There is growing demand for appropriate film and sound resources within education. Where the typical education consumer would previously have been content with text-based learning, they are now seeking to learn from the gamut of rich multi-media all around them.

For all those involved in education either as funders, producers, or practitioners, the challenge is how to harness this new media literacy, and in particular to help ensure that rich media resources can be systematically embedded in teaching and learning, as well as providing new avenues for research. Teachers are increasingly aware of the need to offer compelling and interesting resources that engage students to facilitate the high quality experience that our universities need to be able to deliver in order to remain competitive. Likewise, researchers want to engage more fully with film, television and radio to exploit the potential of resources that have been hitherto inaccessible.

We are therefore excited about the possibilities that the development of a Research Education Space (RES) will offer to address these needs. During 2013, we will be working on the first phase of creating RES which aims to deliver a sustainable digital content collection for post August 1989 BBC broadcast media assets using the ERA licences and the BUFVC’s Box of Broadcasts (BoB) service. More specifically we aim to:

Provide unique, rich and valuable assets to research and educational users.

The audio-visual archives of the BBC contain a wealth of material gathered since it was founded in 1922 but much remains largely inaccessible, held on film or videotape. RES will start to ‘open up’ one of the most influential archives in the world for use within UK education and research.

Establish Principles for making assets and catalogues available to research and educational users

We are only at the beginning of the process of unlocking archives for academic use, but we see our collaboration with the BBC and the BUFVC as crucial to bringing together expertise in this area and enhancing joint understanding. The project will pay dividends for education and research in the longer term by providing more cost effective ways to provide access to high quality and highly demanded archival content.

Develop a Platform for digitised assets which allows easy access and reliable delivery

For us and our customers, RES will contribute to a balanced Jisc portfolio of investment as not only will it greatly enhance the availability of video/ audio resources (being the only dedicated source of BBC broadcasts for education potentially dating back to August 1989), but also begin to create a sustainable infrastructure through the existing BUFVC’s ‘Box of Broadcasts – BoB’ (an off-air recording and media archive service).

Create Propositions to demonstrate the use of these assets within a range of contexts

BoB’s popularity and user-baser is already impressive – in 2012 alone, it streamed some 320 programmes per hour from 50+ channels, with 35k-40k unique users per month at 45 institutions (8 colleges, 37 universities). However, RES will also help us to learn more about current and potential content usage in education and research through academic engagement and case study development. This will help us present the content better in order to gain maximum exposure and use.

RES has the potential to both enhance and energise the academy’s relationship with one of the dominant media of the 20^th century- film, television and radio- by creating new opportunities for research and teaching and encouraging use across many different disciplines. We have some way to go until the first results of our work to develop RES become available in the autumn of 2013 but we’re looking forward to the journey and keeping you posted.

As we put the team together to create RES and our plans develop, I and colleagues look forward to keeping you up-to-date on our progress. If in the meantime you’d like to know more, please do email me at s.fahmy@jisc.ac.uk

An overview of the BBC’s Digital Public Space vision can be read in the Guardian here.

Find out more about BUFVC’s BoB National: http://bobnational.net

The DPC is dedicated to developing the skills, knowledge and solutions to preserve and ensure access to digital information. 2012 marks the 10th anniversary of the DPC and I had the pleasure of being a judge at this year’s awards.

I enjoyed working with colleagues from across the UK to assess the entries.  I saw some of the strides that have been made in digital preservation, and coming from one of the organisations that founded the DPC, I was certainly pleased to see such positive progress and the DPC’s ability to highlight this.

The DPC’s most prestigious prize – the Decennial Prize – was awarded to mark their 10th anniversary and recognizes the most outstanding work over the past decade.   There was intense international competition with finalists from New York, Washington and London.  Dame Lynne Brindley, chief executive of The British Library, July 2000-July 2012, presented the award to the winning entry - the Archaeology Data Service at the University of York.

It was heartening to see this award go to an initiative which we at Jisc supported at their inception and which continues to be successful.  The team at York are a creative group who have developed and thrived within an innovative business model that allows them to preserve an extraordinary range of data while providing free access to all researchers and other users.  This approach ensures the longevity of data that would otherwise rapidly be lost or become obsolete and provides advice to researchers.

The Award for Teaching and Communications, presented by Oliver Morley, chief executive of the National Archives team, was awarded to the University of London Computer Centre team who run the Digital Preservation Training Programme (DPTP); an entry-level, introductory course that develops critical thinking about digital preservation.  It is designed to help all those working in information management to understand effective approaches to the challenges of digital preservation.  It enables students on the course to assess the models and examples in the context of their own organisation.

The Award for Research and Innovation was presented by Martyn Harrow, chief executive of Jisc to the PLANETS project.  PLANETS brings together memory institutions, small businesses, major technology providers, and research institutions from across Europe to build practical services and tools to help ensure long-term access to digital, cultural and scientific assets.  It established the not-for-profit Open Planets Foundation to provide the digital preservation community with services, ongoing support, and a sustainable future for its Open Source results.  It has permanently changed the digital preservation landscape by shifting the focus to practical, sustainable solutions that are soundly supported by practice-driven research.

Digital preservation ensures future access to resources and I believe this is essential for research, learning and future knowledge creation.  Just think of all of the digital information that is created on the web and how that represents points in time that can be lost without action, or all of the data produced through scientific instruments that informs science and understanding – digital preservation helps to secure continued access to these resources.

I am looking forward to what the coming years will bring in terms of digital preservation and I am sure the DPC will be central to showcasing international best practice.  The awards were a great way of recognising important work and I have to say it was really enjoyable working with William Kilbride, executive director of the DPC on this, and being one of the judges.

