JISC Digging into Data

JISC: A Word from the Sponsors With the Strange Acronym

Alastair Dunning@alastairdunning,

http://digitisation.jiscinvolve.orgDigitisation Programme Manager, JISC

JISC ?

• Joint Information Systems Committee – World’s worst acronym

• Currently government funded, $130m core funding• Supports Higher Education in three key areas1. Provides JANET – network for UK HE and beyond2. Service infrastructure – email lists, collections

licensing, data centres3. Innovative projects – digitisation, digital

infrastructure, e-learning, admin systems

http://www.jisc-content.ac.uk is a gateway to all the content JISC has digitised or licensed. Some of the content is open access; some is gated. Around 70 projects, c.$50m

http://www.cartoons.ac.uk presents artwork of 150,000 political cartoons from UK 20th-century newspapers.

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/cabinetpapers/ publishes all minutes of UK government cabinet meetings from 1915 to 1980

http://sounds.bl.uk makes oral histories, classical music, accents and dialects available – some gated, some open access

http://oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1 digitised classic WW1 poetry, but also introduced crowdsourced digitisation of the general public’s WW1 collections

Concern over usage

• Log Analysis of Resources in Arts and Humanities (2006) pointed out problems with digital resources - http://www.ucl.ac.uk/infostudies/LAIRAH/

• Splashes and Ripples (2011) demonstrated significant improvements - http://ssrn.com/abstract=1846535

• Toolkit for the Impact of Scholarly Digitised Resources - http://microsites.oii.ox.ac.uk/tidsr

• Concurrent focus on innovative uses of resources

http://www.connectedhistories.org provides a search tool, with added functionality, over 11 related digital resources, with more to come.

http://oldweather.org asks the general public to transcribe naval logs, with the resultant meteorological data used by climate scientists

Digging into Data

• Like other funders, looking at ways to exploit the entire corpus rather than individual items

• Visualisation and other outputs new forms of explication and engagement

• Enhances possibility of public engagement • Importance of outputs that explain research

without sacrificing integrity