JISC

Delivering online content is an area where significant economies of scale can be realised through national approaches to the delivery of scholarly resources, whether through licensing or digitisation.

Licensing

Entering into its second year as a company limited by guarantee, JISC Collections has continued to develop national licensing agreements for access to online content in support of further and higher education. The company has launched its e-books national observatory project, helped vocational students with mobile learning as well as saved £3.9million across higher and further education through successful negotiations for online journals.

Students learning hairdressing benefited from funding to develop an online training course which can be accessed via their mobile phones. The innovative use of technology to help learners get to grips with the skills needed to become a fully qualified hairdresser enabled learning to take place outside of the classroom environment.

The resource’s innovative use of technology was recently recognised internationally when the resource won the prestigious award for ‘Tertiary, FE, HE and Adult Innovation’ at the Handheld Learning 2008 Conference See the full story.

In September 2007, 22,000 learners signed up to JISC's national e-books observatory project. Once registered they had access to a collection of 36 taught course texts in a variety of subjects. The study will run over a full academic year and the findings will help to shape flexible licensing and pricing modules to help provide students with access to their taught course texts online. April saw the first in a series of National E-book textbook debate events – which quizzed a panel of experts to discuss the future role of the library in the provision of electronic textbooks.

Podcast: Breaking down the e-books barrier
Anne Bell, Librarian at Warwick University and Chair of SCONUL, and Caren Milloy, JISC e-books project manager (Duration: 18:30)
  

Guardian article on e-books No paper required

In 2007 NESLi2 negotiations for online journals generated savings of £3.9million. Based upon this success, in February 2008, JISC Collections launched, NESLi2 SMP to apply the same model for small and medium sized publishers. See further details.

Best practice in accessing and archiving e-resources benefited from studies published in September 2007 with the HAERVI project (Higher Education Access to e-Resources in Visited Institutions) publishing its Best Practice Guide. This is guidance on how students and researchers visiting higher education institutions at which they are not based, are able to access licensed resources.

In the autumn of 2007, tens of thousands of students, staff and researchers at universities and further education colleges across Britain gained online access to Ordnance Survey’s Mastermap – called Digimap. Digimap enables users to download Ordnance Survey information free and supports studies from archaeology to zoology.

In March a JISC Collections agreement made the House of Commons Parliamentary Papers 1901-2004 freely available to all staff and students in colleges and universities. The online resource, comprising more than 180,000individual papers and containing over 9.5 million pages, is among the richest and most detailed primary sources for the history of the 20th century and is considered vital to an understanding of the UK's modern development. The agreement extends the partnership between JISC Collections and ProQuest, which began in 2006, to make the 19th century House of Commons Parliamentary Papers available to the UK academic community.

JISC Collections was involved in an international initiative which came to fruition in May when the Knowledge Exchange - a partnership of four national ICT bodies - announced the successful publishers selected to provide online resources under a multinational license across all four countries. The resources offered through the project were selected by a joint tender process run by the Knowledge Exchange through the EU competitive tender process. With 22 publishers submitting initial bids, the five selected were chosen through consideration of quality, national procurement strategies, innovation and value for money.

Podcast exploring this initiative Licensing across borders – a roundtable discussion 
(Duration: 19:39)

Partners across borders (Inform 20)
Why a Wild West approach just won’t do (Guardian, April)

Another sign of JISC Collections’ widening remit was provided by the announcement in June that the museums sector across England could, for the first time, benefit from nationally negotiated agreements for a range of selected and high quality online subscription services. The new initiative funded by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) and means that museums can choose to subscribe to one or more of a range of prestigious online resources including Early English Books Online, JSTOR, a range of reference works and the Times Digital Archive under generous licensing terms.

JISC Collections further expanded its role during the last year by launching a new Becta-funded initiative giving UK schools access to millions of online images, newspaper archives, dictionary entries, and art, music, history and science resources for a fraction of the original cost. ‘JISC Collections for Schools’ will allow schools to use invaluable resources from a range of trusted, high-quality online subscription services at a specially negotiated discount rate.

Digitisation

JISC’s digitisation programme not only continued to make a wealth of online resources available, including more than one million pages from nineteenth century newspapers and unique sound recordings but also saw its national activities extended to the international arena.

