JISC Digitisation Conference 2007 | 20 July 2007 | Slide 1 JISC Digitisation & e-Content Programme: Strategy and Collections centuries of unique resources for learning, teaching & research Alastair Dunning, JISC Digitisation Programme Manager, UCL Presentation, 11 th May 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 JISCmailMIMAS 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 –ITN’s NewsFilm Online - (UK only) –Political Cartoon Archive – –British Library Sound Archive - (some UK only) –20 th -century Government Cabinet Papers –Musicians of Britain & Ireland –Gateway of content - –Digitisation in UK -

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 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 other interested bodies will submit applications

JISC then uses a peer-review process to select the best projects, using expertise from the universities and also within JISC 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 18 th -20 th century. It was digitised at Oxford but is published by ProQuest, a commercial company (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 …

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... The Digging into Data challenges funds internatoinal resarch team to analyse massive sets of data, including the Digging into Authorship project

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

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

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 elites.org/ elites.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 Visualising China will offer researchers the opportunity build a directory of historic photos of China

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 - Federer – Lightbulb - Committee Men 1 - (Human Space Flight Plans Committee Report ( HQ), Committee Room (Committee Room, Lloyd's), Application (My Application at Scanline) Call Me - Other images taken direct from relevant JISC-funded projects If you think of questions later, tweet or me a.dunning at // jisc.ac.uk More content at