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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: ========== End of included message ========== ---------------------------------------------------------- Roger Fern, Newcastle upon Tyne. ----------------------------------------------------------