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JISC Digitisation Project
JISC has been allocated non-recurrent funding for the acquisition and
digitisation of electronic materials to help meet the growing demand for
online information. The scale of the funding presents an opportunity to
enhance the core resource of digitised material available to HE and will
allow the development of a programme of large-scale activity, the results of
which will provide a comprehensive resource and add significant value to
research, learning and teaching (especially support for distance learning)
and the e-University. The programme will allow the digitisation of a wide
range of formats (including text, geospatial data, images, moving images and
sound) which will be of great value to the community. Digitisation of such
resources will provide on-line access to previously unobtainable materials,
supporting a variety of subject interest and distance access to key
resources.
Both JISC and its Committee for Content Services have considered guidelines
for utilising this funding and identified the following criteria: the
materials should be of broad disciplinary interest and should form a
coherent theme or themes; a small number of large-scale projects should be
funded that would not be possible without an investment of this size; the
materials would need to be fully compatible with the common information
environment being developed by JISC, the British Library, Resource and
others; the materials would need to meet rigorous quality-assurance
standards and be of value to the wider post-16 education community.
A Working Group was established to consider, among other issues, how the
materials to be digitised should be selected. The Group agreed to seek
advice from the learning and teaching and resource communities as
recommended in the HE Content Policy Group report. The purposes of this
document is to invite the community to comment on a series of collections
proposed for digitisation and suggest any additional collections that would
fit the criteria for inclusion in this programme outlined above. The time
period is short and only already known and identified projects can be
considered.
The Group has identified twelve collections that they feel fit these
criteria and these are outlined below (in no particular order). Because the
scientific and engineering communities are already well provided with this
sort of material, the focus of this programme is on the fields of the
humanities, social sciences and medicine. You are invited to indicate the
degree of your interest by numbering the collections to which you might
subscribe in order of preference. i.e. put a figure 1 in the box beside the
collection you are most likely to acquire, a 2 in your next choice etc. If
you are not interested in a particular collection, leave the box blank.
Please return the attached form to Sarah Sherman, Collections Access Support
at the address above or fax it to 020 7848 2939 by 10th January 2003.
Alternatively, you may respond online by visiting
www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/collections/digitisationproject.htm.
There is space at the end of the form for you to suggest any other
collection you would like us to consider or to make any further comments on
the collections proposed.
Yours sincerely,
Chris Bailey
Chair of the JISC Advisory Committee for Content and Services
----------------------
JISC Collections Helpdesk
JISC Office
King's College London
Strand Bridge House, 3rd Floor
138-142 The Strand
London
WC2R 1HH
tel: +44 (0)20 7848 2938
fax: +44 (0)20 7848 2939
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http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/
1. Early English Books Online (EEBO)
EEBO is an existing and successful product, but has the capability to
search only catalogue records for English language texts from 1475 to
1700; many institutions have expressed the desire to search the texts
themselves. For example, this would enable researchers to search thousands
of text for references to Shakespeare by his contemporaries; geographic
place names; cures for the plague (use at your own risk) or conceptions of
dragons. Digitising such documents requires close scholarly supervision,
as Optical Character recognition (OCR) software does not always recognise
the early English characters, but digitisation of 25,000 texts is
envisaged over a 5-year period.
2. The British Librarys Collection of British Newspapers 18001930
This collection would be of interest to students of history, politics,
military history, social, legal and shipping history, foreign affairs,
sport, history of advertising, the development of illustration in the mass
media and numerous other fields. It is proposed to select a mixture of
national and local newspaper titles which reflect the social and political
developments of the times in which they were published. Up to 2 million
pages of newspapers would be available, fully indexed and searchable.
3. A Selection of National Sound Archive (NSA) Recordings
Includes oral history, literature and material from independent radio
stations, as well as various types of music classical, jazz , African and
popular music based on the NSAs close association with the Royal Academy
of Music, the Royal College of Music and the music departments of
universities across the UK. The emphasis of the oral history sector is on
architecture, architectural history, design history, craft history and
contextual studies relating to architecture, design and craft practice.
Literature would include the acclaimed African Writers Club collection. In
all some 12,000 items totalling 3900 hours of segmented recordings would
become available.