You can’t wait to have the book in your hands and show your mum, flaunt it under the nose of the VC and place it on your bookshelf. Yes it’s going to look great in your new office and the citations will start flowing soon. Yep. This is the beginning of….

Oh no wait, what’s that? It only sold 30 copies, worldwide.

In the last ten years, library print book purchasing expenditure has declined from 11.9% of their overall budgets in 1999 to 8.4% in 2009 (RIN, 2010). The average number of sales of monographs to libraries has declined from around 2,000 in 1980 to around 200 in the early years of this century (Willinsky, 2009)

This creates two problems for researchers. First, it decreases the number of readers with access to individual monographs, meaning that the flow of knowledge that underpins research is compromised. Second, it means that many scholarly monographs become economically unviable, leading to concerns that publishers may select titles based primarily upon the potential for sales rather than scholarly worth.

So how do we…

a) Keep the monograph alive to allow humanities and social science researchers to present considered arguments

b) Help increase readership to foster new connections and research, and

c) Find an economic model to sustain the publishing and dissemination of monographs – in both electronic and print.

These are some of the questions we are trying to answer in our open access monograph project –  OAPEN-UK being managed by JISC Collections. What if your monograph was available online for free for everyone to read as a PDF or in HTML and in addition libraries and academics could still purchase print (60% of academics still prefer print) or e-book editions if they wanted them? There would be no limits on who can read your book – discoverable to all through online search engines and the sales of the print could support the sustainability of the Open Access version. And of course each book is put through the same peer review processes that normal print books are – you could even experiment with open peer review – or get input from fellow colleagues as you write.

This is the model we are exploring in OAPEN-UK with 58 monographs matched into pairs – half available in OA and half available through standard methods. We are gathering sales, usage and citation data to assess performance – do the OA titles get more usages and sales than the control group titles?

In addition we are gathering data on perceptions, attitudes and priorities and processes to help us work out how a move to OA publishing may work. We recently did a survey of HSS academics – and had around 700 responses. Here are some of the highlights:

• Only 50% of researchers are aware of OA and only 30% familiar with it.
• Around 50% of researchers think it is ok to make a profit from OA publishing as long as that profit goes back into supporting the discipline or making more OA content available – 20% think you can make a profit and use it however you like and 20% think that you can make a profit but only to cover costs.
• Almost 80% would prefer the most restrictive Creative Comms licence, but what is interesting is that the responses show that researchers are more concerned about protecting their work than it being used commercially.
• 60% had read a monograph in the last couple of days – 39% had bought it and 33% had got it via the library
• Early career academics are more willing to consider self-publishing than later career researchers.
• 397 that had published a mono, book chapter or co-authored a mono since 2000 where interviewed. The authors picked their publishers because 1st they are good at disseminating to the right audience, 2nd cause they have good QA process, 3rd cause they are the best in their filed and 4th because they were the only ones interested!
• Phd students were more likely to rely on the library that late career academics
• Print still dominates reading preferences but less so for early career academics
• Perception of the group was that open access will have negative impacts on quality, reputation and reward but will be brilliant for availability and efficiency – so clearly any open access model really has to address quality and think about impacts in terms of the REF and reputations. Oh and no one really cares about royalties!

You can view all the results of the survey at: http://oapen-uk.jiscebooks.org/research-findings/researchersurvey/

You can also read about focus groups with publishers, research funders, librarians, learned societies and ebook aggregators at: http://oapen-uk.jiscebooks.org/research-findings/y1-initial-focus-groups/

We are doing lots and lots of research so stay involved by following us on @oapenuk or visiting the OAPEN-UK website at: http://oapen-uk.jiscebooks.org/, or by joining us at events: http://oapen-uk.jiscebooks.org/events/

“Digitisation breathes new life into material from the past, and turns it into a formidable asset for the individual user and an important building block of the digital economy.”[1]

Still, the way we create content online is still in its infancy, and the path from initial funding to long-term sustainability can be challenging. Despite financial investment, some undesirable outcomes have emerged:

• Project leaders return again and again to funders, because alternative revenue streams have not been developed;
• Completed projects cannot always be updated/ungraded once funded has ended;
• Content created may live in silos, be difficult to find and hosted on a variety of platforms;
• Preservation strategies are often uncertain, both for digitised and born digital content;
• Project leaders often rely heavily on the largesse of a host institution
• Some programmes or projects that cease to secure ongoing funding are obliged to stop work altogether

Add to this the challenging economic environment of the past few years and all of these issues are brought into glaringly sharp relief.

Since 2007, Ithaka S+R and the JISC-led Strategic Content Alliance have led the way in examining ways  that the academic and cultural heritage sectors are defining sustainability and helping to make sure that the digital resources will endure and provide value well beyond the term of the grant. In 2012, two years and one economic crisis later, this essential research is more important than ever to answer questions such as:

• What were the key sustainability issues to consider?
• How have project leaders made their resources valuable to users?
• How have project leaders made growth and innovation possible?
• Which sustainability models have been most successful?
• How had budget cuts and other factors affected the projects?

Answers to these questions however are never simple and the process by which projects, both current and previous, consider them are multifaceted and complex. As a first step to traversing the difficult road to sustainability, the following video lecture series has been developed with Nancy Maron (sustainability expert at Ithaka S+R) to consider how universities, museums and libraries can deal with these issues in a challenging economic environment. You may not find all the answers here, but you will certainly find out more about the questions you need to be asking and guidance on how to answer them.

Split into parts or available as full versions, the videos (under a CC-BY-NC-SA licence) allow for individuals or organisations to embed or repurpose the relevant sections for their own specific audiences. As they are in easily digestible ‘bite-size’ chunks with links to the relevant resources referenced, these should help you to think in more depth about the issues raised and to read and research at your own pace. All we ask is that you let us know how you are planning to use them and if/ how these have been useful to you.

