This is a long message, and not all of it concerns records in our
period of reference, but there's some very interesting material being
considered here.
A.
Abigail Ann Young (Dr), Associate Editor/ Records of Early English Drama/
Victoria College/ 150 Charles Street W/ Toronto Ontario Canada
Phone (416) 585-4504/ FAX (416) 813-4093/ [log in to unmask]
List-owner of REED-L <http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~reed/reed-l.html>
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~reed/reed.html => REED's home page
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~reed/stage.html => our theatre resource page
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~young => my home page
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 13 Dec 2002 13:58:45 +0000
From: Roger Fern <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: "From: Local-History list" <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: (Fwd) JISC Digitisation Project
I'm forwarding this, as it requests. It's intended for librarians,
but I think people on these lists will also be interested to see its
contents.
Roger Fern.
========== Included message ==========
Date: Fri, 13 Dec 2002 11:42:13 +0000
Reply-to: EDINA Support <[log in to unmask]>
From: EDINA Support <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: JISC Digitisation Project
To: [log in to unmask]
*forwarded on behalf of JISC, please distribute to colleagues locally
and/or other email lists*
JISC Digitisation Project
JISC has been allocated non-recurrent funding for the acquisition and
digitisation of electronic materials to help meet the growing demand
for online information. The scale of the funding presents an
opportunity to enhance the core resource of digitised material
available to HE and will allow the development of a programme of
large-scale activity, the results of which will provide a
comprehensive resource and add significant value to research, learning
and teaching (especially support for distance learning) and the
e-University. The programme will allow the digitisation of a wide
range of formats (including text, geospatial data, images, moving
images and sound) which will be of great value to the community.
Digitisation of such resources will provide on-line access to
previously unobtainable materials, supporting a variety of subject
interest and distance access to key resources.
Both JISC and its Committee for Content Services have considered
guidelines for utilising this funding and identified the following
criteria: the materials should be of broad disciplinary interest and
should form a coherent theme or themes; a small number of large-scale
projects should be funded that would not be possible without an
investment of this size; the materials would need to be fully
compatible with the common information environment being developed by
JISC, the British Library, Resource and others; the materials would
need to meet rigorous quality-assurance standards and be of value to
the wider post-16 education community.
A Working Group was established to consider, among other issues, how
the materials to be digitised should be selected. The Group agreed to
seek advice from the learning and teaching and resource communities as
recommended in the HE Content Policy Group report. The purposes of
this document is to invite the community to comment on a series of
collections proposed for digitisation and suggest any additional
collections that would fit the criteria for inclusion in this
programme outlined above. The time period is short and only already
known and identified projects can be considered.
The Group has identified twelve collections that they feel fit these
criteria and these are outlined below (in no particular order).
Because the scientific and engineering communities are already well
provided with this sort of material, the focus of this programme is on
the fields of the humanities, social sciences and medicine. You are
invited to indicate the degree of your interest by numbering the
collections to which you might subscribe in order of preference. i.e.
put a figure 1 in the box beside the collection you are most likely to
acquire, a 2 in your next choice etc. If you are not interested in a
particular collection, leave the box blank.
Please return the attached form to Sarah Sherman, Collections Access
Support at the address above or fax it to 020 7848 2939 by 10th
January 2003. Alternatively, you may respond online by visiting
www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/collections/digitisationproject.htm.
There is space at the end of the form for you to suggest any other
collection you would like us to consider or to make any further
comments on the collections proposed.
Yours sincerely,
Chris Bailey
Chair of the JISC Advisory Committee for Content and Services
----------------------
JISC Collections Helpdesk
JISC Office
King's College London
Strand Bridge House, 3rd Floor
138-142 The Strand
London
WC2R 1HH
tel: +44 (0)20 7848 2938
fax: +44 (0)20 7848 2939
[log in to unmask]
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/
1. Early English Books Online (EEBO)
EEBO is an existing and successful product, but has the capability to
search only catalogue records for English language texts from 1475 to
1700; many institutions have expressed the desire to search the texts
themselves. For example, this would enable researchers to search
thousands of text for references to Shakespeare by his contemporaries;
geographic place names; cures for the plague (use at your own risk) or
conceptions of dragons. Digitising such documents requires close
scholarly supervision, as Optical Character recognition (OCR) software
does not always recognise the early English characters, but
digitisation of 25,000 texts is envisaged over a 5-year period.
2. The British Librarys Collection of British Newspapers 18001930
This collection would be of interest to students of history, politics,
military history, social, legal and shipping history, foreign affairs,
sport, history of advertising, the development of illustration in the
mass media and numerous other fields. It is proposed to select a
mixture of national and local newspaper titles which reflect the
social and political developments of the times in which they were
published. Up to 2 million pages of newspapers would be available,
fully indexed and searchable.
