Alastair Dunning
Alastair looks after JISC’s e-content programme, which deals with the creation and delivery of digital resources, such as the British Library’s Archival Sound Recordings or the East London Theatre Archive for use in research, teaching and learning.
Cabinet Papers 1915-1978
For students, historians, teachers or indeed anyone interested in recent British politics, the National Archives’ Cabinet Papers is an indispensable resource, documenting the actions of British government cabinets from 1915 to 1980. It provides an excellent insight in to the nature of decision making at the top echelons of government, as successive cabinets fashion a modern state whilst tackling declining empire, world war and globalisation.
It’s a growing resource, too, with new papers added every year.
The documents relating to the provision of health care prior to the NHS are particularly interesting, showing government responding to the variable and generally inadequate services prior to 1945.
Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource
To be honest, I used to loathe the art created by the Pre-Raphaelite group of painters, but Birmingham Museums’ Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource converted me.
The zoom technology allows rapid magnification of rich digital images; paintings that appear sentimental actually have a hyper-real strangeness to them. Have a closer look at a work such as Ford Madox Brown’s Pretty Baa-Lambs – on the surface a sweet story, but keep staring at the flock of sheep and it develops into something much stranger.
First World War Poetry Archive
The Great War archive is a prime example of the current enthusiasm for crowdsourcing in action. Created by the University of Oxford with contributions from the British public’s own personal collections, it’s impossible to forget the digitised manuscripts that make up the original First World War Poetry Archive – the scrawls, jottings and lines by Robert Graves, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon and others that make up some of the most haunting memories of life in the trenches.
Wilfred Owen’s manuscripts for Dulce et Decorum Est, digitised by the University of Oxford as part of this project, remain a powerful document. One sees the arc of the creative process while under the shadow of war, as Owen builds and then chisels away at words and verses in his struggle to convey moments such as the electrifying panic of a gas attack.
Paola Marchionni
A programme manager within the content team, Paola is involved in running the e-content programme, which has funded 11 projects focusing either on the development of institutional skills and infrastructures for digitisation or in the clustering of existing online digitised content under relevant thematic areas.
NewsFilm Online
The moving image is particularly powerful at capturing the atmosphere of a time and a great way to bring the past alive to students who will not have witnessed such key events in recent history. The video is part of Newsfilm Online, a collection of 3000 hours of 20th century footage from the ITN and Reuters archives. The collection is available for free to all subscribing UK higher and further education institutions.
There aren’t many great moments in history when you can say ‘I was there’, but this video clip reminds me of one such moment. The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 was widely covered by the media and this piece of footage strongly evokes the euphoria of the time: thousands of people crowded around the Brandenburg Gate, celebrating with joy, climbing on the wall and taking away bits of bricks that would soon become the symbol of a vanished world.
Freeze Frame
The photograph is part of the Freeze Frame collection which includes over 20,000 freely accessible images documenting the history of polar exploration. Teachers and students will find the thematic pathways provided by the site a useful way to explore this versatile collection, which can be used for the study of history, nutrition, photography, the environment, wildlife and travel.
A man in an apron covered in flour and rolling dough with a wooden pin is not the first thing that comes to mind when we think of Antarctic expeditions. This photograph, The cook making pies by Herbert Ponting, is from the British Antarctic Expedition 1910-13. In stark contrast with the grandeur of the Heroic Age of Antarctic exploration, this picture portrays the more domestic aspects of these journeys of discovery. It puts the spotlight on quotidian concerns such as feeding a crew but also on the re-creation of a home from home setting.
Strandlines Digital Community
The Strandlines project juxtaposes images from King’s College archive documenting the history of the Strand, the famous street in central London, with contributions from disparate community groups, such as the elderly and the homeless, on their experience of living or working in the area.
The result is a series of alternative narratives about place, or strands, which tell stories on a more personal level than archival records do.
This digital blue plaque uses an expedient reserved to the big and famous – Rudyard Kipling and Charles Dickens both have blue plaques in the vicinity of the Strand in London – to draw attention to a moment in the life of a homeless person. The humorous statement on the plaque makes us smile but at the same time its irony touches on something raw and makes us feel deeply uncomfortable. The blue plaques are also plotted on a Google map offering a walking tour of ‘counter commemorations’.
“When it comes to education and research, it’s the information at our fingertips that makes us successful – not just what we know, but what we can access. We know that people across the UK are already finding JISC’s content useful because we regularly analyse user stats – but it would be enlightening to hear your highlights and which resources you would find useful online.” Tell us using the comments box below.
Comment on this article…
You might like…
If you liked this article you might also find these of interest:
JISC’s advice on How can I afford to digitise my collections and maintain them in future?
Are you getting best value from JISC content and your subscriptions? Find out more in our advice sheet.