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Jisc and JSTOR collaborate to maximise the impact of digitised special collections

Today, we are pleased to announce that Jisc is embarking on a project, in partnership with the JSTOR content platform and its parent organisation ITHAKA, to facilitate the hosting and delivery of digitised content from Jisc members, with the goal of extending their reach, impact and reputation. At a time when the necessity of travel […]

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Digitisation priorities

What are the barriers to collaborative digitisation of collections in the UK?

Some members of the HE content team have been discussing issues about the collaborative digitisation of collections. We know, from conversations with our Digital Archival Collections advisory group, that there is a thirst for institutions to work together to make their collections available. We were wondering about the barriers to making this happen. Institutions are […]

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#UKMHL Historical Texts UK Medical Heritage Library

Epidemics in the UK Medical Heritage Library

At such a time of public concern, it can be interesting to examine how our ancestors viewed and dealt with epidemic diseases. I was looking at the UK Medical Heritage Library (UKMHL) which we provide as an open collection via our Historical Texts service and came across: Annals of influenza, or epidemic catarrhal fever in […]

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Participation opportunity

Do you want to get your history of science collection digitised? Let us know!

Does your library or archive hold collections on the history of science that you would like to digitise? If so, Jisc and Wiley would like to hear from you! Jisc and Wiley invite UK HE libraries and archives to submit expressions of interest for their collections to be considered for digitisation. If this is for […]

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Collaboration Community Content Independent Voices

Call for information: digitisation of 1960s, 70s and 80s UK alternative and independent press material

Help us create digital collections, for the open web, by proposing UK alternative and underground press magazine titles in two broad subject areas: The struggle for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) civil rights and equality in Britain Second wave feminism in Britain The deadline for submitting this information is: EXTENDED TO 16 APRIL 2018.  Please download […]

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Metadata Reusable data

Digitisation of English placenames (DEEP) project data

I thought I would post links to  data from a big project we funded some time back to capture English historical place-names. The data drives the Historical Gazetteer of England’s Place-names where you can search for individual modern forms to find the historical name. We had previously provided an automated system for using the data […]

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#UKMHL UK Medical Heritage Library

Visualising Medical History Invitation to Tender now live

Following on from our last post we are pleased to announce the Visualising Medical History invitation to tender is now live from this link. To register interest in this opportunity follow these steps: you will first need to register on the Janet procurement portal via the button on the right. You will be asked to […]

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#UKMHL data mining OCR UK Medical Heritage Library

New Jisc commission to Visualise Medical History

Jisc will shortly be commissioning a project entitled Visualising Medical History as part of the wider work around the UK Medical Heritage Library. This post explains the rationale behind the project and provides practical details. The UK Medical Heritage Library is making 15 million pages of 19th Century medical texts available digitally in one searchable collection for the […]

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#UKMHL Libraries UK Medical Heritage Library

The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine collection goes digital

As part of the UK Medical Heritage Library (UK-MHL) digitisation project, jointly funded by Jisc and the Wellcome Library, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine Library is contributing books and pamphlets dating from between 1780-1914 from its collection. This post, the fourth in a series looking at the UK-MHL, outlines the history of […]

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Some facts and figures from British Library sounds

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, […]

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Strategic or Open Digitisation?

The recent projects that JISC has funded as part of its Content Programme contain a fascinating range of materials – archives relating to the 18th-century Board of Longitude, the UK’s collection of fossils and reports documenting the health of modern London. But the fascination of such an eclectic range of sources could also be construed […]

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Early Music Online

Early Music Online is a pilot project in which 300 of the world’s earliest surviving volumes of printed music, held in the British Library, have been digitised and made freely available online. You can browse the digitised content in Royal Holloway’s digital repository. Pages from Il primo libro de madrigali a sei voci di Pietro […]

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Digitisation priorities Europe

Digitisation in Europe – The New Renaissance

The European Union’s Comite’ des Sages recently published The New Renaissance, a proud call-to-arms for the digitisation of Europe’s cultural heritage. There are plenty of questions it raises and some of the recommendations will be very difficult to put into practice. But as a lofty statement of intent it’s a powerful document and very welcome, […]

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Does the digital humanities need more digitisation?

There was a time, perhaps back in the early misty years of the twenty-first century, when the completion of big digitisation projects would be greeted with whoops and cheers from the nascent digital humanities community. Enthusiastic mailing list emails would trumpet how much easier scholarly access would be and librarians breathed a sigh of relief […]

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Jisc digitisation programmes Projects 2006-2009

Of war, cartoons, eggs, and more…

Cartoons are a very effective medium not only to comment on the social, political and historical events of our times but also for their power to stay in people’s hearts forever, thus recalling a particular event. One of the many contributors to the Great War Archive, part of the First World War Poetry Digital Archive, […]

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Data capture Jisc digitisation programmes Projects 2003-2007 Scanners

Book scanners: compare and contrast

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 […]

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Audio-Visual In the news Jisc digitisation programmes Users

Yesterdays’s Headlines …. Televised News Online

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 […]

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Funding In the news Jisc digitisation programmes Podcasts Projects 2006-2009

Issac Newton Podcasts and other new digitisation projects

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 […]

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Audio-Visual bbc In the news Jisc digitisation programmes Publicity and promotion Users

Will a BBC video archive swamp everything else?

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 […]

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Jisc digitisation programmes Podcasts Projects 2006-2009 Usability Users

Early usage of the John Johnson Collection

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 […]