Scottish Parliamentary Records to 1707

New digitisation projects keep on appearing.

The Records of the Parliaments of Scotland has transcriptions (of the Latin) and translation of all known Scottish acts of parliament up until 1707, when the Scottish Parliament merged with the English one - it did not sit again until 1999.

It’s a reasonably tidy interface and browsing and searching is reasonably intuitive and it deals well with the issue of presenting original text and translation side by side. However, the use of frames looks a bit outdated and some of the functions of the icons are not easy to guess.

It’s quite text heavy and obviously aimed at researchers more than the general public - adding some images of the manuscripts would have added some aesthetic appeal. It would also be useful to find out more about the technical / digitisation side of the project.

Nevertheless, this looks like a high-quality resource. Researchers love having entire runs of material - knowing that all the known acts from 1235 to 1707 is included should keep them contented. And the editorial work that must have gone into creating the resource much have been a labour of love - but a crucial one that will ensure that scholars will treat the resource with respect.

Getting Big Publicity

Two recent digitisation projects have got big dollops of publicity on the mainstream media

The Complete Works of Charles Darwin I have mentioned before, but it was the newly expanded Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913 that really hit the headlines.

The site featured in numerous national newspapers, magazines such as the Economist, radio and, perhaps the best way of getting users interested, a link from the BBC website home page.

Of course, success does not come without its teething problems. Both the Darwin and Old Bailey websites had hiccups in service provision because of the excessive number of hits. But this is a small price to play (and perhaps one that can be eliminated with suitable load testing) for getting such good publicity.

Darwin Manuscripts Online

One of the most successful digitisation projects in Britain is Cambridge University’s The Complete Works of Charles Darwin. It has recently added private papers, including the first draft of his theory of evolution, notes from the voyage of the Beagle and recipe book by Emma Darwin.

The project has has fantastic media exposure in the UK and beyond, including a mention on prime time television. As the history page of the resource recounts, this is not without its problems.

A related project at Camrbridge is the Darwin Correspondence Project, which presents letters Darwin sent and received. There is an interesting research project in waiting to try and bring the two resources together

Funding long-term digitisation projects

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.

Digitisation Services

TASI has recently produced a list of some Digitisation Services based in the UK, along with their respective capabilities in terms of special services

The list is available from the TASI website..

Dutch get out the big guns for audio-visual digitisation

Summer of 2007 saw the start of a mass Dutch digitisation project Images of the Future

The largest Dutch digitization of audio-visual content project ‘Images for the Futures’ has started in July 2007. Over 137.000 hours of video, 22.510 hours of film, 123.900 hours of audio and 2.9 million photos will be digitized in the next seven years. Most content is copyright protected, but parts of the collection are being offered under open licenses.

Most of the documentary material on the capture process is still to be translated from Dutch, but it will provide interesting reading on developing an infrastructure capable of handling so much content

British Library - Nineteenth-century books being digitised

According to an article on BBC news (although there is no sign of this on the BL’s press release pages)

More than 100,000 old books previously unavailable to the public will go online thanks to a mass digitisation programme at the British Library.

The programme focuses on 19th-Century books, many of which are unknown as few were reprinted after first editions.

There is not too much information about the project but it is obviously has the hand of Microsoft - the initial delivery mechanism will be Microsoft’s Live Book Search. There are no dates mentioned concerning when the books will become available online.

It’s interesting to see the different access models used by the British Library for their various collections. EEBO (Early English Books Online) is available at a price; its nineteenth-century newspapers will be free to the university and college sector in the UK but other users will have to pay, while this project seems like it will be freely available online.

I suppose this reflects the amount of money that partners are prepared to pump into BL digitisatition projects; and this in case Microsoft is supplying plenty of cash to to make the nineteenth-century books freely available. How else can Microsoft try and keep up with Google?

Transatlantic Digitisation Collaboration Grants

The JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) and the US’s National Endowment for the Humanities are providing matched funding for digitisation projects.

According to the JISC website:

A call for proposals was issued today by JISC and the US’s National Endowment for the Humanities to support collaborative digitisation projects by UK and US scholars. The aim of the £360,000 ($730,000) programme is to unite scholarly collections split between the two countries, explore innovative approaches to digitisation and match expertise in one country with collections to be digitised in the other.

The programme is funding Transatlantic Digitisation Collaboration Grants which will be awarded to one-to-one partnerships in the US and England with the possibility that these grants will provide the foundation for larger-scale partnerships in the future.

The JISC guidelines are already online. The NEH’s are due to follow shortly.

Why Digitise at a High Resolution?

Digitisation project managers are sometimes keen to digitise at a lowish resolution, creating digital images that will work well for current needs, but maybe not in the future. It can be difficult to convince them that there is benefit in digitising at a higher resolution; that choosing 600dpi rather than 400dpi is more than an unnecessary luxury.

A report by JISC on future display technologies shows that the capabilities of monitors, screen and other such hardware are progressing rapidly. Faced with screens of bigger size and better resolution, images digitised to a high level will look significantly better than those digitised at a lower level. Those digitisation managers that have taken the risk and created large will be the ones who see the dividends.

The report is a useful piece of evidence and worth bearing in mind when pondering what standards and settings to use in an image capture project.

JISC Digitisation Conference

The JISC Digitisation Conference is due to get underway this week, in Cardiff

The conference blog has most of the details, including a link to the list of all speakers and presentations.

Among the speakers are Pat Manson (Head of Cultural Heritage and Technology Enhanced Learning, European Commission), Richard Ovenden (Assistant Director, Bodleian Library, Oxford University) and Mike Keller (University Librarian, Stanford University)