A Harvard professor, Robert Darnton, has recently made a plea to the American public for the creation of a National Digital Library, which is “a comprehensive library of digitized books that will be easily accessible to the general public.” In the UK, the idea of such a library has been floating around for a while, […]
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An early JISC project from 1996 stated that “Digitisation is a key mechanism by which libraries with important research collections can fulfil their responsibilities by providing improved access to users in other UK higher education institutions and internationally” Following on from this pioneering work, JISC has made a committed investment in the digitisation of journals, […]
One of the projects funded under JISC’s Developing Community Content programme is now up and runnning. From the press release: The public are being asked to revisit the voyages of World War One Royal Navy warships to help scientists working on a JISC project understand the climate of the past and unearth new historical information. […]
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Rapid Digitisation Call published
JISC invites institutions to submit funding proposals for projects to be funded as part of its e-content programme for 2011. Funding of up to £400,000 is available for rapid digitisation. It is anticipated that 5-7 projects will be funded and the maximum funding available for any one project is £100,000. Within the call, JISC will […]
In relation to the forthcoming call from eContent Programme, JISC is hosting “Digital Content Partnerships” on 28 October 2010. The event, open to all, will be to offer further information on the call, offer opportunities to form partnerships as part of proposals for the call and to engage further with JISC’s campaign for digital content. […]
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Popes In Britain
Images all from the Visual Arts Data Service Pius VI, by Goulet, 1803, Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, Co. Durham Clement VII, by School of Sebastiano del Piombo, 1527-34, Pollok House, Glasgow Pope Benedict XIII, (Italian School), 1720s, Grosvenor Museum, Chester Christ and the Pope, (German School), late sixteenth century, Pollok House, Glasgow Alexander VIII as […]
Earlier this month, JISC supported a workshop on the University of Nottingham on the development of gazetteers – historic dictionaries of place names (and other geographical information) and their co-ordinates or other appropriate reference. Plenty of work is being done throughout the UK on research on place names, and many projects are keen to exploit […]
FREE 2 day workshops to be held in (follow links for registration) • Belfast, 14 September 2010 – 15 September 2010 • Glasgow, 7th October 2010 – 8th October 2010 • London, 12th October 2010 – 13th October 2010 • Manchester, 28th October 2010 – 29th October 2010 • London, 16th November 2010 – 17th […]
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Thoughts on CyberScience conference
Last week saw the Citizen Cyberscience event at King’s College London, and it featured plenty of ambitious scientific research projects making extensive use of the enthusiasms and knowledge of an international public. Projects on show included Einstein @home, which used volunteer’s PCs to detect various astronomical phenomenoa, and herberia @home, a distributed project to classify […]
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Falkland Islands Penguin
A Rockhopper penguin, taken on British expedition to the Falkland Islands in 1936 The image is available from the Freeze Frame website, published by the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge
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Problems of Marriage and Sex, 1937
“As the Headmaster came into lunch, he slipped into my side-pocket a copy of the ‘New Era’ dealing with problems of Marriage and Sex. Why? A nice gesture of friendliness, anyway.” The above is a transcribed excerpt from a teacher’s diary from Keswick, Cumbria in 1937, the typescript of which is below. It is part […]
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Kennedy arm-wrestling Khrushchev
28 Oct: Khrushchev promised that the Soviet bases on Cuba, that sparked the Cuban Missile Crisis would be removed. The bases had been the subject of a tense standoff between the Soviet Union and the USA. Cartoon from the Daily Mail, 29th October 1962. By Leslie Gilbert Illingworth. Image and caption from the British Cartoon […]
The web interface http://www.jisc-content.ac.uk/ which has recently been set up to provide a more user friendly way of navigating the content that JISC funding has helped made available to the HE and FE communities. The site is not aiming to give item level access to each collection, i.e. it is not a federated search in […]
One of the most interesting partnerships in the JISC Islamic Studies strand is that between the Wellcome Trust, King’s College London, and Egypt’s Biblioteca Alexandrina. The Wellcome Trust, as part of its own digitisation programme, is digitising 500 manuscripts from its extensive collection. King’s College London is developing a cataloguing tool which will allow for […]
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Different Forms of Crowdsourcing
The British Museum’s ‘Wikipedian-in-Residence’, Liam Wyatt, recently gave a talk to JISC on some of the work that the British Museum and Wikipedia were doing together. In particular, Liam focussed on the Hoxne Challenge, a one-day event organised at the British Museum at the end of June 2010. Rather than the usual model of building […]
London Lives makes available, in a fully digitised and searchable form, a wide range of primary sources about eighteenth-century London, with a particular focus on plebeian Londoners. This resource includes over 240,000 manuscript and printed pages from eight London archives and is supplemented by fifteen datasets created by other projects. It provides access to historical […]
The Wellcome Library has launched a new blog dedicated to JPEG 2000. The blog charts our progress in determining what type of JPEG 2000 we will use, how we use it, and how it impacts on the rest of the Digital Library infrastructure. The blog is also fed to our new Twitter account, Wellcome Digital, […]
Forwarded by John Unsworth, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) has just launched a new digitization program, AccessTEI. This program allows member institutions to outsource the transcription and basic structural encoding of source material (whether in print or manuscript, in any language, any sized job), at bulk prices with Apex Covantage, a […]
A review of one of the JISC digitisation projects (the John Johnson collection of ephemera from the Bodleian Library at Oxford) made it onto Radio 4 on Saturday 12th June. http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00sn68v/Saturday_Review_12_06_2010/ (from 21.27 mins to 30.30 – the recording will be available until 19th June) It was interesting to hear the comments from an audience […]
Everything you wanted to know about Wikipedia but were too afraid to ask event – Monday 7th June, Brettenham House, London Liam Wyatt is Vice President of Wikimedia Australia and a historian. He has recently been appointed as the first “volunteer Wikipedian in residence” at the British Museum – the first residency of its kind […]