4. 19th- and Early 20th-Century Census Data
Censuses from 1971 onwards are already available online; this collection
would cover the years 18011961 and provide: page images of the original
documents, capturing their look and feel and setting the data in their
typographical context with surrounding explanatory notes and footnotes
(for censuses up to 1901 only); machine-readable versions of the
statistical tables suitable for use in spreadsheets, databases and
statistical packages; and machine-readable versions of the surrounding
explanatory text and footnotes. The Census of Production, the Census of
Agriculture and the Reports of the Registrar General would also be
included.
5. History of Art Slide Collection
ArtSTOR, a not-for-profit organisation founded in 2001, is making
available digital images and related scholarly materials for the study of
art, architecture and other fields in the humanities. ArtSTOR works with
charitable foundations and museums across the world to digitise
high-resolution images accompanied by appropriate text and flexible search
mechanisms, from the design collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New
York to images associated with Buddhist cave grottoes in Dunhuang, China.
6. Back Numbers of a Selection of British Journals
This project would be based on institutional demand for back numbers of
key British journals, many of which date back to the 19th century and
earlier. It would ensure that there was no overlap with work already being
undertaken by JSTOR and other commercial ventures in the areas of arts and
sciences. Initial suggestions for journals to be digitised are welcome.
7. A Selection of EC Journals and Series
This project would be based on institutional demand for back numbers of
key EC Journals and Series. It would ensure that there was no overlap with
work already being undertaken by Eurotext and other commercial ventures in
this area. Initial suggestions for journals to be digitised are welcome.
8. The British Librarys Illuminated Manuscripts Collection
The British Librarys collection of manuscripts made before 1600 is one of
the largest and finest in the world. The term illuminated manuscripts
covers a broad range, including 85% of the British Librarys western
medieval and renaissance MSS; Greek illuminated book; post-1600 MSS
continuing traditions of illumination (e.g. by William Morris and Edward
Johnston) and handmade facsimiles (e.g. transcripts of Anglo-Saxon mss by
Elizabeth Elstob). These would be made available through descriptions,
continuously updated bibliographies, digital images, virtual exhibitions
and glossaries, providing a flexible tool for students, researchers and
teachers of medieval and renaissance studies and the whole spectrum of
historical humanities subjects, including literature, art, archaeology and
the history of medicine and science.
9. The British Librarys Collection of Photographically Illustrated Books
The British Library has one of the worlds largest and most comprehensive
collections of photographically illustrated books, dating from the 19th
through to the early 20th century. These include examples of most of the
early photographic processes by notable innovators and practitioners from
every continent, and cover a wide range of disciplines from topography to
technology and from portraiture to science. The current digitisation
project would expand the range of books and images currently available
with a view to broadening coverage of images from outside the UK and
include material on fine art, European portraiture, science and technology
and topography, including works by British photographers overseas.
10. A Selection of Independent Television News Archive Material
The ITN archive contains some 60,000 hours of news and feature material,
ranging from 1896 to the present day. It covers the output of ITN itself
(from 1955), Reuters Television library (to1959) and the Visnews news
agency (1957-1992), as well as unissued material. Over six hours of
material is added to the archive each day. The collection includes cinema
newsreels as well as television news. The collection would enable
subscribers to study newsfilm material as they can study newspapers, to
broaden the scope and depth of their research; it would benefit students
in disciplines as diverse as criminology (who could use the news to
contextualise case law) to fashion (who could study street fashion at any
given moment or at the time of any given event.)
11. Geospatial Data, 18th Century to the Present Day
Evidence on the Changing British Countryside, 1700 to the Present Day
includes a mix of mapping and geospatial data for selected dates across
the period, with modern mapping providing a context. Data include the
agricultural revolutions (e.g. Enclosure Acts), progressive urbanisation
and the growth of intervention by the emergent British state. A related
project provides the equivalent information with regard to coastal
mapping, being the 10km near-shore over the same historical period, with
digitised Admiralty charts, material from the Hydrographic Office and some
examples of geo-specific fishing and shipping data. This collection covers
a number of projects suggestions for which would be most useful are
welcome.
12. A Selection of British and American Medical Journals
The collection, which covers a range of medical disciplines in easily
searchable form, is based on the complete back files of several
high-impact medical journals, including the Journal of the American
Medical Association, Annals of Internal Medicine and British Journal of
Psychiatry. Some of these contain material dating back over 100 years.
While the content of most significant medical journals from the late 1990s
is available online, many years worth of issues remain accessible only
through bound copies on library shelves. An online version would be of
value not only to current biomedical researchers and practitioners but
also to social, economic and medical historians.
Other suggestions:
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