Please follow the links below to view the videos most relevant to your sector:

Sustaining Digital Resources for Universities

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sustaining Digital Resource for Museums

Sustaining Digital Resources for Libraries

If we imagine the history of Wales as a long timeline stretching back to St David in the sixth century AD and beyond, we’re confident that JISC has digitised many, many resources that can help us better appreciate that rich culture.  We’ve picked out four highlights below and hope that students and researchers of Welsh culture and history might discover a nugget here to inspire them.

We begin in the 21^st century, where if you’re in the mood to be inspired by contemporary Welsh art you’ll find students’ work online at Galeri Cymru – unusually you can even vote on their work and leave comments, enriching the learning experience for the Coleg Harlech students.   It’s an interesting example of how an interactive website can bring together community groups who might not yet be fully engaged with one another.

Then – a step back to the 20^th century.  When Cardiff University asked people from across Wales to delve into their attics for family memorabilia from the World War One, they uncovered a host of treasures.  Those precious items have now been photographed, recorded and digitised for posterity so that what started out as individual family heirlooms have now become a shared archive describing the Welsh experience of World War One.  Browsing the resulting Welsh Voices collections is incredibly evocative – I can only imagine the mixed emotions of Albert William’s family after the twenty two year old soldier’s discharge certificate sent him home to Swansea after injuring his knee at the Battle of the Somme in 1916.  It’s soon to be part of the ambitious Theatre of Memory project (PDF) run by the National Library of Wales.  Following on from this, we’re now working to digitise a more complete picture of the Welsh experience of World War One (Rhyfel Byd 1914-1918 a’r profiad Cymreig) including 190,000 pages of printed text, archival pages, manuscript pages and photographs; 50 hours of audio; and 20 hours of audio visual materials.

If you’d like to delve back even further, Welsh Ballads online can help you access 4,000 digitised ballads, mainly dating from the 18th and 19th centuries, from the collections of the National Library of Wales and Cardiff University Library. Ballads were like newspapers for the poor at this time, sung on street corners for all to hear.  The impressive documents will be of particular interest to anyone interested in folk music, the Welsh language or the history of popular art, but these pamphlets also narrate a more widely appealing social history– for example “Y Negroes”, a ballad supporting the abolition of slavery, dating from approximately 1830.

Linking these periods together is some of the very best in Welsh scholarship on Welsh Journals Online which gives people working in institutions free access to scholarship from Wales on topics ranging across the humanities, social sciences, science and technology.

I hope you find something here to interest you – and if you have a useful digital resource for other Welsh scholars, perhaps you would share it below.  Thank you.

The Welsh experience is part of a wider international drive to share our cultural history.  For a whole world of JISC Content on Wales and other cultural history, why not search the JISC content portal

For St David’s Day this post is also available in Welsh:

Dydd Gŵyl Dewi: Ymchwilio i Gymru neu hanes Cymru?

Yn ôl Amgueddfa Cymru, un o’r gwyrthiau mwyaf bythol a briodolwyd i Dewi Sant oedd iddo godi’r ddaear dan ei draed wrth bregethu, er mwyn i’w gynulleidfa allu ei weld a’i glywed.  Mae gan Gymru draddodiad llafar cryf, llinynnau artistig a llenyddol cyfoethog, cerddoriaeth werin hanesyddol a chyfoes ac rydym yn parhau i ddathlu’r wisg draddodiadol (fel sydd i’w gweld yma ar Casgliad y Werin Cymru). Mae Casgliad y Werin Cymru yn dod â chasgliadau digidol y prif sefydliadau treftadaeth yng Nghymru at ei gilydd, ynghyd â chynnwys o amgueddfeydd, archifdai a llyfrgelloedd llai, ac mae’n le gallwch rannu’ch stori am Gymru.  Un o’r heriau rydym ni yma yn JISC yn ei hwynebu yw: sut gallwn ddefnyddio technoleg orau i helpu pobl i weld a chlywed am drysorau hanes diwylliannol pan fo llawer ohonynt yn bodoli ar ffurf hanesion, caneuon, gwrthrychau neu ddogfennau gwerthfawr, yn hytrach na thestunau unffurf?

Os ydym yn dychmygu hanes Cymru fel llinell amser faith sy’n ymestyn yn ôl i Dewi Sant yn y chweched ganrif OC a’r tu hwnt, rwy’n hyderus bod JISC wedi digido llawer iawn o adnoddau sy’n gallu ein helpu i werthfawrogi’r diwylliant cyfoethog hwnnw’n well.  Rwyf wedi dewis pedwar uchafbwynt isod ac rwy’n gobeithio y bydd y rhai sy’n astudio ac yn ymchwilio i hanes a diwylliant Cymru yn darganfod telpyn gwerthfawr yma i’w hysbrydoli.

Rydym yn dechrau yn yr 21^ain ganrif lle, os oes arnoch awydd cael eich ysbrydoli gan gelfyddyd Gymreig gyfoes, gallwch ddod o hyd i waith myfyrwyr ar-lein yn Galeri Cymru – yn anarferol iawn, gallwch bleidleisio ar eu gwaith a gadael sylwadau hyd yn oed, gan gyfoethogi’r profiad dysgu ar gyfer y myfyrwyr yng Ngholeg Harlech.  Mae’n enghraifft ddiddorol o sut gall gwefan ryngweithiol ddod â grwpiau cymunedol, nad ydynt yn ymgysylltu â’i gilydd yn llawn efallai, at ei gilydd.

