Readers will recall that the JISC and the US National Endowment for the Humanities funded five transatlantic projects which were digitising material (such as the Shakespeare Quartos project) and creating tools for improving access to the digital material, like the Concordia project on ancient stone inscriptions. These are due to finish in March 2009. JISC […]
JISC recently commissioned a tender to undertake a study of the preservation plans and processes of the sixteen projects funded under Phase 2 of the JISC Digitisation Programme and identify best practice and issues in terms of medium or long-term access to the digitised content. The tenders have now been received and the winning proposal […]
The publishers Cengage have just release a new digital resource, State Papers Online, 1509-1714, drawn from various archival sources related to the government of Britain in the early modern periods. What’s interesting is to see how they have marketed the resources via additional information on the resource homepage – http://gale.cengage.co.uk/statepapers/ Included are 10 essays from […]
For those considering large scale book digitisation, and the purchase of a book scanner, this brief report will help consider the pros and cons of some of the main book scanners currently available on the market. Julian Ball, the author of the report, attended an event at the Munich Digitisation Centre (18-10 June 2008) where […]
Carol Green, from Craven College Skipton, was one of the first lecturers to use the NewsFilm Online resource in a classroom setting, selecting a suite of films from the archive that explore the idea of moral panic. In particular, she wanted to show her class of Journalism students that the idea of moral panic is […]
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 […]
JISC has just selected 25 diverse projects at UK universities that are going to receive £1.8m of funding in the ‘Enrich Digital Resources’ programme. The support has been allocated to projects designed to benefit both researchers and learners, to improve existing digital content and to digitise new materials for sustainable access in the future. The […]
Salary: £28,000 to £32,800 depending on experience Based in: Central London Closing date for applications: Monday 29th September JISC Collections negotiates agreements for and acquires online content to support education and research. The key ambition in establishing JISC Collections is to widen accessibility to online resources, to save the academic sector time and money, and […]
Today Google announced that they are launching: “an initiative to make more old newspapers accessible and searchable online by partnering with newspaper publishers to digitize millions of pages of news archives.” This adds to the large amount of existing online newspaper content, by publications such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, that […]
A recent report from OCLC on The Impact of Digitizing Special Collections on Teaching and Scholarship. Reflections on a Symposium about Digitization and Humanities highlights the main recommendations that emerged from the symposium held in June 2008. The symposium brought together both primary users of (digitised) primary sources as well as “custodians”, such as librarians, […]
There has been recent uptake of the JPEG 2000 format, particular as highlighted in a report written by the Royal Dutch Library. This survey should help clarify positions of current usage I am writing to solicit your help with a survey of library-related digital project staff regarding the implementation of the JPEG 2000 standard for […]
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 […]
The East London Theatre Archive is creating an invaluable database of performing arts resources, from playbills and programmes to press cuttings and photographs. It will consist of around 15,000 digital objects, taken from East London theatres. As an extra part of their work, they have commissioned photography of some of the theatres themselves, such as […]
The Wellcome Library – part of the Wellcome Trust – is currently developing a new strategy which will include a programme to digitise the Library’s unique and significant, out-of-copyright, holdings. Given the scale of the task – preliminary projections suggest that the size of the collection (excluding the in-copyright material) is around 45 million pages […]
The Great War Archive web site, part of the JISC-funded First World War Poetry Digital Archive project, is a powerful example of how communities can be galvanised in the creation of a unique and poignant online resource for the benefit of the wider public. An article on the Times Higher Education Supplement “From no man’s […]
Following the designation of Islamic Studies as a strategically important subject by the UK Government in June 2007, JISC commissioned a review of user requirements for digitised resources for researchers and teachers within higher education working in the field of Islamic Studies. The University of Exeter carried out the study and in their final report […]
As part of its development, the Pre-Raphaelite Resource digitisation project recently commissioned an audience research study to consult users about whether the inclusion of Web 2.0 features on a resource of this type would be useful or important to the education community. The report indicated that: “there is some readiness among the education community for […]
The programme for the 4th International Digital Curation Conference, Radical Sharing: Transforming Science? has just been announced, and very interesting it is too. But in the rush to explore the issues related to the preservation of terabytes of astronomical or physical data, it’s worth remembering that it not just the sciences that are the preserve […]