim for the resultant website, but also some criticism of their use of Creative Commons. Some bloggers (here and here) asserted that the (seventeenth-century) documents are out of copyright and therefore should be … Read more
One of the largest and strangest archives in the UK is the collection of the British Geological Survey. Its mammoth collection store, just outside Nottingham, holds thousands of fossils but also pallets and pallets of rocks samples, often taken as samples prior to oil drilling. JISC has recently funded the Survey to lead a nationwide … Read more
A couple of JISC funded content projects have recently gone live, and they are worth having a look through as they provide excellent examples of good interfaces for digital content One is the papers of Isaac Newton, a joint project between Cambridge and Sussex, whilst the other is Locating London’s Past, which involves Sheffield, Hertfordshire, … Read more
As part of its initial work in digitising its huge collection of historic newspapers, the British Library received two tranches of funding from JISC to digitise 3m pages from its Colindale repository. As part of a three-way project involving the BL, JISC and the publishers Gale-Cengage, these newspapers have been made available in two different … Read more
It’s great to see the Europeana Collections 1914-18 project get under way, bringing together sizeable digital collections from a range of European librares, and focussing them on a particular theme – in this case World War One The concept of clustering of digital content on a particular topic has been on the radar for a … Read more
The NAM project at the University of the Arts, London is bringing together the photographic archives of Phillip Jones Griffiths, aspect of the film archive of Stanley Kubrick, and the journalistic archive of Phillip Knightley in an interactive multimedia resource that looks at the resonances of the conflict in Vietnam today. It then gets students … Read more
Boutiques, Shopping Malls and Specialist Shops (or put your content where the users are, not where you are) This presentation looks at why content owners such as universities, museums, archives etc need to deposit their digitised matieral not just on their own bespoke websites, but also the popular websites such as Google, Flickr, Wikipedia and … Read more
What would a UK Digital Collection look like? A glittering digital library or museum, with informative stunning, collections that represent the UK? A series of artworks, scientific discoveries, images, poems, documents, performances and programmesthat have played an essential role in shaping and informing UK society. But that word ‘represents’ is a really thorny one. Who … Read more
The recent projects that JISC has funded as part of its Content Programme contain a fascinating range of materials – archives relating to the 18th-century Board of Longitude, the UK’s collection of fossils and reports documenting the health of modern London. But the fascination of such an eclectic range of sources could also be construed … Read more
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. … Read more
The Connected Histories site now has a widget that you can put on your website. Details are available from the website and you can test it out below. Read more
Creating a Hive of Activity: Why we need to adopt APIs for Digitised Content Presentation from the 3rd EBLIDA-LIBER Workshop on Digitisation, October 2011 Read more
Early Music Online is a pilot project in which 300 of the world’s earliest surviving volumes of printed music, held in the British Library, have been digitised and made freely available online. You can browse the digitised content in Royal Holloway’s digital repository. Pages from Il primo libro de madrigali a sei voci di Pietro … Read more