Yna – cam yn ôl i’r 20^fed ganrif.  Pan ofynnodd Prifysgol Caerdydd i bobl ledled Cymru chwilota yn eu croglofftydd am bethau cofiadwy eu teuluoedd o’r Rhyfel Byd Cyntaf, gwnaethant ddadorchuddio trysorau lu.  Erbyn hyn, mae’r eitemau gwerthfawr hynny wedi’u ffotograffio, eu cofnodi a’u digido ar gyfer y dyfodol, felly mae’r hyn a ddechreuodd yn drysorau teuluol wedi dod yn archif ranedig sy’n disgrifio profiad Cymru o’r Rhyfel Byd Cyntaf.  Mae pori drwy gasgliadau Welsh Voices yn arbennig o atgofus – gallaf ond dychmygu teimladau cymysg teulu Albert Williams wedi i dystysgrif ymadael y milwr dau ddeg dau oed ei anfon adref i Abertawe ar ôl iddo anafu ei ben-glin ym Mrwydr y Somme ym 1916.

Os hoffech ymchwilio ymhellach yn ôl, gall Baledi Cymru ar-lein eich helpu i ddod o hyd i 4,000 o faledi wedi’u digido, yn dyddio o’r 18^fed a’r 19^eg ganrif yn bennaf, o gasgliadau Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru a Llyfrgell Prifysgol Caerdydd.  Roedd baledi fel papurau newydd ar gyfer y tlodion yn yr oes hon, a oedd yn cael eu canu ar gornel y stryd i bawb eu clywed.  Bydd y dogfennau nodedig hyn o ddiddordeb arbennig i unrhyw un sydd â diddordeb mewn cerddoriaeth werin, yr iaith Gymraeg neu hanes celfyddyd gyfoes, ond mae’r pamffledi hyn hefyd yn adrodd hanes cymdeithasol ag apêl ehangach – er enghraifft “Y Negroes”, sef baled sydd o blaid dileu caethwasiaeth, sy’n dyddio o oddeutu 1830.

Yn cysylltu’r cyfnodau hyn at ei gilydd, mae peth o’r ysgolheictod Cymreig gorau erioed ar Cylchgronau Cymru Ar-lein, sy’n rhoi mynediad rhad ac am ddim at ysgolheictod o Gymru ar bynciau sy’n cynnwys y dyniaethau, gwyddorau cymdeithasol, gwyddoniaeth a thechnoleg i bobl sy’n gweithio mewn athrofeydd.

Rwy’n gobeithio y dewch o hyd i rywbeth yma sydd o ddiddordeb i chi – ac os oes gennych adnodd digidol defnyddiol ar gyfer ysgolheigion eraill yng Nghymru, efallai yr hoffech ei rannu isod.  Diolch.

by Paola Marchionni and Nicola Yeeles

If you have any questions about what JISC is doing to digitise Welsh resources, or to find out more about JISC’s investment in econtent, please email Paola at p.marchionni@jisc.ac.uk

Just weeks into the New Year and already there is a new ebooks revelation that colleges and universities need to digest. January saw the launch of Apple’s new iBooks2 software which grabbed headlines (see the BBC article here) and sparked heated debate across the academic community.

Quietly underpinning the technology of the iBooks software is ePub.  ePub is the ‘defacto’ ebook standard, with the latest version of ePub3 supporting complex layouts and rich media and interactivity for eTextbooks and professional and scientific publications.

Supporting institutions and academics in taking advantage of these new technologies saw JISC fund the creation of a thinktank to explore the potential of ePub for the academic community.  JISC, the members of the thinktank and Edina at the University of Edinburgh, undertook a study on ePub and the current ebook landscape.

Digital Monographs: Technical landscape exemplars and Recommendations peers beneath the eye-catching headlines and provides an important message for institutions and how they increasingly adapt their teaching and support services to an online, interactive and digital future.

Importantly, the report identifies areas where ePub3 can help institutions, students and researchers confront some of the problems they currently face. For example, students face a continued rise in the costs associated with buying print text books.  Researchers too find that they have to adjust to an increasingly open mandate from funders and institutions.

Listen to a podcast about this with JISC programme manager Ben Showers:

Podcast

EPub provides opportunities for institutions to answer critical problems such as those above and others:

• Academics and researchers can publish their work cheaply and easily, benefitting students as well as researchers who may be outside an academic institution;
• It is easily readable on multiple devices (from phones to tablets and desktop) and can be accessed from popular platforms;
• It provides a clean copy of text or data for quoting – essential for the scholarly process;
• ePub3 realises the potential for highly interactive and rich academic content,
• It has no legal restrictions or patents preventing its open use,

The report also provides a picture of the current ebook landscape and the impact that ebooks and mobile access are having on the support institutions provide to their students and academics. In particular there is a lot of talk about student expectations; but scholars’ expectations are changing rapidly.

As the report makes clear: The next generation of scholars will be educated in a context of increasingly-digital learning materials. Their expectations for ease of discovery, format-shifting, mobile access and multimedia exemplars will extend beyond e-textbooks used at the undergraduate level (P. 15).

Increasingly these expectations are focussing around mobile access and consumption: “…mobile devices are ubiquitous, personal and always at hand; even if they are not the locus of sustained content consumption, they are a critical adjunct” (p. 38).

JISC has been interested in the transformations taking place in scholarly publishing and communications for a number of years, most recently with its work on scholarly communications and the idea of campus-based publishing. Indeed, the availability of cheap and easy e-book publishing platforms combined with open licensing is the basis for a growth in open textbooks , often with significant public investment (for example in California).

While processes such as peer-review ensure the quality and value of scholarly outputs, ePub3 could see academia exploit a trend that’s already witnessing blockbuster authors such as JK Rowling withholding digital rights and publishing ebooks directly.