Calls went out in September 2007 for proposals to unite scholarly collections spilt between the UK and US. The aims of the project was to explore innovative approaches to digitisation and match expertise in one country with collections to be digitised in an other. JISC worked in partnership with the US National Endowment for the Humanities. Five projects were awarded funding in March 2008:

• The St Kitts-Nevis Digital Archaeology Initiative (Southampton University/ Thomas Jefferson)
• The World Wide Web of Humanities (Oxford Internet Institute/ Internet Archive)
• Shakespeare Quartos Archive (Oxford University/ Folgar Shakespeare Library)
• PhiloGrid (Imperial College/ Tufts University)
• Concordia (King’s College London/ New York University)

Podcast on this initiative: Transatlantic collaboration in digitisation
(Duration: 10:00)

JISC and the British Library launched their British Library 19^th century Newspapers site in November 2007, enabling the UK’s further and higher education communities to freely access online national and regional titles.

An example of a digitisation project awarded more recent funding was provided by Oxford University’s ‘Great War Archive’. The archive aims to collect artefacts, letters, diaries, poems and stories that have been down through the generations to reflect the true experience of the First World War – which are now in danger of being lost. A call was issued in March 2008 for members of the public to submit digital photographs and mementoes related to the First World War. More than 5000 items were submitted to the archive by June 2008.

The Welsh Journals project also got underway during the last year, digitising a growing body of materials dedicated to Welsh culture, history and language.

Podcast: How digitisation can bring a nation’s heritage to the desktops of all
by former project manager Arwel Jones (Duration: 8:21)

Among other digitisation projects which continued their work during the year were the East London theatre archive, Newsfilm Online, the Pre-Raphaelite resources site, the British cartoon archive, the John Johnson collection of printed ephemera, British governance in the 20^th century (Cabinet papers 1914 – 1975) and many others.

Due to continuing interest in JISC’s digitisation activities, plans were laid during the last year and a call issued to extend the digitisation programme to cover smaller institutional digitisation projects. For a full list of all JISC digitisation projects, please go to: Digitisation

Podcast on the JISC Digitisation programme: Five centuries of unique resources
Alastair Dunning, JISC programme manager (Duration: 5:45)

Digitisation featured strongly in the start of JISC’s Libraries of the Future campaign, which aimed to explore the achievements of UK academic libraries over the last decade and to provide a forum for debate about their future. Articles in the Guardian and CILIP’s Library and Information Update highlighted the importance of digitisation in opening up the doors of libraries to a global readership.

Strategic Content Alliance

Over the past year the Strategic Content Alliance (SCA) has continued to build a forum for the building of principles and the sharing of best practice for the provision of online e-content for UK citizens. Its aim is to build a common information environment where users of publicly funded e-content can gain best value from these resources.

JISC is working with the British Library, the BBC, Becta, UK e-Science Core programme, the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) and the NHS National Library for Health (NeLH) to reduce the barriers that currently inhibit access, use and re-use of online content. There has also been work to invite applications for organisations to become affiliate members and assist in the development and deployment of the UK content framework.

Podcast interview: Update on the SCA Stuart Dempster, director of the Strategic Content Alliance
(Duration: 9:19)

With the focus of the SCA being on the UK, the Alliance looked to the US to see what lessons could be learnt. In May of this year, the SCA and the US-based Ithaka, an organisation that supports innovation in the use of ICT, met to discuss Ithaka’s paper on sustainability of online academic resources. A full report was created following the meeting including a list of next steps for research and concrete measures that would advance sustainability.

Podcast interview: The US perspective on digitisation Ithaka president Kevin Guthrie
(Duration: 16:20)

In April 2008 JISC, the British Library, the National Health Service National Institute for Innovation and the Museums Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) submitted a joint declaration in response to the Gower Copyright consultation to call for ‘legislative clarity’ in the field of copyright. These four organisations believe that the current copyright legislation fails to address the requirements of providing and using content in the digital age. The SCA is working to bring clarity and guidance on intellectually property rights for creators, publishers and users within a digital context.

Podcast interview:  IPR for the SCA Naomi Korn, JISC IPR consultant:
(Duration: 9:44)

In June the SCA visited Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales to seek input and share knowledge of issues across the home countries of the UK. These ‘Home Nation Forums’ involved participants from government, libraries, museums and business partners who shared information and experiences in the field of digital content and explored regional and national challenges in breaking down barriers to access to online resources.

Podcast interview: The Strategic Content Alliance Emma Beer, formerly of the SCA
(Duration: 5:35)

 

For further information on the SCA, see the SCA blog