There’s an interesting and well-illustrated (in the print version at least) article on the variety and strength on special collections in UK universities in the 7 May version of the Times Higher. However, in focussing on the special collections as single curios, the article rather downplays the Importance that such collections can have within education. […]
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Using maps to find digital stuff
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 […]
Registration is now open for the JISC Digital Content Conference, to be held on 30 June – 1 July at the Cotswold Water Park Four Pillars Hotel, South Cerney, Gloucestershire. The conference, as previously announced on this blog, has been organised in the the context of the completion of Phase 2 of the JISC Digitisation […]
JISC and the NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) have now received all the applications for the second phase of transatlantic digitisation. As with the first phase, the quality of bids looks high. 28 applications have been received and it is likely that three or four of these will receive funding of up to £200,000 […]
The National Library of Wales is a step closer to realising its ambitious vision to digitise the entire printed memory of Wales and ensure audiences across Wales and around the world can enjoy the mines of information held in the library’s collection said Andrew Green, Librarian, as reported by BBC News in Historic newspapers to […]
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 […]
Those who are thinking of embarking on a digitistaion project or need to improve their knowledge of the key issuses in running a digitisation project should consider attending the forthcoming training event Digital Futures: from digitization to delivery, held at King’s College London, 27th April – 1st May 2009. Led by experts of international renown, […]
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 has just released a funding call for applicants to organise workshops related to achievements and challenges in digitisation and e-content. Applications may come from in- or outside the HE sector. Potential topics that applicants can address pretty wide and include particular areas of technology (e.g. optical character recognition, 3D digitisation, visualisation); the relationship with […]
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 […]
One of the key problems in getting widespread acceptance of digital resources has been the lack of a review process, as would happen to an article or a monograph. Thus it’s heartening to note the Institute for Historical Research is specifically undertaking more reviews of digital resources on its webpages. Three of the JISC projects […]
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Funding for digital heritage questions
The AHRC have teamed up with British Telecom to provide funding related to digital cultural heritage Plenty of the questions relate to issues relevant to the JISC Digitisation Strategy From the briefing paper on the AHRC website, it says the research questions of interest are: • How can the availability and accessibility of heritage sites/cultural […]
Last week, the University of Liverpool, held a conference to celebrate the launch of 19th-Century Pamphlets Online project Delivered by JSTOR, managed by RLUK and digitised by the University of Southampton, the collection is bringing together many of the which played a vital part in the intellectual, economic and social landscape of the nineteenth-century Britain. […]
In a recent article, An Awfully Big Adventure: Strathclyde’s Digital Library Plan, published in Ariadne magazine, Derek Law describes the university’s plan to achieve excellence in league tables and innovation in teaching by focusing “on technology and by extension on e-content” while at the same time make savings on space, utility bills, and other Estate […]
The philosopher, linguist and novelist Umberto Eco described libraries as a form of repository, or bank, which served to secure the written word and the treasures of the text. The essential nature of the library, even today, is therefore one of contradiction: where the traditional processes of cataloguing and classification act to hide and ‘lose’ […]
The JISC Digital Content Conference will take place on 30th June – 1st July 2009 at the Cotswold Water Park Four Pillars Hotel. Issues In the context of the completion of Phase 2 of the JISC’s Digitisation Programme the conference will look at the issues facing the UK’s universities as they deal with creating, delivering, […]
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 […]
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 […]