The once high barriers to such a future are being rapidly lowered with ePub and similar standards. Criticlaly, ePub reuses existing technologies wherever possible, for example, XML, XHTML, and has led to ePub being described as “a website in a box”:

Its technology stack is heavily borrowed from web technologies. This allowed a number of ebook readers to be developed quickly using web browsers as base platforms

It also means that the technologies and tools are ones familiar to many in the academic community; this is based on existing technologies, ensuring it is quickly adopted within the academy.

With open standards like ePub3 and the JISC Digital Monographs: Technical landscape exemplars and Recommendations report institutions are in a great position to start taking advantage of these technologies and providing students and their researchers with the tools enhance their learning and research and give UK institutions a cutting-edge in the competitive world of education.

Find out more about the report and its 10 recommendations for the future of ebooks in education.

What strikes me about the post is that is latches on to some recent synthesis work on digital humanities, extracting some of its findings and treating them as an ideology to be critiqued.

This implies there is a coherent philosophy to the digital humanities. A set of founding ideas, an essential ideology, that will either determine its success or failure.

The trouble is that the Digital Humanities is not reducible to a manifesto. Rather it is the evolving set of humanistic traditions and practices about investigation, analysis, critique, communication and publication that are coming under pressure in the Internet age. The whole practice of scholarship is evolving / being revolutionised (delete to taste) because of the digital realm.

All scholars are affected by this. Are there really any scholars who don’t use emails, mailing lists, JSTOR, digitised resources, Google Search, electronic journals, Wikipedia? Are there really any scholars who’ve not worried about peer review, or taken advantage of open access?

No, of course not. Although they might pretend that this is all mere convenience and doesn’t help come them closer to the ‘explanation of aesthetic works’?

But the ‘convenience’ of the digital can drive their work in different directions; a radical reduction in the hours spent travelling to libraries and browsing through print archives changes the research process.

And as the tools created by digital humanities projects grow in their scope and functionality – projects in 3D scanning, data mining, textual analysis, crowdsourcing – these too will change research practices.

I don’t disagree with Fish that we need to measure the contribution of digital tools to scholarship, but this should be with the aim of refining these tools, not just throwing them all away.

Arguing against the Digital Humanities is a little like arguing the Internet itself. It’s there, and it surrounds you. It won’t go away.

This post originally appeared on the JISC digitisation blog here.

Image from The First World War Poetry Digital Archive, University of Oxford www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit © The Imperial War Museum

The legacy of World War One in terms of social, economic and political global change cannot be overstated; it changed the individual’s view of society and their place within it with far-reaching effects into their future and our past. In the words of H.G. Wells: ‘This is the end and the beginning of an age’.

To mark this event in international history is therefore a key priority for custodians of heritage and educators alike.

We’ve already made considerable efforts to preserve online the memories and writings of those active during the First World War.  The popular Great War Poetry Archive was funded by JISC to digitise precious documents relating to the poetry of the Great War – including Wilfred Owen’s original notes for the well known poem Dulce et Decorum Est.

It also includes podcasts with eminent historians and veterans including the writer and broadcaster Ian Hislop talking about his grandfather’s experience in action and why he is so ‘obsessed’ with the First World War.  The Serving Soldier collection might also interest you as a way of finding out about the lives of soldiers from 1899 to 1918, a period which spans the Second Boer War, Younghusband Expedition and World War One.

But now it’s time to commemorate the 2014 anniversary.  Higher and further education has a  unique part to play in the WW1 commemoration because it can offer an academic appraisal and reappraisal of themes, events and perceptions.  To help people in education who are studying the period, we are promoting a joined-up approach across many different organisations that currently hold audiovisual, images, text based works and film relating to the First World War. JISC wants to explore how providing this in a more seamless way could help those working in education and research to access the resources. So as a result we’re planning two activities:

• JISC WW1 Discovery programme- to aggregate digital content such as films from a range of digital collections and find new and innovative ways of presenting this content for the benefit of education and research on WW1.

• JISC WW1 OER project- to create innovative Open Educational Resources around WW1 relevant across disciplines for embedding in teaching and learning using a range of content pertaining to WW1 in the UK and internationally, ready for release in March 2012

JISC’s overriding goal for both activities is to work for researchers, teachers and students to produce digital content and resources that are comprehensive, open and sustainable, but that answer differing, specific needs within higher and further education.  The plans are underpinned by a common strategic ‘direction of travel’ which is outlined most clearly in the JISC Statement of Intent.

I look forward to updating you further as these projects progress.

To find out more about what’s planned visit the blog.

It is becoming evident that the conflicts and indeed the events of the 20th century can be fully investigated only when today’s historians have the equivalent relationship to the moving image as they have to the recorded text.

This short video by the JISC Film & Sound Think Tank highlights the issues involved in opening up access to film archives.

Film and television archives, delivered over the web, are as essential for learning today as libraries of books. Students already expect to use the full gamut of rich media in their education, and by 2014 video will account for 91% of global consumer traffic on the internet.

However, a recent report from the JISC Film & Sound Think Tank identifies what it refers to as the “AV gap” (the Audio Visual gap) between the expectations of learners and the reality of education today.

The report says, “The engines of our screen culture – film, television, and radio – were the dominant media of the 20th century, and many of the most important and most memorable messages of the 20th and 21st centuries have been expressed in moving images and sound. Yet education has far to go still to incorporate them systematically in teaching and learning.”

The Film & Sound Think Tank was convened with the aim of advising  JISC on all issues relating to the creation, discovery, use, delivery and preservation of film and sound resources in education and to input into relevant strategic and policy areas.

Contributors came from a broad set of organisations within broadcast, production, archives, research and education.  Those who contributed to the work clearly recognised that there was an opportunity to work in partnership to enhance film and sound archive provision – and all were interested in the challenges and opportunities around enhancing usage for education, research and beyond.

