The International Dunhuang Project: The Silk Road Online and the Darwin Correspondence Project are two of the longest running digitisation projects in the UK.
The International Dunhuang Project is a “ground-breaking international collaboration to make information and images of all manuscripts, paintings, textiles and artefacts from Dunhuang and archaeological sites of the Eastern Silk Road freely available on the Internet and to encourage their use through educational and research programmes.”. It is international project running since 1994, hosted at the BL and has over 140,000 relevant images online.
The Darwin Correspondence project aims to document and add scholarly apparatus to over 14,000 of Darwin’s letters (both received and sent). Hosted at Cambridge University, the project is a mixed media one, with both digital and print outputs.
Both are huge projects and are need of continued assistance to digitise all the items within its orbit – the Darwin project aims to have 30 printed volumes, and complete around 2025. (!)
But of course the difficult thing is to find continued funding for such projects. For funding bodies or charities there are diminishing returns in funding something which already has had some academic impact. The gains are less tanglible if one funds something which is not trying to innovate and is already established in the academic blood stream. Equally, a funder will have less say in the project if it is jostling against many other donors who have already funded it.
I’m not quite sure how this is solved! Potential fund raising needs to get that much innovative in order for the projects to reach their natural conclusion.
January 22, 2008 at 1:17 pm
This is a good point – I’d like to know what your perspective is as I can’t get any clue from this. If you’d like to get in touch with us at the Darwin Correspondence Project, we’d be interested in discussing the issues.
Alison Pearn
January 23, 2008 at 6:13 pm
Some possible funding strategies for long-term digitisation projects …?
1) Ensure relentless innovation with each iteration of funding – so that extra value is added to the collection with every new volume or set of collections that is added. This could be Web2.0 technologies (i.e. allowing online peer review, or Wiki transcriptions) or improving exposure via federated searching Z39.50 or harvesting technologies like OAI
Other innovative ideas could include building some of the content into e-learning packages, or exposing the content with an API – allowing for scholars to experiment with it. On the same tack, a Virtual Research Environment could be developed to help discuss and research the content
2) Exploring new sets of users with each iteration of funding. Too many digitisation projects categorise their users too simplistically – researchers, undergrads, teachers and the general public. Breaking down these chunks into more sophisticated groups can give greater rationale for digitisation, showing how the content will directly appeal to that group’s needs.
3) Come up with devastating metrics to show usage and impact. There’s no crystal clear idea of how to judge the impact of digital resources, but if you could develop and test that methodology and use it as evidence of the importance of continued digitisation, then that is likely to wow potential funders.
In every case, the funder’s ego has to be massaged – showing how the funding body is making such an essential contribution to the project despite the presence of many other funders.