In a previous post (What’s your priority for digitisation? ), we mentioned the JISC-funded DiSCmap project, Digitisation in special collections: mapping, assessment, prioritisation, which aims to produce, among other things, a “top priority” list of special collections held within the UK Higher Education sector (including libraries, archives, and museums) for potential future digitisation, based primarily […]
Author: Paola Marchionni
A new online discussion forum has recently launched in order to gather people’s feedback on digitisation priorities for special collections. Current debates raise issues such as what defines a special collection, how to determine digitisation priorities, user needs in research & teaching, and a provocative “Devil’s advocate” thread to provide a platform to air “contrary […]
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Digitisation on YouTube
The recently launched JISC channel on You Tube, JISCmedia, showcases short videos on the digital collections that will be going live between now and Spring 2009 funded under the JISC Digitisation Programme. Here’s an example from the Cabinet papers 1915-1978 project, which has digitised millions of pages of government debates on key events of the […]
“Improving your online presence” is a FREE 3-day course held in London aimed at showing how simple and inexpensive techniques can be used to boast your collection’s web visibility and consequently traffic to your website. The course is organised by the Strategic Content Alliance (SCA) and the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN) and builds on […]
Two new resources have been recently launched by JISC as guidance on how to deal with IPR issues in Web2.0 content and on digital preservation, including preservation of user generated content. The free Web2Rights online diagnostic tool addresses the confusion often found when dealing with IPR in its relation to Web 2.0 within education, and […]
On 16-17 March 2009, The British Library will be hosting the conference Unlocking Audio 2: Connecting With Listeners. The conference is a key event exploring the use of sound recordings online, focussing on ways that researchers and other audiences expect to discover, browse, audition and analyse archival audio resources. It will be of interest to […]
The Learning on Screen Conference 2009 will be held at The Wellcome Collection (183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE) on 7th and 8th April 2009. This annual conference was established by the Society for Screen-Based Learning and focuses on the delivery of learning and research with moving image and sound – be it broadcasting, web […]
Cartoons are a very effective medium not only to comment on the social, political and historical events of our times but also for their power to stay in people’s hearts forever, thus recalling a particular event. One of the many contributors to the Great War Archive, part of the First World War Poetry Digital Archive, […]
For those considering large scale book digitisation, and the purchase of a book scanner, this brief report will help consider the pros and cons of some of the main book scanners currently available on the market. Julian Ball, the author of the report, attended an event at the Munich Digitisation Centre (18-10 June 2008) where […]
In a previous post earlier in the year, Measuring the impact of digitised resources (12/6/2008), we announced the work that the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) was about to embark upon of identifying use and usage patterns of five JISC-funded online resources and devising meaningful metrics for the measurement of the impact of digitised scholarly resources. […]
Salary: £28,000 to £32,800 depending on experience Based in: Central London Closing date for applications: Monday 29th September JISC Collections negotiates agreements for and acquires online content to support education and research. The key ambition in establishing JISC Collections is to widen accessibility to online resources, to save the academic sector time and money, and […]
Today Google announced that they are launching: “an initiative to make more old newspapers accessible and searchable online by partnering with newspaper publishers to digitize millions of pages of news archives.” This adds to the large amount of existing online newspaper content, by publications such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, that […]
A recent report from OCLC on The Impact of Digitizing Special Collections on Teaching and Scholarship. Reflections on a Symposium about Digitization and Humanities highlights the main recommendations that emerged from the symposium held in June 2008. The symposium brought together both primary users of (digitised) primary sources as well as “custodians”, such as librarians, […]
The second release of the JISC-funded John Johnson Collection: An Archive of Printed Ephemera, a collaboration between the Bodleian Library and ProQuest, is now available at http://johnjohnson.chadwyck.co.uk and http://johnjohnson.chadwyck.com. The project reported that “usage Statistics for the John Johnson Collection resource during the first two months since the launch (March 2008) have been extremely encouraging […]
The Great War Archive web site, part of the JISC-funded First World War Poetry Digital Archive project, is a powerful example of how communities can be galvanised in the creation of a unique and poignant online resource for the benefit of the wider public. An article on the Times Higher Education Supplement “From no man’s […]
Following the designation of Islamic Studies as a strategically important subject by the UK Government in June 2007, JISC commissioned a review of user requirements for digitised resources for researchers and teachers within higher education working in the field of Islamic Studies. The University of Exeter carried out the study and in their final report […]
As part of its development, the Pre-Raphaelite Resource digitisation project recently commissioned an audience research study to consult users about whether the inclusion of Web 2.0 features on a resource of this type would be useful or important to the education community. The report indicated that: “there is some readiness among the education community for […]
Measuring the use and impact of digitised resources is no easy exercise. This is not only because of the changing nature of information seeking behaviour of different audiences, which has an effect on how users engage with digital resources. It is also due to the challenge in establishing appropriate metrics and criteria for measuring the […]
A recent blog post on Digitization 101 pointed to the article Online Digital Special Collections in English Universities: Promoting Awareness. This article is a useful read for those involved in the creation of digital collections and responsible for their take-up once material is available online. The author proposes a number of practical tips on activities […]
If we make it, they might come… but it is a fact that any newly launched digital collection has to compete for attention with a huge amount of material already available on the web. Resource creators, therefore, have the challenging task of devising ways in which to interest and engage potential users. Projects within the […]