Interviews with Kevin Guthrie and Joyce Ray

JISC is publishing the podcast interviews with guest speakers at its JISC Digitisation Conference, held in the summer this year.

Joyce Ray, of the US’ Institute of Museum and Library Services, which funds various digitisation projects , gave a perspective on some of the challenges facing funders in the digitisation of high-quality content for education and other sectors.

Meanwhile, Kevin Guthrie of Ithika, speaks about why international collaboration is important to the digitisation of scholarly resources and what the US and the UK can learn from each other.

Digital Humanities Infrastructure in Ireland

The Irish Government has recently announced (Word doc) four-years worth of funding, totally around £2.5m (3.5m Euro) for a Digital Humanities Observatory to manage and co-ordinate the increasingly complex e-resources created in the arts and humanities.

Initiatives like this in Ireland, the Digital Humanities Initiative in the States and the German development of digitisation infrastructure all rather put the AHRC’s decision to end funding of the UK’s AHDS to shame.

Digitisation Infrastructure

In June I gave a presentation on Digitisation Infrastructure at the UCL Summer School of publishing e-content.

The presentation looked at some of the key capabilities that are required, whether at a campus-wide, regional or national level to make sure that digitisation happens effectively, as rapidly as possible and offers value for money in the medium and long term. Some of the key ingredients were:

1. A variety of data capture facilities / digitisation bureaus
2. Internationally agreed file formats, preferably non-proprietary
3. International co-ordination, certification, co-operation to develop international schema and vocabularies
4. A range of mechanisms for delivering data, working to sustainable technical and financial models
5. Long-term preservation facilities
6. Staff and expertise to provide these services and the essential research and development

The full presentation can be seen here

Digitiation units in UK universities

The Centre for Data Digitisation and Analysis (CDDA) at Queen’s University Belfast, and BOPCRIS at the University of Southampton are two of the leading digitisation units in the UK Higher Education sector.

Both are engaged in a wide number of projects (such as the Stormont Debates digitisation or the 18th-century Parliamentary papers and play an instrumental part in the UK’s digitisation infrastructure.

Most notable about CDDA is that has a good relationship with local students, providing them with skills and training to undertake data capture and processing work. The centre has around 5 or 6 flatbed scanners, 4 or 5 book scanners on tables and 1 larger book scanner for more difficult material.

BOPCRIS’s jewel is its robotic scanner which using suction power to automatically lift and turn pages before taking pictures. BOPCRIS also has 4 or 5 book scanners on tables and one larger book scanner standing on its own.

Pulling the plug on the digital humanities

The UK’s central archive for arts and humanities data, the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) has unexpectedly lost half its funding after the Arts and Humanities Research Council withdrew the half a million pounds it contributed towards the running of the service.

I have a slightly vested interest in that I worked for the AHDS for several years, but even then this seems a poor decision to endanger a unit that is responsible for long-term preservation of digital data, and has had a pioneering role in setting up a working preservation service. There are not many others in existence in the world.

Even stranger is the four-line justification given on the funding council’s website. Most seasoned observers will not the statements are simply not true; the lack of accompanying evidence is telling.