Digitisation: A Funder’s Perspective

Alastair DunningJISC Programme Manager

www.jisc.ac.uk/digitisation/www.twitter.com/alastairdunning

Presentation given at British Library, 20th July 2010Digitised History: newspapers and their impact on research into 18th and 19th century Britain

https://www.history.ac.uk/events/conferences/1157

Jis, etcc network, services

JISC is the UK Higher Education’s ICT body, providing Internet and email access for universities

http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2007/03/10/business/11archive.chart.ready.htmlHow much of the National Archives in Washington is digitised? Not very much. Approximately 1,800 years worth of work to go.

Google Books reckon there are 100m books to be digitised. Will they digitise them all?

The AHRC has funded numerous digitiasation projectshttp://web.me.com/xcia0069/ahrc.html

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Philanthropic organisations include Arcadia and the Mellon Foundation, plus private donors.

Publishers such as Gale-Cengage and ProQuest also have a significant role

JISC licences all kind of

material for HE, including

journals and resourcessuch as Early English

Books Online

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JISC Digitisation Programme• Oversight of c.70 projects, c.£25m from 2004 - 2010

– 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 and further afield - http://arts-humanities.net

– Guide to Bidding - http://www.jisc.ac.uk/fundingopportunities/bidguide.aspx

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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

/

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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/

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Resources need to have an obvious educational impact, whether in teaching or research

the Shakespeare Quartos website allows for different versions of Hamlet to be compared, http://quartos.org

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Projects need to be well managed, or they will not be completed

the 19th-century pamphlets resource digitised over 26,000 pamphlets from 7 UK research libraries, http://www.britishpamphlets.org.uk/

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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/

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What does this mean for you

• A complex process, involving both technical and intellectual peer review, decide which physical objects get digitised

• 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

• Further digitisation from JISC in the short term? Depends on government agenda

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Credits

• BL Printing Press - http://www.flickr.com/photos/takomabibelot/3984413475/

• Philanthropist - http://www.flickr.com/photos/re_wolf/2935139956

• Other images taken direct from relevant JISC-funded projects