3. A Selection of National Sound Archive (NSA) Recordings
Includes oral history, literature and material from independent radio
stations, as well as various types of music classical, jazz , African
and popular music based on the NSAs close association with the Royal
Academy of Music, the Royal College of Music and the music departments
of universities across the UK. The emphasis of the oral history sector
is on architecture, architectural history, design history, craft
history and contextual studies relating to architecture, design and
craft practice. Literature would include the acclaimed African Writers
Club collection. In all some 12,000 items totalling 3900 hours of
segmented recordings would become available.
4. 19th- and Early 20th-Century Census Data
Censuses from 1971 onwards are already available online; this
collection would cover the years 18011961 and provide: page images of
the original documents, capturing their look and feel and setting the
data in their typographical context with surrounding explanatory notes
and footnotes (for censuses up to 1901 only); machine-readable
versions of the statistical tables suitable for use in spreadsheets,
databases and statistical packages; and machine-readable versions of
the surrounding explanatory text and footnotes. The Census of
Production, the Census of Agriculture and the Reports of the Registrar
General would also be included.
5. History of Art Slide Collection
ArtSTOR, a not-for-profit organisation founded in 2001, is making
available digital images and related scholarly materials for the study
of art, architecture and other fields in the humanities. ArtSTOR works
with charitable foundations and museums across the world to digitise
high-resolution images accompanied by appropriate text and flexible
search mechanisms, from the design collection of the Museum of Modern
Art in New York to images associated with Buddhist cave grottoes in
Dunhuang, China.
6. Back Numbers of a Selection of British Journals
This project would be based on institutional demand for back numbers
of key British journals, many of which date back to the 19th century
and earlier. It would ensure that there was no overlap with work
already being undertaken by JSTOR and other commercial ventures in the
areas of arts and sciences. Initial suggestions for journals to be
digitised are welcome.
7. A Selection of EC Journals and Series
This project would be based on institutional demand for back numbers
of key EC Journals and Series. It would ensure that there was no
overlap with work already being undertaken by Eurotext and other
commercial ventures in this area. Initial suggestions for journals to
be digitised are welcome.
8. The British Librarys Illuminated Manuscripts Collection
The British Librarys collection of manuscripts made before 1600 is one
of the largest and finest in the world. The term illuminated
manuscripts covers a broad range, including 85% of the British
Librarys western medieval and renaissance MSS; Greek illuminated book;
post-1600 MSS continuing traditions of illumination (e.g. by William
Morris and Edward Johnston) and handmade facsimiles (e.g. transcripts
of Anglo-Saxon mss by Elizabeth Elstob). These would be made available
through descriptions, continuously updated bibliographies, digital
images, virtual exhibitions and glossaries, providing a flexible tool
for students, researchers and teachers of medieval and renaissance
studies and the whole spectrum of historical humanities subjects,
including literature, art, archaeology and the history of medicine and
science.
9. The British Librarys Collection of Photographically Illustrated
Books
The British Library has one of the worlds largest and most
comprehensive collections of photographically illustrated books,
dating from the 19th through to the early 20th century. These include
examples of most of the early photographic processes by notable
innovators and practitioners from every continent, and cover a wide
range of disciplines from topography to technology and from
portraiture to science. The current digitisation project would expand
the range of books and images currently available with a view to
broadening coverage of images from outside the UK and include material
on fine art, European portraiture, science and technology and
topography, including works by British photographers overseas.
10. A Selection of Independent Television News Archive Material
The ITN archive contains some 60,000 hours of news and feature
material, ranging from 1896 to the present day. It covers the output
of ITN itself (from 1955), Reuters Television library (to1959) and the
Visnews news agency (1957-1992), as well as unissued material. Over
six hours of material is added to the archive each day. The collection
includes cinema newsreels as well as television news. The collection
would enable subscribers to study newsfilm material as they can study
newspapers, to broaden the scope and depth of their research; it would
benefit students in disciplines as diverse as criminology (who could
use the news to contextualise case law) to fashion (who could study
street fashion at any given moment or at the time of any given event.)
11. Geospatial Data, 18th Century to the Present Day
Evidence on the Changing British Countryside, 1700 to the Present Day
includes a mix of mapping and geospatial data for selected dates
across the period, with modern mapping providing a context. Data
include the agricultural revolutions (e.g. Enclosure Acts),
progressive urbanisation and the growth of intervention by the
emergent British state. A related project provides the equivalent
information with regard to coastal mapping, being the 10km near-shore
over the same historical period, with digitised Admiralty charts,
material from the Hydrographic Office and some examples of
geo-specific fishing and shipping data. This collection covers a
number of projects suggestions for which would be most useful are
welcome.
12. A Selection of British and American Medical Journals
The collection, which covers a range of medical disciplines in easily
searchable form, is based on the complete back files of several
high-impact medical journals, including the Journal of the American
Medical Association, Annals of Internal Medicine and British Journal
of Psychiatry. Some of these contain material dating back over 100
years. While the content of most significant medical journals from the
late 1990s is available online, many years worth of issues remain
accessible only through bound copies on library shelves. An online
version would be of value not only to current biomedical researchers
and practitioners but also to social, economic and medical historians.
Other suggestions:
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Roger Fern, Newcastle upon Tyne.
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