JISC Digitisation Conference 2007 | 20 July 2007 | Slide 1

JISC Digitisation & e-Content Programme: Strategy and Collections

www.jisc.ac.uk/digitisation Five centuries of unique resources for learning, teaching & research

Alastair Dunning, JISC Digitisation Programme Manager,UCL Presentation, 11th May 2011a.dunning@jisc.ac.uk, 0203 006 6065, @alastairdunning

How digital projects (in UK)are funded & sustained

the jisc network (janet) gives all higher education internet access

jisc also supports sevices for the

educational community such as

JISCmail, MIMAS and JISC Digital Media

jisc also funds innovative projects to create new ideas for the use of

technology in education

JISC Digitisation Programme Oversight of c.80 projects, > £25m from 2004 - 2011

– ITN’s NewsFilm Online - http://www.nfo.ac.uk/ (UK only)

– Political Cartoon Archive – http://www.cartoons.ac.uk/

– British Library Sound Archive - http://sounds.bl.uk/ (some UK only)

– 20th-century Government Cabinet Papers -http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/cabinetpapers/

– Musicians of Britain & Ireland - http://www.charm.rhul.ac.uk/sound/sound_mbi.html

– Gateway of content - http://www.jisc-content.ac.uk– Digitisation in UK -

http://www.peelingwall.org/uk-digitisation.html

How does public funding happen? Not just universities and libraries working by themselves – universities partly

funded by taxes; although this is changing quickly in UK (ie student fees)

Complex set of politics, government, strategy and institutions

http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/

Each step on the chain has strategic guidance about how that money can be spent

Prime Minister > Minister for Business, Innovation and Skills > Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) > JISC

– Also via Research Councils or direct to universities

How are the digitisation / digital humanities projects funded?

PS – This is subject to significant change as effect of government policies are felt!

jisc will issue calls to the educational community, asking for proposals

universities and maybe otherinterested bodies willsubmit applications

JISC then uses a peer-reviewprocess to select the bestprojects, using expertise from the universities and also withinJISC itself

Call > Bids > Review > Projects

What are JISC’s ‘strategic imperatives’, i.e. what do tell our projects that have to do

Bear in mind the issues from the prologue

JISC wants successful projects, of high quality and of use for researchers, lecturers and students

digital resources are not free to run – they need to be sustained in the long term, both technically and intellectually

the Electronic Ephemera collection has images from 18th-20th century. It

was digitised at Oxford but is published by ProQuest, a commercial

company

http://johnjohnson.chadwyck.co.uk/

(You may have access if your university has subscribed)

build it and they will come? – Nope, users need to be actively engaged if they are to use a resource

the Freeze Frame project went through every UK undergraduate

course, identifying which would be interested in their collection of

polar images – geology, geography, fashion, health and

nutrition, history …

http://www.freezeframe.ac.uk/

but users can also start to do new things with digital resources

Connected Histories interprets, indexes and cross-searchers 11

different sources. It breaks down silos ...

http://www.connectedhistories.org/

The Digging into Data challenges funds internatoinal resarch team to

analyse massive sets of data, including the Digging into

Authorship project

http://www.diggingintodata.org/

without good metadata a resource will not be found nor trusted

the Archival Sound Recordings has over 44,000 audio files on wildlife, oral history, the Holocaust, artist’s

testimonies, lectures. Each recording is scrupulously

catalogued, so the rights are clearly labelled, and the recordings

findable via Google

http://sounds.bl.uk

innovation means that you can have exciting projects that do new things

the First World War Poetry Archive asked members of the public to digitise and

comment on their own collections – the pool of content and expertise was hugely

increased. Plus a whole trench recreated in Second Life

http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/

innovation means that you can have exciting projects that do new things

the PreRaphaelite resource is beautifully

designed and the photographs are of a quality unsurpassed

http://www.preraphaelites.org/

innovation means that you can have exciting projects that do new things

Old Weather encourages the public to transcribe naval logs with weather

reports thus providing important data for climate scientists

http://www.oldweather.org/

Visualising China will offer researchers the opportunity build a directory of historic

photos of China http://www.visualisingchina.org/

What does this mean for you

A lot goes on of which end users at universities don’t know about

But is vital in creating sustainable, high-quality resources

At the end you have free access to high quality resources to use in classwork and research (at least most of the time)

Also, library professionals of future will need to tackle issues addressed in this presentation

Credits Network - http://www.flickr.com/photos/funksoup/403990660/

Federer – http://www.flickr.com/photos/franz88/1092672031/

Lightbulb - http://www.flickr.com/photos/vermininc/2777441779/

Committee Men 1 - (Human Space Flight Plans Committee Report (200910220001HQ), http://www.flickr.com/photos/nasahqphoto/4035625512/

Committee Room (Committee Room, Lloyd's), http://www.flickr.com/photos/jessicamulley/3941173374/

Application (My Application at Scanline) - http://www.flickr.com/photos/strahl/2392228947/

Call Me - http://www.flickr.com/photos/trashit_t-shirt/2171336265/

Other images taken direct from relevant JISC-funded projects

If you think of questions later, tweet me @alastairdunning or email me a.dunning at // jisc.ac.uk

More content at http://www.jisc-content.ac.uk/