The report marks the culmination of the group’s work and proposes a series of strategic recommendations aimed at promoting current audiovisual collections and making them easily findable and usable for educational purposes.

The recommendations include, among others, strategies for improving resource discovery, clarifying licensing information, allowing more sophisticated manipulation and citation of moving images, and partnership work between Higher Education institutions and producers and broadcasters.

These high level approaches echo the more practical, every day, barriers to embed sound and moving images in education also identified in this blog post.

We are currently exploring how the recommendations made by the group can be taken forward in collaboration with JISC Services and other organizations working in this area. For example through enhancements to relevant JISC Services such as BUFVC, JISC Digital Media and MediaHub as well as through forthcoming projects to commemorate the anniversary of the First World War and activities around the BBC-led Digital Public Space.

The report was written by Paul Gerhardt and Peter B. Kaufman and can be found here together with a range of video resources and podcasts.

A summary downloadable pdf version of the report is available here.

When we started creating a search environment to look at multiple databases in one we were given the oddest, but most precious piece of advice: ‘lose the search box’. The stunned looks around the project team’s faces said it all… isn’t searching about, well, searching?

At the BUFVC we offer access to many different types of datasets, from listings of practically everything that was broadcast on British TV and radio since 2001, to newsreels produced throughout the 20th century. In the United Kingdom there is no audiovisual equivalent for the British Library legal deposit. We therefore work hard to fill that information gap and find ways for education institutions to gain access to audiovisual content.

When we thought of ‘federating’ most of our data (searching it all at once) we thought it would be easy. And it was. We know our data well and could map it quickly.  But that wasn’t the real challenge. It was by looking at how users interacted with the developing system that we learnt the key lessons. If you are searching our 13 million records there are two difficult steps: what to type in that search box and how to then get rid of all the stuff you don’t want.

The answer to the first dilemma – how to stop users worrying about the empty search box – was to make it less important. We needed to make sure that whatever the exact search term, users should be able to make interesting discoveries even if the results were not the best. To do this we created relationships between our records based on semantics. This means that users will see suggestions for searches and records that may take them in different (but related) journeys.

The second dilemma is all about filtering. The search results page became our control centre, allowing users to filter results, tweak searches, see the suggestions for related searches and use a variety of additional tools. All this makes for a busy page but after many rounds of user testing we think our designer hit the right balance between complexity and elegance. Some of these features include:
•    Human-friendly filters such as identifying results by availability (‘can I see it online, do I need to order it from someone?), media type (moving image, audio, documents), genre or collection
•    A comprehensive history function that keeps track of viewed records, searches and tweaks to searches and the ability to mark and cite or export records in a variety of standards

When reflecting back on the project, I remember mostly the sense of fun, the permission we gave ourselves to think creatively, and our exciting user testing rounds. Developers and users don’t often mix but with good moderation these sessions proved magical. These are three elements I would urge anyone to replicate in future projects.

We are not alone in this development; sites that enable discovery and aggregate results from multiple collections are increasing in number – Edina’s JISC Media Hub is well worth a visit. We hope to have created something which rewards users with new connections through discovery. Work will only be completed in September and there are many plans beyond that. In the meantime if you are looking for moving image and sound, be it television or radio, newsreels or commercially available programmes for education pay a visit to our beta site and give us your feedback. If you are reading this from a UK higher or further education institution, please remember to login to access all areas.

The open-source based software and interface will be released as a package under an Open Source licence later this year. This project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and led by Royal Holloway, University of London.

Luis Carrasqueiro is Chief Executive, British Universities Film & Video Council
luis@bufvc.ac.uk

Why all this interest now? One reason might be the overwhelming evidence that open access is a desirable destination for all kinds of reasons.  A joint report was released last month from JISC, RIN, Publishing Research Consortium, RLUK and the Wellcome Trust, which showed clearly that moves toward open access were supported by an analysis of the costs, benefits and risks in scholarly communication.  A recent Danish study of SMEs showed that most of them struggle to access findings from publicly funded research, which surely inhibits innovation.  JISC, on behalf of the UK Open Access Implementation Group, is commissioning three further studies to discover how open access can support the work of the private, public and third sectors, and these studies will report over the next six months or so.

But there are other reasons why open access is gaining a lot of attention from governments.  We have known for some time that the knowledge economy depends on the application of codified, technical knowledge.  As David Cameron and Barack Obama pointed out this week  “science and higher education are the foundation stones of their two nations’ 21st century economies”.

Most readers will know that JISC has been an advocate of open access for some time but that does not mean we have taken an uncritical stance.  Now that the direction of travel is established and widely accepted, there are some tricky practical challenges to overcome.  For example:

• Open access is likely to look different, and emerge at different speeds in different disciplines.  In some disciplines such as the life sciences, there are major, innovative publishers such as the Public Library of Science, and repositories such as UK PubMedCentral supported by research funders.  In other disciplines, such as chemistry, open access is not yet growing fast.
• The transition to open access will need to be co-ordinated to ensure the continuity and rigour of the peer review system.  Again, the Public Library of Science is leading the way here, exploiting the opportunities of digital technologies while preserving academic rigour.  JISC’s new programme in campus-based publishing is exploring an alternative approach that has had success in other countries already.
• The institutional repository infrastructure, while mature and reasonably comprehensive, is not yet as joined-up as it needs to be.  JISC will be commissioning work in this area during 2011-12, and will be working with international initiatives such as the European OpenAIRE project.

