From Indian ritual music to bawdy English pub songs to Ugandan court music to Nigerian Highlife, the British Library’s collections of world and traditional music are emerging from the shelves of the Sound Archive and appearing on the Archival Sound Recordings website. Below are some of the new collections that are available from the Sound […]
Europeana, the portal for the cultural collections of Europe, is now fully functioning and looking for feedback. The ups and downs of Europeana have been followed by this blog in a number of past posts, so it is good to see it in full working order, and looking to improve the user experience. Tell us […]
When it comes to digitisation projects it is easy to become seduced into rushing straight into the digitisation before thinking about anything else. However, it is often the case that successful digitisation projects spend what seems like a lot of time thinking about and drafting their work flows and guidelines before embarking on the ‘real […]
The First World War Poetry Digital Archive at Oxford University recently held a two day workshop for teachers and lecturers to help support the creation of resources to enhance teaching and the student experience of the poetry archive. One of the most interesting outcomes of the workshop was the immense popularity of the Great War […]
The philosopher, linguist and novelist Umberto Eco described libraries as a form of repository, or bank, which served to secure the written word and the treasures of the text. The essential nature of the library, even today, is therefore one of contradiction: where the traditional processes of cataloguing and classification act to hide and ‘lose’ […]
The British Library’s Archival Sound Recordings project, supported by JISC, today launches a vital new resource for the exploration of western classical music heritage. Bringing together nearly 1000 historic recordings, this freely available online collection allows researchers to easily compare various interpretations of great composers, tracing the impact of globalisation on performance style and its […]
There was an interesting article on the BBC recently that looked at how new technologies (specifically immersive environments using avatars, such as Second Life), are changing the way we interact with cultural artifacts (such as art and music). Furthermore, Bill Thompson, the articles author, points out that these environments are changing the very way such […]
The Information Environment team has just released a new call for Rapid Innovation Grants. Further details of the call are below: JISC invites institutions to submit funding proposals for grants to fund technical rapid innovation projects addressing priority areas. Proposals are sought under the following priority areas: Mashups of open data Aggregating tags and feeds […]
The International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO), in cooperation with University College, London will be holding their first biennial conference entitled: Content Architecture: Exploiting and Managing Diverse Resources. The conference will run from the 22 – 23rd June, 2009, and will take place in London. In our networked world, enabling easy access to multiple services and […]
Improving your online presence is an essential component of any digitsation project; without visitors to your site there is little point having the material digitised and available online. Much of the web’s curent usability is dependent upon the effectiveness and effeciency of web crawlers, most prominent among these is, of course, the Google bot. The […]
The National e-Science Centre (NeSC) has announced a new 5 day workshop on The Influence and Impact of Web 2.0 on e-research infrastructure, applications and users. The event is open to all and will be held between 23 March – 27 March at the e-Science Institute, 15 South College Street, Edinburgh. Aimed at the e-research […]
JISC Digital Media is the new name for the Technical Advisory Service for Images (TASI). The JISC Digital Media team will continue to provide advice, training and guidance on the creation and use of digital media collections, with the expanded service now providing expertise in moving images and sound in addition to still images and their […]
Not much time is left to register for the Digital Lives Research Project conference on 9-11 February 2009 at the British Library in St Pancras, London. It is the first Digital Lives Research Conference on Personal Digital Archives in the 21st Century. The conference is free, although only a limited number of places are available […]
Today is Holocaust Memorial Day and to mark the occasion the British Library’s JISC funded Archival Sound Recordings project has added a new tool for Holocaust research and education, available online. Here are some of the details of the collection by the project manager, Peter Findlay (more can be read on the Sound recordings blog): Jewish […]
Below are details of a forthcoming conference being held by the 19th Century Pamphlets project. If you are interested in attending then contact details and further information can be found below: ‘New access to past debates: 19th century pamphlets’ The 19th Century Pamphlets Online project is holding a one-day conference at the University of Liverpool on […]
A year ago the Library of Congress asked members of the public to tag and describe two sets of approximately 3000 historic photos using Flickr, the photosharing website. The LOC reports that within the first 24 hours of the project starting Flickr recorded 1.1 million total views on the account, with 3.6 million views a […]
The Digging into Data Challenge is an international grant competition sponsored by four leading research agencies from the UK, US and Canada. The challenge that this funding call wishes to confront is what do we do with a million books, images or articles? How does the huge volume of digitised material effect humanities and social science […]
JISC Collections is making two new archival collections freely available to universities, colleges and research councils: The British Periodicals Collections I and II: Traces the development and growth of the periodical press in Britain from its origins in the seventeenth century through to the Victorian “age of periodicals” and beyond. The collections comprise six million keyword-searchable […]
JISC and JISC Collections are pleased to announce a series of three tenders to provide digital images for use by the UK education community (schools, further education and higher education) under the title The JISC Collections/JISC Images for Education Project. More details of this call are attached, and can be found by following the links […]