 |
 |
JISC Press Release
Digitisation of major scholarly
resources: have your say…
Community consulted on shortlisted
projects
24th July, 2006. A fossil record database that will
‘document the history of life’; the country’s largest
collection of Pre-Raphaelite drawings; the most important commercial radio
archive in the UK; the full text of all twentieth century Cabinet papers; the
Desmond Tutu archive; the historic boundaries of Britain…
These are just some of the proposals for digitisation which
JISC has received since its April call and which the education community is
being consulted on over the next two months. With around £4m of further
investment in the digitisation of unique resources of national importance being
made by JISC in the coming two years, widespread consultation is taking place
to decide which projects will receive funding.
A total of 49 proposals were received, involving 120 partner
institutions from education, research, public libraries, museums and the
commercial sector, totaling more than £34m of requested funding. A selection
panel has agreed on a shortlist of 24 projects which will form the basis of the
consultation to be held until the end of September.
Among other proposals received are those for the
digitisation of Islamic manuscripts; all photographic negatives held by the
Scott Polar Research Institute; the Carl Giles newspaper cartoon archive; rare
pamphlets and newspapers from the Anglo-Jewish community, and primary material,
including sound, images and video, of the major First World War poets.
Those selected will join six funded projects in the £10m JISC Digitisation programme,
projects which are currently digitising a wide variety of online content,
including sound, moving pictures, newspapers, census data, journals and
parliamentary papers. The first resources to be made available from the
programmme – the
Medical Journals Backfile project – were launched in May and the
coming year will see other major scholarly resources made available to the
further and higher education communities.
Stuart Dempster, manager of the digitisation programme,
said: ‘We’ve had a tremendous response to our call and a large
number of excellent proposals. Making unique but inaccessible resources more
widely available is central to the programme and we’re keen now to ensure
that we get the views of the education and research community to find out which
resources they want to see digitised and made more accessible.’
To view the shortlisted projects and to make your views
known, please go to: http://jiscdigitisation.typepad.com/
To find out more about the JISC Digitisation programme,
please go to: Digitisation
Dr Philip Pothen,
JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee),
King's College
138-142 The
020 7848 2935
07887 564 006