As part of the JISC funded First World War Poetry Digital Archive project, the University of Oxford has launched a web site to allow members of the public to submit digital photographs or transcripts of items they personally hold which are related to the First World War. The ‘Great War Archive’ site will run for […]
In the development of a Web resource, ideally usability testing is an iterative process that is carried out throughout the development of a resource and can be conducted both internally (expert review) and with outside users (user testing). The second meeting of the JISC Digitisation programme partly focused on Web usability issues and user interaction […]
The JISC Digitisation Conference was held at the St David’s Hotel and Conference Centre in Cardiff on 20/21 July 2007. It gathered together some of the leading digitisation projects, funding-bodies, publishers, archives, libraries and many of the key thinkers in the area. There was an international delegate list, drawing in representatives from the UK, France, […]
The Archive Sound Recording Project is developing its user panel, and holding a related event on 11th March 2008. Details below The British Library’s Archival Sound Recordings (www.bl.uk/sounds) is a JISC funded project to make selected material from the Sound Archive available online to Higher and Further Education institutions. The project will be hosting a […]
The JISC’s Digitisation Advisory Group met at the British Film Institute (BFI) Archives in Berkhamsted, north of London. The BFI leads the JISC’s InView project, which is digitising 600 hours of unique moving image materials from their collection. However, as a tour organised by senior preservation manager Andrea Kalas demonstrated such digitisation is just scratching […]
The National Archive’s digitisation project, British Governance in the 20th century – Cabinet Papers, 1914-1975, has been grappling with issues of “useful” OCR. It might be stating the obvious, but accurate OCR is as useful as the search results it produces. If OCRd text consistently misspells particularly relevant key words for retrieving certain documents, than […]
As part of its Digitisation Programme, the JISC appointed consultant Hervé L’Hours to assist the 16 projects in defining their metadata requirements. In particular, Hervé looked at issues relating to technical / preservation metadata and how these were being built into project workflows. The bulk of this work took place between June and November 2007. […]
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Digitise a book in 15 minutes!
JISC recently met with representatives of QIDENUS TECHNOLOGIES, who are prototyping new robotic book scanning technologies. QiScan RBSpro is a fully automated robotic scanner that uses a robotic rubber “finger”, and no suction technologies, to turn the pages of a book. The “finger” senses the type of paper and the machine sets the right angle […]
The JISC and BL-commissioned Google Generation report highlights a number of key points that will have an effect on current and future digitisation projects. That librarians need to radically re-think their position and tasks to avoid becoming outdated in the face of tools like Google. It is not just the ‘kids of today’ that dumb […]
As well as digitising several thousand sound files, the British Library Archival Sound Recordings project has made multiple digital images of record and music players from its artefacts collections. This includes gramophones from the 1890s right up to Sony cassette decks from the 1970s. The players have been photographed from multiple angles, allowing for the […]
The JISC-funded 19th Century Newspapers digitisation project was highlighted in today’s Guardian as part of a growing number of online newspaper archives which constitute an invaluable resource for historians and researchers. Stephen Hoare commented: “The digitisation of the British Library’s 19th-century newspaper collection – the most comprehensive archive ever to go online – was launched […]
Developing International Collaboration for Digitisation: the JISC – National Endowment for Humanities (NEH) perspective Hosted by King’s College London. Monday 21st January, 5.30pm – 6.45pm (Room 2B08, Strand Campus) With presentations and commentary from Bruce Cole, Chairman, National Endowment for Humanities Malcolm Read, Executive Secretary, JISC Paul Ell, Director, The Centre for Data Digitisation and […]
The recent LIBER-EBLIDA workshop on digitisation of library material in Europe explored some important challenges facing national and university libraries across the continent as they attempt to join together to deliver a “European Digital Library”. In this podcast interview Paul Ayris, librarian at University College London and a senior figure in these European developments, depicts […]
A project plan might not be the most exciting document to read, but it can reveal in depth details about how a digitisation project aims to proceed. Most of the sixteen projects in the programme have now published their plans on the JISC website. Click on the appropriate project name from the digitisation page on […]
The JISC presenation at Educa Online focussed on strategies that funders can take to ensure material digitised in their digitisation programmes is available for re-use by a variety of different users (eg teachers, lecturers, postgrards, undergrads, interested members of public) For JISC these five strategies are Ensure licensed usage for educational sector so that users […]
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The importance of media literacy
Members of the JISC Digitisation Programme attended the Educa Online e-learning conference in Berlin at the end of November 2007. Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture, was one of the key speakers at the conference. He made an impassioned attack on what he saw as […]
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On “Good Terms”
Next week (6 December) will see the launch of the beta version of Electronic Ephemera: Digitised Selections from the John Johnson Collection at Online Information 2007, London. This new e-resource is part of the JISC Phase Two Digitisation Programme and features selections from the Bodleian Library’s John Johnson Collection, one of the most important collections […]
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Evaluation, Evaluation, Evaluation
Evaluation is often a neglected area within a digitisation project’s life cycle, as most of a team’s energies and resources get absorbed by the complex task of setting up the right infrastructure to carry out the actual digitisation of material. At times subsumed within the more technical Quality Assurance process, at best it’s the kind […]
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Deadline for JISC / NEH applications
As previously announced, the JISC is running a short digitisation initiative with the US National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Funding is available for: New digitisation projects and pilot projects Addition of important material to existing digitisation projects Development of infrastructure to support US-English digitisation work The closing date for applications is 29th November 2007 […]
More than 150 years of Guardian and Observer back copies have been made available online with the launch of the paper’s digital archive. The archive allows users to search for free the full text of the newspaper from 1821 to 1975 and the Observer from 1900 to 1975 (a second phase early next year will see […]