Open access publishing faces a number of specific challenges, which could be summarised under the following six headings:

a)      Funding outputs from research that is not grant-supported.  This is a real challenge, and one that is likely to fall mainly to universities, who might want to act collectively to address it, as in the COPE scheme in the US.  Some publishers offer waivers, which is helpful.

b)      Funding outputs produced after the end of the grant.  This can be addressed by changing the ways in which grants are administered, for example by making it clearer and more straightforward for indirect costs to be used in this way.

c)      Complexity of funding arrangements from an author’s perspective.  Here, I think funders, universities and publishers do simply need a way to sit down together and develop a better set of arrangements.  There may be lessons from the approach taken by the Wellcome Trust, especially if research grant funding becomes more concentrated.

d)      Need for transparency in costing, especially for hybrid journals.  There seems to be no consensus that these are a way to transition to open access.

e)      Absolute cost.  Recent research shows that the average article processing charge needs to be under £2000 for the cost-benefits to work for the UK.  It seems likely that the PLoS-One publishing model, now widely emulated, must be a large part of the answer.  In the medium term, this needs to be combined with agreements on the wider sharing of usage statistics and citation data , and review services such as the Faculty of 1000, to open up a market in services to help readers navigate the literature.

f)       Distribution of costs / benefits among the sector.  Will research intensive universities have to pay more?  This is not necessarily the case, if arrangements are in place to ensure that research papers from grant-funded research are supported via those grants.  However, this will require close monitoring and perhaps collective action, and JISC Collections may well have a role in seeing a way through this.

We are working towards making open access in the UK both good for the research community and good for UK plc.

JISC Podcast:
How you can build a business case for open access policy

This statement is revealing of wider issues institutions face in today’s times of financial constraints: how do we know if a digital resource is having an impact on its target audience? How do we reach and speak to scholars, teachers and students to measure their satisfaction? What metrics should be adopted in the context of digitised scholarly material? How much does a digital resource tell about the institution that created it? And above all, has the investment paid back? These are not easy things to assess and often impact just takes time to materialise.

In order to support content creators, resources managers and information professionals within institutions in the task of assessing the usage and impact of their digital resources, JISC has supported the development of the Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources (TIDSR), by the Oxford Internet Institute (OII).

The toolkit, first developed in 2009 and recently updated, provides a framework for conducting this kind of analysis and offers guidance on a range of qualitative and quantitative methodologies that can be used such as webometrics, content analysis, surveys and focus groups. The TIDSR was used by projects in the JISC Impact and embedding of digitised resources programme, of which the Old Bailey was one, to conduct an analysis of their collections, identify where resources were working well and what could be done to improve them and better embed their content within teaching and research.

The case studies drawn from the experience of the projects are available in the toolkit and are a useful starting point for beginners in the field. They also provided fertile ground for the programme’s final report, “Splashes and Ripples: Synthesising the Evidence on the Impacts of Digital Resources” (PDF), by Eric Meyer. The report begins to sketch a picture, based on evidence rather than anecdotes, of how digitised resources in the humanities are currently being used and provides a set of recommendations to content creators on how to go about maximising the impact of their resource such as:

[quote from report]

1.     Remember in advance that you will want to contact your users. A number of projects had a difficult time finding users to survey or interview, but users are a key resource that you will want to approach from time to time.

2.     Use the media to your advantage. One of the undeniable advantages that arts and humanities resources have in the United Kingdom is that there is considerable public interest in these topics. […] The Old Bailey Proceedings Online project has benefitted from inclusion in popular BBC programmes (see page 11).

3.     The media and the public are influenced by numbers and metrics. Being able to demonstrate your impact numerically can be a means of convincing others to visit your resource, and thus increase the resource’s future impact. For instance, the amount of traffic and size of iTunesU featured prominently in early press reports (see page 21).

4.     Make your resource easy to find. This can involve a number of strategies, including search engine optimization (SEO), partnerships with more prominent related sources (see page 31), links in related sites, and inclusion in Wikipedia and other sources. A Vision of Britain through Time has been the most proactive resource in this regard, (see page 28),

5.     Give your resource an unambiguous name and acronym/initialism, both to increase the likelihood that your resource turns up at the top of relevant searches, and to make measuring mentions of your resource result in as few false positives as possible.

6.     Create quick wins for new visitors to your collection. By finding things that they can quickly learn, do, see, or contribute, you can increase the stickiness of your site, and increase the likelihood that your resources will be used. Oxford University’s podcasts, for instance, are easy to immediately access and hear (see page 23).

7.     Leverage your wins. Using the most popular aspects of your resource to attract people to other parts of the collection via features such as suggested links and recommendations for further information can increase the time spent with your collection.

8.     Adopt Cool URLs as persistent, consistent, human-readable, and citable links to digital resources. The British History Online collection has used this method to increase the readability of its links (see page 39).

9.     Provide the ability to export citations directly to reference management software such as Zotero and EndNote.

10.     APIs are the future. Linked data, apps, and other ways that enable researchers to access and combine the data in your resource will increase its utility.

In my role at JISC I look after our content programme which brings scholarly collections into the digital age – taking journals, newspapers, manuscripts, photographs and other material and putting them on the web. I have the pleasure of working with many outstanding collections in the UK and have helped unearth some real treasures that can be shared and used for education and research.

The British Cartoon Archive is one such example. Hosted by the University of Kent, it represents a visual history of British history whether through the social comedies of Carl Giles or the political satire of Steve Bell. It provides the student with an alternative viewpoint on the century – not official documents, but a more slanted approach that provides a more accurate portrayal of public opinion. The video explains more.

The First World War Poetry archive, curated by the University of Oxford, is another astonishing collection. Incorporating the Great War Archive, where members of the general public where asked to submit images of objects relating to the war (letters, diaries, photos etc.), the resource is a seminal example of a crowd sourced website. The accompanying video tells some amazing stories that have been collected by the archive. In one story, we hear of a Scottish soldier, enlisted for war without the chance to say goodbye his family. He placed his goodbye message inside a matchbox and threw it onto the platform in the hope it would get to his loved ones. This video recounts the full story.

