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 […]
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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 […]
The Digging into Data Challenge is an international grant competition sponsored by four leading research agencies from the UK, US and Canada. The challenge that this funding call wishes to confront is what do we do with a million books, images or articles? How does the huge volume of digitised material effect humanities and social science […]
JISC Collections is making two new archival collections freely available to universities, colleges and research councils: The British Periodicals Collections I and II: Traces the development and growth of the periodical press in Britain from its origins in the seventeenth century through to the Victorian “age of periodicals” and beyond. The collections comprise six million keyword-searchable […]
This workshop, funded by JISC, is taking place on 30th January 2009, at King’s College London. There is more information on the JISC website and you can book a place there too. Researchers from all parts of the campus are long-used to collecting, structuring and presenting their data in databases, spreadsheets, webpages etc, using a […]
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 […]
“Improving your online presence” is a FREE 3-day course held in London aimed at showing how simple and inexpensive techniques can be used to boast your collection’s web visibility and consequently traffic to your website. The course is organised by the Strategic Content Alliance (SCA) and the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN) and builds on […]
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 […]
JISC and JISC Collections are pleased to announce a series of three tenders to provide digital images for use by the UK education community (schools, further education and higher education) under the title The JISC Collections/JISC Images for Education Project. More details of this call are attached, and can be found by following the links […]
The JISC-managed Strategic Content Alliance the museum, archive and library sector Collections Trust have issued a survey on Orphan Works – http://surveys.omni-web.co.uk/start.aspx?sid=5DZ6VD The idea of the survey is to get a sense of the scale of orphans works in the cultural heritage community, which will then act as evidence for more sensible legal framework for […]
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Major digital conference in Belfast
The 2009 Digital Resources in the Humanities and Arts conference looks like it will be a big one, drawing in delegates who are contributing to the recent developments in digital scholarship in the Republic of Ireland. The conference is taking place at Queen’s University Belfast, from the 6 to 9 September 2009, and is entitled […]
With somewhat less fanfare than its original launch, when thousands of budding Europeans scrambled online to enter the search time “Mona Lisa”, the European cultural heritage portal Europeana has gone online. The portal and design seems quite impressive, and technically, there appear to be few glitches. However, the level of metadata is quite disappointing – […]
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 […]
The following email arrived today, with the EU obviously doing its best to maintain its normal standards of linguistic clarity. I think it means there is some more funding for exploiting existing digitised content The eContentplus programme will expire on 31 December 2008. Measures to make digital content in Europe more accessible, usable and exploitable […]
The JISC and the US’s National Endowment for the Humanities are pleased to announce they will be funding a second round of Transatlantic Digitisation grants. This pre-announcement is being made so that potential applicants can start developing the necessary partnerships. The call will be issued in mid December, with a closing date of the […]
On 16-17 March 2009, The British Library will be hosting the conference Unlocking Audio 2: Connecting With Listeners. The conference is a key event exploring the use of sound recordings online, focussing on ways that researchers and other audiences expect to discover, browse, audition and analyse archival audio resources. It will be of interest to […]
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Cartoons and war make the news
JISC-funded digitisation projects have been getting a good press recently, with two recent project launches garnering coverage in a range of major media outlets. The First World War Poetry Digital Archive at the University of Oxford was launched to coincide with the 90th anniversary of Armistice Day. Amid the wealth of first world war coverage […]
Editors Brent Nelson (University of Saskatchewan) and Melissa Terras (University College London) invite submissions for a collection of essays on “Digitizing Medieval and Early Modern Material Culture” to be published in the New Technologies in Medieval and Renaissance Studies Series edited by Ray Siemens and William Bowen. Further information on the call is available from […]
The JISC digitisation team is currently planning an international grant competition to look at the exploiting text mining methodologies for digitised content. Provisionally called the Million Books Challenge, the competition will see how analysis of large corpora of texts, images or other digital material can open up new avenues for research. Alastair Dunning gave an […]