Last week some of the JISC Programme Managers met with representatives from the Brazilian Ministry of Culture, Digital Culture department. Our Brazilian colleagues talked us through their ambitious plans for setting up, among other things, a National System of Cultural Information and Indicators (SNIIC), a new platform that will push the open data agenda and […]
It is customary for many digitisation projects to undertake user consultation activities during their development as a way to ensure that the content that is being digitised is relevant to the needs of target users. And so it should be. However, while this activity is useful to ascertain the potential use that people might make […]
This year the Consortium for European Research Libraries (CERL) will be holding their national seminar on Accessing heritage research collections through digitisation: models and use at the British Library on Tue 30 October 2012. The programme includes contributions on licencing models, working with commercial partners, Google Books in Spain and the JISC Historic Books platform. […]
If you use digitised newspapers or other large-scale digital collections in your work, research or for personal interest, then please fill in the survey at https://opinio.ucl.ac.uk/s?s=15519. This survey is part of a research project being undertaken at UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, which aims to learn more about users of large scale digitised collections, and […]
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Virtuous and vicious circles
There is an increasing focus within JISC’s Content Programme on social media, mobile technologies and multi-channel communications. We have moved away from being merely concerned with the practices of digitisation, and with core technologies such as metadata or website development. Projects are discovering that the way people use and interact with resources is critical to […]
Yesterday we ran an evaluation and impact synthesis workshop and I must say it helped me see that, rather than being dry topics, evaluation and impact are actually practices which we can all benefit from. To achieve good results it is essential to plan ahead and try to stand back from what you are doing […]
It is nice to see project blogs packed with interesting facts and updates. I recently enjoyed this post on musical and sculptural uses of Seal Level data from Rescuing Historical UK Sea Levels Data, a project being undertaken at the British Oceanographic Data Centre (see some more recent posts as well). Then there is this […]
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Digital Humanities Congress 2012
The Digital Humanities Congress will be held at the University of Sheffield on 6-8 September 2012. Digital humanities is intended to mean “the use of technology within arts, heritage and humanities research as both a method of inquiry and a means of dissemination.” The programme is packed with sessions covering, among other topics, digitisation of […]
(From Stuart Dunn, King’s College London) The increasingly networked nature of the academic world is raising important questions about how the humanities can interact with wider communities outside the academy. ‘Crowd-sourcing’ is a term that has come to encompass a range of activities involving such interaction. It has been used in the past by physical […]
Despite its ubiquity as a website, Wikipedia is still underused as a mechanism for exposing digitised content. In a recent survey from the Enumerate project only 3% of digitised collections expose their content via Wikipedia. However, Wikipedia, or rather the suite of platforms under the Wikimedia Foundation, offers universities and cultural heritage institutions a complementary […]
“How many lifetimes?” was the recurrent question that the authors of the One Culture report kept on coming up against in their investigations of the work of the first round of projects that took part in the Digging into Data Challenge. The projects were all founded on a high degree of international collaborations and set […]
Just in case you hadn’t heard, seen or talked enough about the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, a recently launched JISC-funded website, Media and the memory in Wales, has collected people’s memories of seeing the coronation of Elizabeth II on television in 1953. The coronation of Queen Elzabeth II in 1953 was one of the key events […]
Tate is currently looking to recruit a Project Manager to undertake a substantial digitisation project within its archive. Here is an outline of what the job entails. Tate’s aim is to increase public awareness, understanding and enjoyment of British art from the 16th century to the present day. Successful in our Heritage Lottery Fund bid […]
Archival Sound Recordings was one of the first projects to be funded under the JISC Digitisation Programme. The British Library released its initial batch of recordings online in 2007, and has continued to add new (and old !) recordings to this fascinating resource. There are now some 50,000 recordings available, including oral histories, classical music, […]
A new video discusses the work on sustainability of digital content that the Strategic Content Alliance (SCA) and ITHAKA S+R have been doing over the last few years and new resources now available. Highlights include Five things sustainable projects do and a tool which provides a Framework for post-grant sustainability. The video is also available […]
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Update on JISC Content programme
Projects in the JISC Content programme are now about 6 months into their development. After an initial settling down stage and bringing teams and documentation together, they’ve been getting their teeth into the nitty gritty of the work. Drawing on projects’ blogs and their own reflections on recent activity, which can be accessed on the […]
The University of Sheffield is undertaking research with the intention of improving search within the humanities. The AHRC-funded project called ‘Participating in Search Design: A Study of George Thomason’s English Newsbooks‘ is a collaboration between the Humanities Research Institute and the departments of History (Professor Mike Braddick, Pro-Vice Chancellor for Arts and Humanities), English (Dr […]
Great War Collections (which now includes the JISC-funded Great War Archive and Europeana 1914-1918) has been entered for the EngageU Award, a European Competition for Best Innovations in University Outreach and Public Engagement. The public can vote for this project until 19 April. The Great War Collections started as a JISC-funded project, the Great War […]
The Digital Humanities Congress is a new conference which will be held in Sheffield every two years. Its purpose is to promote the sharing of knowledge, ideas and techniques within the digital humanities. Digital humanities is understood by Sheffield to mean the use of technology within arts, heritage and humanities research as both a method […]
User engagement, both online and offline, is an important process for any project delivering successful web-based resources. Web usability is arguably part of that process, and we were keen to expose projects within the current JISC Content programme to the principles of user centred design early on in the planning of their online resources. Many […]