The New Opportunities Fund ran a huge £50m digitisation programme between 2001 and 2004. Opinion to the success of the programme has been somewhat divided; some have seen it as pioneering; others saw it is a poor use of money, which did not really reap the expected dividends. There has actually been little analysis as […]
The recently launched Freeze Frame project, which has digitised over 20,000 images of historic polar expeditions, has achieved phenomenal interest in the press. The press page on the JISC website lists 32 news articles or features, including an audio slideshow on the BBC website, and articles in newspapers as diverse as the Scotsman, the Daily […]
The Learning on Screen Conference 2009 will be held at The Wellcome Collection, on 7th and 8th April 2009 and will focus on: Disability and Access to Moving Image and Sound. The Learning on Screen Conference will offer an opportunity for academic service providers, web developers, lecturers, broadcasters, educationists, advisors, publishers and representatives of disability […]
Two new online collections, funded by the JISC Digitisation programme, launched yesterday giving global access to thousand of images ranging from polar expeditions to theatre and entertainment in the East End of London. Freeze Frame: Historic Polar Images features an archive of 20,000 images depicting the history of polar exploration, inlcuding the adventures of famous […]
The International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO), in cooperation with University College, London will be holding their first biennial conference entitled: Content Architecture: Exploiting and Managing Diverse Resources. The conference will run from the 22 – 23rd June, 2009, and will take place in London. In our networked world, enabling easy access to multiple services and […]
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 […]
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 […]
Improving your online presence is an essential component of any digitsation project; without visitors to your site there is little point having the material digitised and available online. Much of the web’s curent usability is dependent upon the effectiveness and effeciency of web crawlers, most prominent among these is, of course, the Google bot. The […]
The EU recently held a meeting in Luxembourg to inform potential applicants about their the ICT Policy Support Programme. 25million Euros have been allocated to the digital libraries strand with the specific objectives of Developing services to improve the usability of Europeana Aggregating content for Europeana Digitising content for Europeana Open access to scientific information […]
The National e-Science Centre (NeSC) has announced a new 5 day workshop on The Influence and Impact of Web 2.0 on e-research infrastructure, applications and users. The event is open to all and will be held between 23 March – 27 March at the e-Science Institute, 15 South College Street, Edinburgh. Aimed at the e-research […]
The JISC Digitisation programme is pleased to announce that a new funding call will be issued shortly, towards the end February-beginning March 2009. The call will focus on 3 key themes: 1) institutional skills and strategies, including activities aimed at embedding digitisation into institutional strategies and practices, eg development of institutional skills, policies and capacity […]
JISC Digital Media is the new name for the Technical Advisory Service for Images (TASI). The JISC Digital Media team will continue to provide advice, training and guidance on the creation and use of digital media collections, with the expanded service now providing expertise in moving images and sound in addition to still images and their […]
Not much time is left to register for the Digital Lives Research Project conference on 9-11 February 2009 at the British Library in St Pancras, London. It is the first Digital Lives Research Conference on Personal Digital Archives in the 21st Century. The conference is free, although only a limited number of places are available […]
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 […]
Today is Holocaust Memorial Day and to mark the occasion the British Library’s JISC funded Archival Sound Recordings project has added a new tool for Holocaust research and education, available online. Here are some of the details of the collection by the project manager, Peter Findlay (more can be read on the Sound recordings blog): Jewish […]
Below are details of a forthcoming conference being held by the 19th Century Pamphlets project. If you are interested in attending then contact details and further information can be found below: ‘New access to past debates: 19th century pamphlets’ The 19th Century Pamphlets Online project is holding a one-day conference at the University of Liverpool on […]
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 […]
A year ago the Library of Congress asked members of the public to tag and describe two sets of approximately 3000 historic photos using Flickr, the photosharing website. The LOC reports that within the first 24 hours of the project starting Flickr recorded 1.1 million total views on the account, with 3.6 million views a […]
Categories
Digitisation on YouTube
The recently launched JISC channel on You Tube, JISCmedia, showcases short videos on the digital collections that will be going live between now and Spring 2009 funded under the JISC Digitisation Programme. Here’s an example from the Cabinet papers 1915-1978 project, which has digitised millions of pages of government debates on key events of the […]