[Owen Stephens provides a progress update on the Spotlight on the Digital work.] In our investigation of digitised collections on the web as part of the Spotlight on the Digital project we’ve been looking at how both collections and individual items within collections are presented on the web, and how ‘discoverable’ they are using Google. […]
Category: Resource discovery
As part of the ongoing reseach the Spotlight project is doing on how to improve discoverability of digitised collections, a couple of weeks ago we blogged asking for suggestions of recent studies on online user behaviour in resource discovery and add them to a Google document we set up. After all suggestions were received (thank […]
As part of the Spotlight on the Digital project, which aims to provide practical solutions on how creators and managers of digitised collections can make it easier for people to find (discover) their collections, our Expert group suggested we look into the role social media might play in this. We would like to investigate whether […]
Categories
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 […]
Over the past few months we’ve been busy setting up Spotlight on the Digital, an eight-month project (Jun 2013-Jan 2014) which Jisc is running in collaboration with RLUK (Research Libraries UK) and SCONUL (Society of College, National and University Libraries) as part of the Jisc co-design programme. This is a pilot programme including six projects […]
Over 2000 recordings by British and Irish Muscians have been digitised and made available online in a project by Kings College, London. The Musicains of Britain and Ireland 1900-1950 project is allowing listeners and researchers to rediscover leading musicians who were once household names. Most of the recordings are making their first public appearance since […]
Categories
Search Engine Optimisation
One of the key ways of getting exposure to your website is by ensuring that search engines such as Google have successfully harvested your content, and added information on your site to their indices. Whilst some of the tasks that facilitate this can be quite tricky, it is surprising that many digital projects still fail […]
As an addition to its successful Freeze Frame digitisation project, JISC asked the University of Cambridge’s Scott Polar Research Institute to explore what was needed to export their collection of 20,000 digitised images to portals such as Europeana and Flickr, as well as to commerical image providers. The request led the Institute to a full-scale […]
Categories
JorumOpen
The recent launch of JorumOpen sees free access to a growing collection of open educational resources. JorumOpen will allow lecturers and teachers to share materials under the Creative Commons licence framework. This will allow for easier sharing, grants users greater rights for use and re-use of online content and is easier to understand. Jorum […]
Do you have your collection on-line? Do you want it to be accessible to as wide an audience as possible? If you answer ‘Yes’ to either of these questions then having your collection accessible through the flagship European portal is something you should seriously consider. However you might not have heard of Europeana or […]
The Archival Sounds Recordings website had recently introduced a new facility to allow users to explore their digitised sounds via maps. Instead of relying on browsing or searching via keyword, users can now click on the customised Google Map, which reveals sound recordings related to a particular place. This is particularly useful for collections that […]
There’s plenty of discussion about things like APIs (application programming interfaces) and concepts of opening up data, but to the non-initiated this can all seem rather confusing and overly technical. However, as those who have created digital projects continue to look for new ways to expose their content to the widest possible audience, APIs offer […]
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 […]
The British Library’s Sound Archive has some fascinating collections but they tend to have some quite obscure names. For example, the St Mary-le-Bow public debates have contributions from Iris Murdoch, Peter Cook and Enoch Powell. A previous version of the Sound Archive website replicated these collection names – and quite possibly put off users who […]
The European Union’s Europeana portal project was launched yesterday, offering user access to a wealth of cultural heritage content, harvested from the continent’s museums, archives and libraries. There has been some scepticism about the long-term success of the project, especially in regards to its sustainability model and it’s ability to deflect users away from Google […]
There’s a lot of digital content out there, and so the battle to get your particular project noticed and used is a tough one. One particular project that has dealt with this is the Nineteenth-Century Pamphlets project, a multi-partner project led by the University of Southampton. The resource will not just have its own website […]