Most of the time I am looking at ways to promote these resources and create awareness amongst academics, researchers and learners that they exist. The JISC content site lists all the resources JISC has either funded or licensed for educational use. But one also needs to remember digitisation from the perspective of the creator, and the many things to take into account when putting collections online.

There are five pieces of advice that recent JISC funded projects have discovered have been crucial to successful digitisation projects.

Five top tips

1. Embedding digitisation within a university needs engagement, you need people on your side from across the whole of the organisation from researchers, academics and IT staff as well as senior management

2. Partnership is vital for those developing digitised content. Not just with other universities but with innovative publishers and producers

3. Digitised resources will achieve maximum impact when part of universities’ teaching and research strategies

4. Users love speed and convenience – one quick search over a federated website works better than multiple searches over disparate websites

5. Engaging external communities in digital content needs to be a two way process. It’s not just about universities broadcasting their expertise and exposing their digital content

Our parallel session at the JISC Conference 2011 was entitled Using Digital Media to Improve Teaching and Learning.

Between our speakers we had a wide range of knowledge, skills and experience: each of our speakers was a cartographer of the digital media landscape, mapping not only the Ariel perspectives of policy and future trends but also individual bumps along the road. Rather than promoting digital media as a pedagogical ‘magic bullet’ our session focused on ways to mitigate the problems of using digital media:

- view ‘workflows’ themselves as useful tools in a similar way to open source software. Workflows can be shared, refined and recirculated amongst communities to help us learn from the experiences of others (Zak Mensah, e-learning officer at JISC Digital Media)

- support  your students as producers of digital media, a concept of importance as resources are cut and students are encouraged to take ownership of learning resources (Dr Jane Williams, director of e-learning within the University of Bristol’s Faculty of Dentistry and Medicine)

- where possible be aware that the idea of ‘attendance’  needs to develops in line with new technologies. Learners  ‘in attendance’ may be using a webcam at home or contribute to discussion via Twitter (Doug Belshaw, JISC Infonet).

In summary, our session suggested that the use of digital media really can enhance teaching, but also poses the risk of only passively engaging the learner.  No single individual or even institution in isolation could possibly ‘keep up’. Only by pooling knowledge and sharing stories of what works and what doesn’t can we use successfully integrate digital media into our teaching and learning.

Find out more at the virtual goody bag for this session.

I would like to consider one area affected by the financial challenges: digital content collections development. I would like to share with you some ways in which the JISC-led Strategic Content Alliance can help you evaluate the financial standing of those important resources. As early as 2008, the Alliance commissioned Ithaka to address different aspects of the sustainability issue. Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources presented a framework for thinking about the mindsets and cultural factors needed to create sustainable resources and included a high-level survey of different revenue models that support digital content. In 2009 we commissioned the Ithaka  Sustaining Digital Resources: An On-the-Ground View of Projects Today. It took this approach a step further, examining in detail 12 digital content collections to understand how their leaders define and work towards sustainability, and drawing out the lessons other project leaders might apply to their own work. This included real figures giving the costs and income streams. Additional and supportive international research was also published in the Blue Ribbon on Sustaining Digital Preservation and Access in 2010.

As colleges and universities face increasingly tough choices on what to stop, start and continue in terms of provision of a range of activities to support their core missions, we have revisited and updated the twelve case studies. This will  show how their costs and income streams have been affected by the economic downturn and present the lessons learnt to help colleges and universities considering their options. It will contain real world examples of what is and isn’t working in terms of new emergent business models for digital content and collections. The preliminary findings will be showcased at JISC meeting rooms at Brettenham House in London on 17 March. Further information, including the registration details will be made available via the JISC website and Strategic Content Alliance blog shortly.

Just as we have considered how a college or university might weather the economic storm, we have thought about how funders might adopt good practice in developing their policies and practices in the future to help sustain their investments over the long term. So in 2010 we commissioned Ithaka to undertake research on how funders in Europe and North American are approaching the issues surrounding sustainability and taking the “best in class” practices develop a “tool-kit”. This will be published in April 2011. We hope that this research will support UK universities by allowing funders to identify good investments to help sustain not just digital content collections agencies such as JISC enhance its tactical and strategic approaches to help develop and sustain not just digital content collections, but other mission critical activities that are vital to UK college and university competitiveness globally.

Yet this is far from the truth. Opinions vary, but it is probably fair to say that more than 95% of the world books, magazines, newspapers, videos, films, documents still lay hidden in archives and libraries, inaccessible in digital form.

And there are numerous benefits to continue with the work of digitising all this content – it’s more than making it convenient for the learner to access something from the comfort of their own home or office.

So, for example, research is radically changed by the availability of millions of new documents, as shown by resources like the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, which is changing the face of the study of history of London.

Equally, costs of publishing and travel can be significantly reduced by open access journals, such as the 2m pages of text provided by the Wellcome Trust’s Medical Journal Backfiles digitisation.

The University of Oxford’s Great War Archive not only gathered and digitised the general public’s material evidence from World War One but enabled new communities and expertise to be developed outside the campus walls.

And projects such as Freeze Frame collection of polar photographs, or the Old Weather resource for transcribing weather reports in Naval logbooks, not only provide new data for educators and learners around the world, but also allow for a greater appreciation of the nation’s ‘prize jewels’ within its cultural and educational collections.

Much of the argument is laid out in a new JISC report written by Simon Tanner of King’s College London. Inspiring Research, Inspiring Scholarship is available as a pdf document from the JISC website.