Researchers often tell us that they have problems when they want to use digital methods to interrogate large archives, special collections, masses of catalogue records or aggregations of metadata. We are therefore pleased to announce a new partnership between Jisc, the Programming Historian and The National Archives (TNA) to publish a series of articles to […]
Author: Peter Findlay
Subject Matter Expert, Digital Scholarship, Content and Discovery, Jisc
Working with Jisc's Higher Education members in support of digital scholarship and digital library strategy in the age of data-centric arts, humanities and social science research.
I am a site admin for this website.
Jisc’s Digital Archival Collections (DAC) advisory group met again recently. We discussed some interviews we have undertaken with acquisition librarians. The group thinks that DACs need to be taken as seriously as books and journals in library planning because they are increasingly purchased from budgeted allocations, not from under-spend. Purchasing them, therefore, is dependent on […]
Some members of the HE content team have been discussing issues about the collaborative digitisation of collections. We know, from conversations with our Digital Archival Collections advisory group, that there is a thirst for institutions to work together to make their collections available. We were wondering about the barriers to making this happen. Institutions are […]
At a digital archival collections advisory (DAC) group meeting earlier this month, we discussed the increasing need for higher education libraries to purchase DACs which are more relevant to teaching, especially as most teaching has now moved online. Academics on some arts and humanities courses are increasingly using primary source archives to teach, often with […]
This post is part of an ongoing series about digital archival collections (DACs) and launches our new guide: purchasing digital archives; guidelines for librarians when negotiating with publishers, which provides guidance on the purchasing of these collections for librarians needing to negotiate licences with publishers. Previously our research has shown that these collections provide valuable […]
At such a time of public concern, it can be interesting to examine how our ancestors viewed and dealt with epidemic diseases. I was looking at the UK Medical Heritage Library (UKMHL) which we provide as an open collection via our Historical Texts service and came across: Annals of influenza, or epidemic catarrhal fever in […]
Here is a recording of a recent webinar (Zoom meeting) about the report and our next steps. Pamphlets have long been a popular way of getting people involved in campaigns. We have been working with teams at the London School of Economics and at UCL to digitise some pamphlets from their collections as part of […]
At the end of last summer, we were not surprised to see publishers being asked, on one of our email lists, to justify the charges they make for enabling continued access to digital archival collections (DACs). The email was headed ‘enough is enough‘. The issue of platform fees has been a recurring theme for us at […]
UK higher education has become increasingly focused on the quality of its teaching. Since the implementation of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), we have noted that some universities are developing innovative approaches to engaging students in the use of primary sources at undergraduate level. A small number are implementing initiatives to improve engagement in the […]
Jisc would like to invite you to take part in a survey about the cost of annual platform, access and service charges that libraries have to pay for digital archival collections/static databases that they typically acquire as one-off perpetual purchases (ie not subscription content). We would be grateful if you could follow this link to […]
A couple of year ago Jisc worked with Reveal Digital to provide early access to US independent press publications for UK Higher Education institutions (the US publications are now openly accessible). This led us to working with 13 UK universities to define a set of UK material which would complement the US offer. Earlier this […]
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 […]
We recently ran a workshop after a long period of consultation about out future approach to digisation. The resulting workshop report: Summary Report: New Business Models for Digitisation sets out a direction of travel for us and our key partners and stakeholders. Jisc has a long history of undertaking digitisation initiatives. Back in 1993 the Joint […]
Peggy Glahn of Reveal Digital concluded a recent guest post on this blog by stating: As proven by the Independent Voices project, Reveal Digital is building an exciting and innovative approach to open access publishing that puts libraries in control of their own content while providing scholars with important new primary source material to support […]
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Digital Archival Collections survey
Jisc is supporting Higher Education (HE) institutions in developing a more strategic approach to the acquisition of Digital Archival Collections (DACs). We have been working with 12 HE libraries* on a pilot to help us identify, specify, and quantify information and data which supports a more informed decision-making process. The pilot has shown us, amongst […]
I thought I would post links to data from a big project we funded some time back to capture English historical place-names. The data drives the Historical Gazetteer of England’s Place-names where you can search for individual modern forms to find the historical name. We had previously provided an automated system for using the data […]
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Reports from the Live Lab
Jisc recently joined forces with the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine to run one of our Live Labs (see this previous post about our Cardiff lab) at the University of Manchester on 11 May. Some 20 academics, students and convenors assembled to explore the UK Medical Heritage Library (UKMHL) which sits […]
In recent years hack-days have been all the rage and have proved a good vehicle for interactions between people who normally might not work together. In academia there has been a trend towards running so-called ‘labs’. The word implies experimentation; hack-day tends to imply coding (it can be experimental!), whereas ‘lab’ suggests that it can […]
Jisc is looking to design a new service to support Higher Education (HE) institutions to develop a more strategic approach to the acquisition of digital archival collections. We are inviting up to 12 HE libraries to participate in a pilot to help us identify, specify, and quantify information and data which supports a more informed […]
You may be interested to know that Reveal Digital’s Independent Voices is now available to UK Higher Education institutions for pledging via the Jisc Collections catalogue at https://goo.gl/YmbH7Q. The pledging period runs until 31 July 2017. Reveal Digital have developed a digital collection made up of alternative press newspapers, magazines and journals from the latter […]