As phase 2 of the British Libray’s newspaper digitisation programme prepares to conclude (1m more pages are due to be added in the coming months), there are some interesting reports about the digitisation process becoming available. The project’s final report looks at the issues such as the capture of metadata, the standards used, and the […]
Category: Projects 2006-2009
The Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource , funded under the JISC Digitisation programme, has been awarded the first prize in the Arts/Culture category of the Interactive Media Awards. The Interactive Media Awards™ recognize the highest standards of excellence in website design and development and honor individuals and organizations for their outstanding achievement. The project was led by […]
The addition of over 1500 recordings of Chopin’s music – including key performances of piano repertoire, including all Mazurkas, Preludes, Etudes, Polonaises and more – is another string to the bow of the British Library’s Archival Sound Recordings. The Sound Archive has now built up a formidable array of early recordings of canonical composters, comprising […]
The University of Oxford’s First World War Poetry Archive has just released a new collection of digitised poems and other material, by Edmund Blunden Blunden was sent to the Western Front in 1916, and served as part of the 11th Royal Sussex regiment. He received the Military Cross for his actions during the Battle of […]
The Institute for Textual Scholarship and Electronic Editing (ITSEE), University of Birmingham are running a series of workshops as part of the JISC funded Virtual Manuscript Room project. The workshops will be taking place on Tuesday and Wednesday 22-23 September, 2009 The first of the workshops, on Tuesday 22nd Sept will present a hands-on introduction […]
JISC has today realised its guide to using Second Life for lecturers and teachers. The guide has been written by lecturers, for lecturers and aims to assist lecturers in their use of virtual worlds for teaching and learning. The aim of the guide is to present the basics in order to help lecturers experiment, rather […]
To celebrate the completion of the In the Bygynning project and the launch of the Manchester Middle English Digital Library, the John Rylands University Library, University of Manchester is hosting a major academic conference on 17-18 September 2009. The Manchester Middle English Manuscripts Conference will consider the Rylands collection within the wider context of other […]
“Many, if not all, of the Pre-Raphaelites had their own ideal of beauty“, as the recently launched Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource illustrates through beautiful images of Pre-Raphaelite paintings and sketches in its Learning resources section. The Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource gives free access to over 3000 images related to the works of artists belonging to one of […]
The JISC-funded A Vision of Britain Through Time website launches today, giving e-access, often for the first time, to over two centuries’ worth of facts, figures, surveys, maps, election results and travel writing showing how 15,000 UK places have changed. The changing story of Britain’s towns and villages can be explored in new depth online, […]
This month sees the launch of the first phase of the Virtual Manuscript Room(VMR), as part of the Mingana Day at the University of Birmingham on 8 July. The presentation of the collection online is a crucial part of JISC’s £1.8 million Enriching Digital Resources programme, a set of 25 projects which enhances the use […]
The British Library archive of 19th-century newspapers is now available to the general public on a per per view basis. Over 2m pages of newspapers were digitised as part of the JISC’s Digitisation Programme The HE and FE version of the same content was launched in Autumn 2007 and remains freely available to the tertiary […]
In these times of economic hardship and ever decreasing household budgets, it is always good to remind ourselves of times when money was extremely short. The Visual Arts Data service (VADS) has just launched an online wartime cosmetics archive. The archives of Gala, Miner’s and Crystal, three prominent cosmetics companies operating during and after the […]
Many digitisation projects have an interest in (or feel that they should be) engaging with social networking and communication tools. Many projects are tempted to automatically adopt the use of sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, LinkedIn, as well as share information through Flickr, Vimeo, You Tube, Second Life, Digg, StumbleUpon, Google Groups…etc…. But with […]
The British Film Institute has announceed the completion of a ground breaking project to give academics, teachers, students and researchers free online access to hundreds of hours of film and television. Available through the BFI National Archive these clips tell the complex social, economic and political history of Britain in the 20th century. Funded by […]
Categories
Music Without Walls
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 […]
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 JISC Digitisation programme is coming to end and most projects have launched, or are about to, the digital resources created over the past couple of years. What are the key issues that projects felt they would need support on during the development of their resources and what kind of support has JISC provided to […]
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 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 […]