For better or worse, it is increasingly accepted that it is no longer the ideal to conduct research which extends the boundaries of knowledge merely for its own sake; which supports, builds upon or refutes the work of others, but which ultimately reflects back upon an enclosed and self-sustaining world of scholarship and discourse. Researchers […]
Category: Users
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 […]
Here at the Historical Texts and Journal Archives team (http://historicaltexts.jisc.ac.uk and https://journalarchives.jisc.ac.uk) we strive to provide our users with the kind of support that is properly relevant to their needs. As such, we explore quite a large range of support activities to try and cater for as many differing requirements as possible. We look to […]
Having recently issued our Funding Call on impact & embedding of digitised resources now seems an appropriate point at which to reflect on some of the work JISC has done to investigate and facilitate the impact and usage of digital resources. The Oxford Internet Institute (OII) recently submitted their Final Report on a workshop they […]
JISC has just announced funding for its Grant call 7/10: e-Content and Digitisation programme: Impact and Embedding of digitised resources. Funding of up to £150,000 is available for projects addressing the impact and embedding of digitised resources. It is anticipated that 4-6 projects will be funded and the maximum funding for any one project is […]
In the last few years there has been an increasing number of initiatives involving the general public in creating or contributing content to existing digital collections, including scholarly digital resources. Projects have ranged from involving the general public in the cataloguing of galaxies (Galaxy Zoo) to experiments in amateur digitization to supplement a literary digital […]
At the event “Why pay for content?” organised by the Publishers Association, representatives from the publishing sector, JISC, and academics, put across opposing views on whether we should pay to access content on the internet or it should be freely and openly accessible to everybody. The content in question referred mainly to textbooks and research/reference […]
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 Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources (TIDSR), developed for JISC by the Oxford Internet Institute, is now available online for everybody to use. If you have been struggling with making sense of hits, visitors numbers, log analysis, users feedback, wondering how to interpret all this data, how to gather it in the […]
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 […]
In addition to digitising a huge variety of material (text, sound, images, moving images…) tracing about 500 years of British and international history, culture, life and society, the great majority of digital collections funded under the JISC Digitisation programme has also developed learning resources and tools to help teachers and students make the most of […]
There has been plenty of publicity about the eye-wateringly beautiful digital images produced by Madrid’s Prado museum in association with Google Earth. Detail from Rubens’ The Three Graces, Prado Museum, Madrid. Taken from Google Earth. Contrary to what some art critics have written, this is, in some ways, a more powerful experience than seeing the […]
In a previous post (What’s your priority for digitisation? ), we mentioned the JISC-funded DiSCmap project, Digitisation in special collections: mapping, assessment, prioritisation, which aims to produce, among other things, a “top priority” list of special collections held within the UK Higher Education sector (including libraries, archives, and museums) for potential future digitisation, based primarily […]
A new online discussion forum has recently launched in order to gather people’s feedback on digitisation priorities for special collections. Current debates raise issues such as what defines a special collection, how to determine digitisation priorities, user needs in research & teaching, and a provocative “Devil’s advocate” thread to provide a platform to air “contrary […]
JISC, along with publishers ProQuest, Cengage and Adam Matthews Digital, were involved in a couple of round table sessions at the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference at Oxford University. The sessions were designed to get feedback from the scholarly community on resources such as ECCOand the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera The presentation […]
Two new resources have been recently launched by JISC as guidance on how to deal with IPR issues in Web2.0 content and on digital preservation, including preservation of user generated content. The free Web2Rights online diagnostic tool addresses the confusion often found when dealing with IPR in its relation to Web 2.0 within education, and […]
In a previous post earlier in the year, Measuring the impact of digitised resources (12/6/2008), we announced the work that the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) was about to embark upon of identifying use and usage patterns of five JISC-funded online resources and devising meaningful metrics for the measurement of the impact of digitised scholarly resources. […]
NewsFilm Online, launched last week, contains 60,000 digitised clips from the archives of ITN and other news sources. It’s an incredibly rich resource, featuring news stories relating to events such as the Suez crisis in 1956, Nelson Mandela’s first interview in 1961, the moon landing in 1969 and the death of Diana, Princess of Wales […]
Various events earlier in the summer gave the BBC the chance to parade their plans to digitise their entire back archive of televisual material. (Although it’s interesting to note there is little info on this on the BBC site itself, particularly on its archive pages). The plans are not new. Back in 2006, there were […]
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 […]