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 […]
The Stormont Papers resources makes available the debates from the parliament of Northern Ireland (Stormont) from creation in 1921 until the end of Home Rule in 1971. It’s been available since 2006 and some statistics from the website are available. Of most interest is graph showing the spread of search terms entered by users There […]
Measuring the use and impact of digitised resources is no easy exercise. This is not only because of the changing nature of information seeking behaviour of different audiences, which has an effect on how users engage with digital resources. It is also due to the challenge in establishing appropriate metrics and criteria for measuring the […]
The JISC is making up to £2m funding available for digitisation-related work under the following three headings. More information is available from the circular (Word document) 1. Pilot and small-scale digitisation. Proposals may focus on undertaking pilot digitisation, small-scale digitisation or a smaller feasibility study prior to larger scale activity. Alternatively, proposals may focus on […]
One of the most difficult aspects of developing a digitisation strategy is deciding how you will prioritise your digitisation work Fragile manuscripts, fading newspapers, valuable coins, hidden audio recordings, historical texts and the like all clamour for the right to be digitised first. The JISC Digitisation Programme recognises this is a difficulty and therefore issued […]
A recent blog post on Digitization 101 pointed to the article Online Digital Special Collections in English Universities: Promoting Awareness. This article is a useful read for those involved in the creation of digital collections and responsible for their take-up once material is available online. The author proposes a number of practical tips on activities […]
Standards for digital content such as file formats or metadata aren’t sexy. But they are crucial – without them resource discovery is impeded, functionality is diminished and long-term access is imperilled. But implementing standards is not just a matter of a ‘Stalinist’ top-down mandate. Within in a project, service or an organisation standards impinge on […]
There’s an awful lot of interesting ideas to unpack in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (ncse) resource mentioned in a previous posting. For a start, there is novel to addition to showing results by showing the image reproduction for a search results as well as the OCR’d transcription. There’s the whole range of partners involved in […]
Members of the JISC team attended a conference to launch the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (ncse): a free, online edition of six nineteenth-century periodicals and newspapers. The conference was interesting for a number of reasons, not least because it is in a excellent model for getting groups of end-users involved in discussing and using such resources […]
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In the news: lags and legacies
The launch of a couple of digitisation projects have made the news this week. There’s excitement in the papers over the prospect of digging over some of the most sensational trials in British criminal history as the Old Bailey opens its previously unseen files to the public. The Old Bailey Online website, published by the […]
If we make it, they might come… but it is a fact that any newly launched digital collection has to compete for attention with a huge amount of material already available on the web. Resource creators, therefore, have the challenging task of devising ways in which to interest and engage potential users. Projects within the […]
One of the great things about digitising multiple collections is it allows you to build connections between different resources. Here’s a straightforward example The John Johnson Collection of Electronic Ephemera has a news-sheet (dated 14 Nov 1807) recounting the murder of two women in the town of Kilmarnock, on the west coast of Scotland. It […]
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In the news: Darwin Online project
The Guardian reports today that about 90,000 pages of manuscripts, field notes, photographs and sketches connected with Charles Darwin are being placed online, where they can be viewed free. The material is the last major set of additions to the Darwin Online project, started in 2002 and based in Cambridge, and which claims to be […]
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Public libraries digitising music
During a recent meeting on digitisation in the EU, the JISC Digitisation Programme came across this interesting digitisation model from the Rotterdam Central Record Library The library in Rotterdam owns 300,000 CDs (including mainstream stuff) They are digitising every CD CDs are then lent digitally, ie via Internet, to library users (for free) Users can […]
Thanks to a public-private partnership between the Bodleian Library and ProQuest, thousands of images from one of the world’s most important collections of printed ephemera are being made freely available to all UK universities, further education institutions, schools and public libraries. The John Johnson Collection: An Archive of Printed Ephemera, part of the JISC Phase […]
There’s a lot of digital content out there, and so the battle to get your particular project noticed and used is a tough one. One particular project that has dealt with this is the Nineteenth-Century Pamphlets project, a multi-partner project led by the University of Southampton. The resource will not just have its own website […]
Five digitisation projects are to be awarded funding of around £600,000 ($1,150,000) under a transatlantic collaboration between JISC and the US National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).A call for proposals issued last November invited scholars in England and the USA to collaborate on digitisation, the aim of the £600,000 ($1,150,000) programme being to unite scholarly […]