how jisc projects are funded and sustained

Joint Information Systems Committee April 8, 2023 | Programme Meeting | Slide 1

How JISC projects are funded and sustained

Alastair Dunning

Digitisation Programme Manager JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) a.dunning@jisc.ac.uk, 0203 006 6065

UCL Presentation, 20th November 2009

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

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

education

JISC Digitisation Programme

Oversight of c.60 projects, c.£25m from 2004 - 2009

– ITN’s NewsFilm Online - http://www.nfo.ac.uk/

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

– British Film Institute InView http://www.bfi.org.uk/inview/

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

– http://www.jisc.ac.uk/digitisation

– Digitisation in UK - http://web.me.com/xcia0069/uk-digitisation.html

How does funding happen?

Not just universities and libraries working by themselves – universities largely funded by taxes (but more and more 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 Education > Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) > JISC

How are the digitisation / digital humanities projects funded?

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/

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/

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/

the PreRaphaelite resource is beautifully designed and the photographs are of a quality

unsurpassed http://www.preraphaelites.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)

Credits

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

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