Author: Paola Marchionni

The Jisc Content programme is nearing its completion. At the final programme meeting we held early in July we asked projects to reflect back on the last 18 months of work and in particular on “unexpected” events such as problems, successes, unforeseen occurrences… both positive and negative. FRIENDS By far the majority of comments revolved […]

Here are highlights on some of the new digital collections which have been produced as part of the Jisc Content programme 2011-13. These collections are particularly aimed at teachers and learners as a way of engaging students with digitised archival resources which would otherwise be hard for them to access. All collections are licenced under […]

The BT Archive is held, with limited public access, in central London and is by any standard a collection of national and international importance, recognised by UNESCO. This large and remarkable collection details the history of Britain’s leading role in the development of telecommunications and the impact of this technology on society. With Jisc funding, […]

Two reports have recently been published as the outcome of surveys on special collections within research libraries in the UK and the US. Here are some highlights from the findings. OCLC and RLUK’s Survey of Special Collections and Archives in the UK and Ireland grapples with many of the issues inherent in the management of […]

Today Jisc and Ithaka S+R are launching “Sustaining Our Digital Future: Institutional Strategies for Digital Content”, a new report aimed at helping digital projects to thrive. This report, which provides a close look at three institutions (UCL, Imperial War Museums and the National Library of Wales) in the United Kingdom confirms: • How fragmented the […]

A few months back, the JISC Content team carried out an impact survey among previously funded digitisation and content projects. The survey aimed to find out more about how digitised collections were being used and the impact such projects have had on their hosting institutions and more broadly. The content of these slides (or better, […]

Last September, the Bodleian Library organised a conference entitle Revolutionising Early Modern Studies? The Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership in 2012 to mark a decade of the Text Creation Partnership (TCP)’s work producing searchable, full-text transcriptions of works in Early English Books Online (EEBO). JISC was pleased to support this conference by sponsoring […]

Last week some of the JISC Programme Managers met with representatives from the Brazilian Ministry of Culture, Digital Culture department. Our Brazilian colleagues talked us through their ambitious plans for setting up, among other things, a National System of Cultural Information and Indicators (SNIIC), a new platform that will push the open data agenda and […]

It is customary for many digitisation projects to undertake user consultation activities during their development as a way to ensure that the content that is being digitised is relevant to the needs of target users. And so it should be. However, while this activity is useful to ascertain the potential use that people might make […]

This year the Consortium for European Research Libraries (CERL) will be holding their national seminar on Accessing heritage research collections through digitisation: models and use at the British Library on Tue 30 October 2012. The programme includes contributions on licencing models, working with commercial partners, Google Books in Spain and the JISC Historic Books platform. […]

If you use digitised newspapers or other large-scale digital collections in your work, research or for personal interest, then please fill in the survey at https://opinio.ucl.ac.uk/s?s=15519. This survey is part of a research project being undertaken at UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, which aims to learn more about users of large scale digitised collections, and […]

The Digital Humanities Congress will be held at the University of Sheffield on 6-8 September 2012. Digital humanities is intended to mean “the use of technology within arts, heritage and humanities research as both a method of inquiry and a means of dissemination.” The programme is packed with sessions covering, among other topics, digitisation of […]

(From Stuart Dunn, King’s College London) The increasingly networked nature of the academic world is raising important questions about how the humanities can interact with wider communities outside the academy. ‘Crowd-sourcing’ is a term that has come to encompass a range of activities involving such interaction. It has been used in the past by physical […]

Despite its ubiquity as a website, Wikipedia is still underused as a mechanism for exposing digitised content. In a recent survey from the Enumerate project only 3% of digitised collections expose their content via Wikipedia. However, Wikipedia, or rather the suite of platforms under the Wikimedia Foundation, offers universities and cultural heritage institutions a complementary […]

“How many lifetimes?” was the recurrent question that the authors of the One Culture report kept on coming up against in their investigations of the work of the first round of projects that took part in the Digging into Data Challenge. The projects were all founded on a high degree of international collaborations and set […]

Just in case you hadn’t heard, seen or talked enough about the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, a recently launched JISC-funded website, Media and the memory in Wales, has collected people’s memories of seeing the coronation of Elizabeth II on television in 1953. The coronation of Queen Elzabeth II in 1953 was one of the key events […]

A new video discusses the work on sustainability of digital content that the Strategic Content Alliance (SCA) and ITHAKA S+R have been doing over the last few years and new resources now available. Highlights include Five things sustainable projects do and a tool which provides a Framework for post-grant sustainability. The video is also available […]

Projects in the JISC Content programme are now about 6 months into their development. After an initial settling down stage and bringing teams and documentation together, they’ve been getting their teeth into the nitty gritty of the work. Drawing on projects’ blogs and their own reflections on recent activity, which can be accessed on the […]