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 […]
Author: Peter Findlay
Digital Portfolio Manager, Content and Discovery, Jisc
I do stuff related to the production, consumption, and uses of content. Usually, I work with Jisc members and stakeholders to identify issues they may have. We then work together to find solutions through an innovation lifecycle.
I am a site admin for this website.
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 […]
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 […]
When I was fortunate to be invited by, Anthony Mandal, Professor in Print and Digital Cultures, to deliver the keynote at the recent GW4 Remediating the Archive workshop at the University of Cardiff, Wales, I decided to set out the current state of digitisation and its focus upon actual use of digital content by providing […]
Come and join us to celebrate the addition of 68,000 digitised texts from the long 19th century to Jisc’s Historical Texts platform which already contains some 350,000 texts from the 15th to 19th centuries. Jisc, Wellcome Library, and 9 UK universities and professional societies, have been working on a three-year large-scale digitisation project of more than […]
Impacts of digital collections
Last year Jisc in partnership with ProQuest commissioned the Oxford Internet Institute to look into the impact of digital collections on academic researchers working within the humanities. This research was focussed on two key historical primary resources, Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Houses of Commons Parliamentary Papers (HCPP). (see a recording of the presentation […]
This is the second in a series of posts about the content which is being created for the UK Medical Heritage Library. John More, Collections Manager and College Librarian, College of Science and Engineering Glasgow University Library, takes up the story or Glasgow’s long association with advances in medicine. The University of Glasgow is the […]
Medical insights
The 20th century is the period in which advances in medicine and public health led to a much improved life span for the populations of developed nations. The 19th century, on the other hand, is seen as time when only the wealthy could benefit from medicine. This is perhaps an unfair assertion. To be able […]
Digital Humanities Congress 2014
The conference will take place from 4 – 6 September 2014. The organisers, the HRI, are delighted to present a programme comprising 18 sessions and 54 speakers. Abstracts for all the papers being presented can now be viewed via the conference website. The papers cover a wide ranges of topics including: advances in the creation […]
Over the last 10 months Martin Poulter, Jisc’s Wikimedian Ambassador, has been exploring, in some detail, how Wikimedia platforms can be employed to openly disseminate academic information, help develop students’ digital literacy and allow collaboration. To this end Martin has run a number of editathons such as the Ada Lovelace Day at the University of […]
The Content Programme 2011-13’s call for proposals strongly advocated that projects should take account of the Discovery Task Force’s Open Metadata Principles. The programme commissioned a report to evaluate to what extent projects were able to implement these principles in the context of specific strands of programme work: creating OERs with digitised materials, mass digitisation and […]
Studies in discovery
Spotlight on the Digital is a co-design project which is exploring barriers to the discovery of digitised resources. The starting point is an assessment of a wide range of resources through a Discoverability Diagnosis but equally we need to identify the changing needs of teachers, learners and researchers in relation to their online behaviour in […]
Not content!
As Jisc’s current content programme is reaching its conclusion, it has become increasingly apparent to me that, if we are to innovate we have to take risks, we have to experiment and test new ideas and we have to make mistakes. It is a preposterous idea that we can create a new environment for digital […]
Jisc appoints Wikimedian Ambassador
Jisc and Wikimedia UK are collaborating on a project to bring the academic world and Wikipedia closer together. This will create opportunities for researchers, educators, and the general public to contribute to the world’s freely available knowledge. We are very pleased to be working with Dr Martin Poulter of the University of Bristol who is […]
Here are some more highlights of the new digital collections which have been produced as part of the Jisc Content programme 2011-13. – Old Maps Online Old Maps allows the user to search for online digital historical maps across numerous different collections via a geographical search. – Manuscripts Online Manuscripts Online enables you to search […]
Jisc seeks a Wikimedian Ambassador
For some time now it has been evident that the academic community are becoming more involved in the improvement of information on Wikipedia and see it as a means of disseminating open scholarly information. For example take a look at this oii project. Jisc has,over the last decade, worked closely with many institutions to develop […]
Innovation, innovation, innovation
The development of image matching functionality for the Bodleian Library’s Integrated Broadside Ballad Archive is one of those innovations which arise during a Jisc Programme. Often we do not make too much of these innovations. Perhaps we think that they are par for the course; a natural consequence of being involved in innovative programmes of […]