A presentation for students at University College London, looking at the JISC processes for selecting and giving guidance to digitisation projects

1. How JISC projects are funded and sustained Alastair Dunning Digitisation Programme Manager JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) a.dunning@jisc.ac.uk, 0203 006 6065 UCL Presentation, 20 th November 2009

2. the jisc network (janet) gives all higher education internet access

3. jisc also funds innovative projects to create new ideas for the use of technology in education

6. jisc will issue calls to the educational community, asking for proposals

7. universities and maybe other interested bodies will submit applications

8. JISC then uses a peer-review process to select the best projects, using expertise from the universities and also within JISC itself

10. digital resources are not free to run – they need to be sustained in the long term, both technically and intellectually the Electronic Ephemera collection has images from 18 th -20 th century. It was digitised at Oxford but is published by ProQuest, a commercial company http://johnjohnson.chadwyck.co.uk/

11. build it and they will come? – Nope, users need to be actively engaged if they are to use a resource the Freeze Frame project went through every UK undergraduate course, identifying which would be interested in their collection of polar images – geology, geography, fashion, health and nutrition, history … http://www.freezeframe.ac.uk/

12. without good metadata a resource will not be found nor trusted the Archival Sound Recordings has over 44,000 audio files on wildlife, oral history, the Holocaust, artist’s testimonies, lectures. Each recording is scrupulously catalogued, so the rights are clearly labelled, and the recordings findable via Google http://sounds.bl.uk

13. innovation means that you can have exciting projects that do new things the First World War Poetry Archive asked members of the public to digitise and comment on their own collections – the pool of content and expertise was hugely increased. Plus a whole trench recreated in Second Life http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/ the PreRaphaelite resource is beautifully designed and the photographs are of a quality unsurpassed http:// www.preraphaelites.org /