Digitisation in the UK and the JISC Content programme

Digitisation in the UK and the JISC Content programmePaola Marchionni, Programme Manager Digitisation, JISC

University College London Summer school24 May 2012

The digitisation landscape is varied: public and private, big and small, organisations and individuals and they often merge into each other.

Partnerships with libraries all over the world.

Focus on book digitisation.

20m books scanned as of March 2012.

Over 100m books still to do.

Microsoft stopped its scanning project in 2008.

Scholarly publishers: JISC Collections purchases and licences content for the UK HE and FE sector.

Journals, special collections, ebooks... from broad coverage (eg EEBO, over 100,000 books between 1473-1700 ) to niche content (Pidgeon Digital)

Negotiated deals with over 100 publishers.

Museums, libraries and archives digitise their collections to increase access for all, support learning and engage new audiences.

In the UK memory institutions house over 500m books, records and objects, but only 5-10% has been digitised.

Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery –

Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource

British Library – Virtual Books

Public and private funding bodies support digitisation with different priorities, eg research, lifelong learning, cultural heritage, education...

AHRC grant for digitisation of criminal court cases, Old Bailey

HLF grant for building and digitisation of Tate Archive

Private donation to set up the Cambridge Digital Library

People do their own

digitisation: The Great Archive

collected and digitised 1000s of WW1 items from

the general public in the UK

and Europe

Students, researchers, teachers, learners, people... access digital content from different places and in a variety of ways

RSS

Where is JISC in the landscape and what do we do?

www.jisc.ac.ukJISC receives funding from the UK government mainly through the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and often its Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish equivalent and funds:

UK HE internet and email network, JANET

Innovative ICT projects for teaching, research and learning

Services such as advice and guidance, and data centres

www.jisc-content.ac.uk

The JISC Digitisation and Content programme focuses on creating and enhancing content for use in research, teaching and learning in Higher Education and encourages partnerships within and outside HE.

Since 2004: over £30m and over 100 projects:

•Digitisation of special and archival collections •Open Educational Resources (OER)•Enriching existing collection•Clustering existing digital content•User generated content/community engagement•Developing skills and strategies

JISC Content programme 2011-2013Just under £6m - 24 projects:

Strand A: Digitisation and OER Creation small scale digitisation and creation of learning resources for courses

Strand B: Mass Digitisationlarge scale digitisation of collections for research

Strand C: Clustering Digital Contentbringing together existing but scattered digital content

JISC Content programme Netvibes site with projects’ blogs http://bit.ly/xfy1Qh

JISC awards grants by issuing Calls to the HE community and selecting the best projects.

All projects have special and, often unique, collections to digitise, but they have to make a strong case about the value and potential use of their content to others as well.

Projects also have to show innovation, create content that is legal, standards based, open, if possible, and sustainable.

Partnerships are

encouraged.

.

JISC Film and Sound Think Tank http://bit.ly/KeLHQo

This short video explores many of the issues projects face when digitising content and making it available.

There is a huge amount of content that can be digitised, so institutions need to prioritise selection and tailor it to users’ needs.

Freeze Frame identified UK courses which would benefit form their polar images collection, eg. geology, geography, health, photography...

The Online Theatre Histories Archive embedded theatre archive resources in courses/modules across four partner universities

Often projects don’t own the copyright to the material they want to digitise and have to undertake lengthy negotiations to licence the content for their users.

Often because of copyright reasons collections are only accessible to universities behind password.

However, there is also a strong drive towards openess at the moment and the use of Creative Commons licences.

InView: over 2000 non-fiction films from the archives of the British Film Institute available to UK universities behind authentication.

However, a lot of content is available as Open Educational Resources under Creative Commons licences.www.myleicestershire.org.uk

Many of the projects funded by JISC make content freely and openly available.

Digital resources are often built in isolation to other, relevant, collections, which causes fragmentation.

Also, by making data openly available projects increase the chance of their content being used by others.

JISC projects cluster existing content to provide a seamless search across disparate collections.

Locating London Past brings together 17th and 18th C GIS-enabled data sets (criminal, archaeological, social, population...) and visualises them on historical and contemporary maps of London. An API allows geo-referenced material to be exported and re-used in Google maps mash-ups and other GIS environments.

Partnerships are a good way to source content not in the public domain or difficult to access, expand audiences, combine different expertise and strengths to create innovative content.

Fashion designer’s Zandra Rhodes Digital Study Collection – Zandra Rhodes and the University for the Creative Arts

New Connections BT Archive and University of Coventry

3D metalwork collection – Museums Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University

People, whether the public at large or specific communities, are increasingly becoming partners in content creation.

Since 2010 over 1600 volunteers have helped transcribe 45% of the 7,464 manuscripts uploaded to the UCL Transcribe Bentham website

A small group of supertranscribers (“gangsourcing”) participates actively gaining “status” through competitive element.

Value of this project: no Research Associate would be paid to do this kind of work.

JISC-funded project part of the Citizen Science Alliance, a transatlantic collaboration of universities and museums who are dedicated to involving everyone in the process of science.

The Old Weather project asks volunteers to help scientists record weather observations of Royal Navy ships during WW1.

Transcriptions will contribute to climate model projections and historians will be able to track ship movements and study the stories of the people on board.

Once grant funding terminates, collections have to be sustained, both technically and editorially. This is arguably the biggest challenge institutions face when creating digital resources.

Host institutions play a key role in supporting own collections.Integration into institutional infrastructures is the best way for an new resources to be maintained as part of “business as usual”.

Partnerships with the commercial sector provide an alternative: Bodleian Library John Johnson Collection delivered and sustained through ProQuest.

Development of services: CHICC at University of Manchester’s John Rylands Library

Revenue generation models such as Google Ads can contribute to the running costs of maintaining a service, as in the case of the Vision of Britain website.

The Faculties provides university-level podcasts for A level students and experimenting with and sponsorships to keep the content open. Freemium models

provide the flexibility to deliver a mixture of free and paid for content.

Image credits(unless otherwise stated on individual slides)

Map of Great Britain: David Rumsey Historical Map Collection http://bit.ly/Lulr7P Hong Kong harbour, c.1900: http://visualisingchina.net/#hpc-bk02-04Fancy dress whilst in camp: http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/gwa/item/7114?CISOBOX=1&REC=2Lightbulb: http://www.flickr.com/photos/vermininc/2777441779/sizes/s/in/photostream/Federer: http://www.flickr.com/photos/franz88/1092672031/sizes/s/in/photostream/Coins: http://www.flickr.com/photos/59937401@N07/5474205269/sizes/l/in/photostream/Puzzles: http://www.flickr.com/photos/horiavarlan/4273913228/sizes/l/in/photostream/ Beaded creations from the Zandra Rhodes archive:

http://zandrarhodesarchive.wordpress.com/2012/04/20/cataloguing-the-zandra-rhodes-archive/

Teapot http://www.museums-sheffield.org.uk/collections/objects-in-3d/drink/teapot-sheffield

All other images are screeshots of websites.Thanks also to Alastair Dunning for some of the slides and images.

Text of slides licenced under CC-BY

Thank you!

Paola MarchionniProgramme Manager Digitisation, JISC p.marchionni@jisc.ac.uk@paolamarchionni

JISC Digitisation blog: http://digitisation.jiscinvolve.org/wp/

Portal of JISC-funded digital content: http://www.jisc-content.ac.uk

JISC Digitisation and Content programmes:http://www.jisc.ac.uk/digitisation