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 […]
Category: Usability
The Pre-Raphaelites online resource has won the BETT Award for best digital collection and resource bank after being recognised as one of the UK’s leading educational websites. Further details of the award can be found on the Birmingham City Council’s website. This latest accolade follows earlier victories in the BIMA (British Interactive Media Association) and […]
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 Strategic Content Alliance has just announced aseries of workshops across the UK that will look at the digital content lifecycle from creation to curation. Details of the workshops can be found below, with further information on the Strategic Content Alliance’s blog. These FREE workshops from the Strategic Content Alliance and Netskills introduce simple and […]
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 […]
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 […]
A previous article on another digi blog illustrated how the commercial arms of the British Library and British Museum seemed to produce more efficient and innovative websites for users to browse and buy their digital wares. Following on from this, Christie’s the Auctioneers have an excellent website which allowed potential customers and interested bystanders to […]
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 second release of the JISC-funded John Johnson Collection: An Archive of Printed Ephemera, a collaboration between the Bodleian Library and ProQuest, is now available at http://johnjohnson.chadwyck.co.uk and http://johnjohnson.chadwyck.com. The project reported that “usage Statistics for the John Johnson Collection resource during the first two months since the launch (March 2008) have been extremely encouraging […]
The Stormont Papers resources makes available the debates from the parliament of Northern Ireland (Stormont) from creation in 1921 until the end of Home Rule in 1971. It’s been available since 2006 and some statistics from the website are available. Of most interest is graph showing the spread of search terms entered by users There […]
In the development of a Web resource, ideally usability testing is an iterative process that is carried out throughout the development of a resource and can be conducted both internally (expert review) and with outside users (user testing). The second meeting of the JISC Digitisation programme partly focused on Web usability issues and user interaction […]
The JISC and BL-commissioned Google Generation report highlights a number of key points that will have an effect on current and future digitisation projects. That librarians need to radically re-think their position and tasks to avoid becoming outdated in the face of tools like Google. It is not just the ‘kids of today’ that dumb […]