Digitisation in the UK and beyond
Call For Papers is now open for Historical GIS 2008, a two-day conference on all aspects of using GIS in historical
research to be held at the University of Essex, UK on the 21-22nd August
2008.
For more information please see:
http://www.hgis.org.uk/HGIS_conference/index.htm
or contact Ian Gregory at: I.Gregory@lancaster.ac.uk.
Digitisation has so far created plenty of related collections sitting in distinct websites on the Internet, but it can be a frustrating experience trying to navigate multiple websites with similar content.
The University of Glasgow’s National Inventory Research Project has done the opposite in bringing together European paintings from distinct UK museum collections. It contains detailed records, and an increasing number of digital images, of nearly 8,000 paintings, principally in smaller regional collections in the UK.
There a different ways of trying to bring such info together – automated metadata creation, vocabulary mapping, federated searching. This project has followed a traditional method, focussing the metadata on shared research approaches towards hand-crafted scholarly evidence.
The inventory can be searched via the Visual Arts Data Service website
Both the British Library and the British Museum have set up websites which allow them to licence rights to their digitised images. According to British Museum Images website: “British Museum Images is the on-line digital image website of the British Museum catering primarily for the image-buying professional”. The British Library version says much the same.
Rather then embed the sites within their institutional sites for delivering collections, providing information for visitors etc. etc Both the websites are clean, efficient and aesthetically pleasing. They are easier to navigate than the main institutional site.
I think there are two main reasons for this navigation.
1) The ‘commerical’ sites have one clear purpose rather than sometimes conflicting purposes the main sites have.
2) With a ‘commercial’ site there is a even greater imperative to have a properly usable site – poor usability damages revenue. The same pressures do not exist on the main institutional site. Perhaps they should?
It’s often remarked upon that there is not enough focussed marketing on digital resources.
UCL’s (University College London) resource, Imagestore, for the use of the students and teachers on the campus, has somewhat bucked the trend. This huge poster is erected on around 25 metres of scaffolding in the middle of London’s Bloomsbury district.
The web address is plain for all to see – unfortunately, there’s no access for anyone who does not have a UCL password 
… this is blog is away from computers at the moment. Will be back in early November.
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
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?
Holland’s National Archives and National Library have announced the launch of an important tool which could save several old computer files from a digital grave.
The Koninklijke Bibliotheek – national library of the Netherlands – and the Nationaal Archief of the Netherlands are proud to present the world’s first emulator designed for digital preservation: Dioscuri.
Dioscuri is capable of emulating an Intel 8086-based computer platform with support for VGA-graphics, screen, keyboard, and storage devices like a virtual floppy drive and hard drive. With these components Dioscuri successfully runs 16-bit operating systems like MS-DOS and applications such as WordPerfect 5.1, DrawPerfect 1.1 and Norton Commander. Furthermore, it is capable of running many nostalgic DOS-games and a simple Linux kernel. And when you finally open your long-forgotten WP5.1-files you can extract the text from the emulated environment into your current working environment using a simple clipboard-feature.
Hopefully, this work can be built upon. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a national Computer Museum (whether this is virtual or physical) where people could send orphaned files to be rescued?
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.
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.
