JISC

JISC is changing the world of authoritative e-resources through its investment in digitising content from some of the UK's greatest collections.

Aims of the eContent and Digitisation Programme

Digitisation Blog

Bringing collections out of the dark

• Enabling the use of difficult to access physical collections for the benefit of teaching, learning and research.

• Allowing for universities to exploit the full richness of their special collections, whilst easing the management of physical collections, helping preserve precious material and easing the pressures on space.

Meeting and advancing research needs

• Building a critical mass of content, thus providing for new methodologies, uncovering previously hidden evidence and opening up new areas of research.

• Helping meet teaching needs by using digital resources for innovative pedagogies, the gap between teaching and research, and inspiring teaching and learning in different spaces and scenarios.

Stimulating the economy, underpinning competitiveness and developing skills

• Establishing new business models for digital content and developing the appropriate skills in creating, describing, delivering and marketing digital content for HE and beyond.

• Working with the private sector to achieve commercial success and public good, reducing environmental impact, and opening up public sector content for re-use.

Reaching out and building communities

• Using innovative techniques and technologies, such as crowdsourcing, to create new forms of social inclusion and help create economically sustainable digitisation.

• Harnessing communities of users within scholarly groups and from the broader public to allow for the two-way transfer of knowledge and help address concerns over the sustainability and usability of digital content.

As well as the creation of 'transformational content', the e-Content and Digitisation programme works to improve digital literacy and build skills around the creation and consumption of these resources. At the same time, embedding and sustaining these resources is a challenge that the programme constantly confronts and funds a range of projects to explore these areas.

Yearly Highlights

2010 - The JISC e-content programme continues on from 2009, funding projects to look at institutional skills and strategies for digitisation (such as the Life-Share project at the University of Leeds) and ways of bringing disperesed digital content together. (such as the Visualising China project at the University of Bristol).

2009 - Phase 2 of the JISC Digitisation Programme draws to a close, and projects such as the RLUK Nineteenth-Century Pamphlets and University of Oxford's First World War Poetry Archive prove spectacular successes

2008 - With £1.8m funding, a series of 25 smaller projects are funded under the Enriching Digital Resources banner. The 25 projects bring a wealth of new material online in 2009.

2007 - JISC begins a second phase of digitisation, with 16 projects at a cost of £11.6m initiated. These include Birmingham Museum's Pre-Raphaelite resource and the University of Kent's British Political Cartoon archive.

2006 - Resources resulting from the first phase published online, including the British Library's Archival Sound Recordings, or the Online Historical Population Reports from the University of Essex

2004 - JISC's mass digitisation programme begins, funding 6 projects at a total cost of c.£12m. NewsFilm online will digitise ITN film footage, while valuable scholarly articles will be made available via the Medical Journal Backfiles project

Useful documents:

• JISC Collections Open Educational User Licence (Word) from CASPER project