Celebrating transatlantic collaboration on digitisation

The event marks a further stage in a collaboration between the two organisations which began formally with a joint call for
proposals in November. The call invited scholars in England and the USA to collaborate over digitisation proposals,
the aim of the £360,000 ($730,000) programme being to unite scholarly collections split between the two countries,
explore innovative approaches to digitisation and match expertise in one country with collections to be digitised
in the other.

Bruce Cole, Chairman of the NEH, is leading a delegation to the UK to explore international approaches
to the digitisation of scholarly resources and to take forward the collaborative programme with Jisc. The joint Jisc/NEH
programme is funding Transatlantic Digitisation Collaboration Grants which will be awarded to one-to-one partnerships in
the US and England with the possibility that these grants will provide the foundation for larger-scale partnerships in the
future.

The grants are part of the wider International Partnership of Research Excellence (IPRE), an initiative instigated by
the late Professor Sir Gareth Roberts of the University of Oxford. The second strand of the initiative recommends
undertaking collaborative digitisation initiatives of which these grants will be a part.

Dr Malcolm Read, Jisc Executive Secretary, will welcome the delegation at this evening’s event which will also be addressed by Robert K. Englund, Professor of Assyriology at the University of California and Director of the Cuneiform Digital
Library Initiative.

Projects awarded grants through the programme will join the Digital Library of Core Materials on Ireland digitisTogether we will begin to build a 'virtual bridge' across the Atlantic through our support of projects that use digital technology to unify collections of artifacts, documents, manuscripts, and other cultural materials. ation project currently underway at Queen’s University Belfast. The project is drawing on library collections throughout Ireland to digitise 100 key journals, over 200 monographs and 2,500 manuscript pages from core Irish Studies collections. Dr Paul Ell, the project’s director, will talk about the project and, in particular, the substantial North American audience interested in this theme.

Speaking ahead of the event, Malcolm Read said: ‘This is a particularly exciting and important programme which has already generated a great deal of interest from scholarly communities on both sides of the Atlantic. We look forward
to taking forward new funded projects which we hope will demonstrate innovative ways of working between the two countries.’

National Endowment for the Humanities Chairman Bruce Cole said: ‘The NEH has long recognized that the humanities are a global endeavor -- and this is especially true in the burgeoning new field of the digital humanities. By partnering with our colleagues at the Joint Information Systems Committee, together we will begin to build a 'virtual bridge' across the Atlantic through our support of projects that use digital technology to unify collections of artifacts, documents, manuscripts, and other cultural materials.

A report on the evening will be distributed later this week.

The event is open to all and will be followed by a wine reception for all attendees.
Jisc and the NEH are grateful to the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's College London for hosting the event.

Full details: Developing International Collaboration for Digitisation:
the Jisc – National Endowment for Humanities (NEH) perspective
Hosted by King's College London.
Monday 21st January, 5.30pm - 6.45pm (Room 2B08, Strand Campus)