JISC

21^st August, 2006. Due to technical problems with the digitisation consultation and to ensure that as many people as possible are able to make their views known in the last days of the consultation, a simplified process has been implemented to enable the views of the education and research community to be fully heard.

A total of 49 proposals for the digitisation of nationally-important resources were received since JISC’s April call, involving 120 partner institutions from education, research, public libraries, museums and the commercial sector, totalling more than £34m of requested funding. A selection panel agreed on a shortlist of 24 projects which has formed the basis of the consultation to be held until 1st September.

A fossil record database that will ‘document the history of life’; the country’s largest collection of Pre-Raphaelite drawings; the most important commercial radio archive in the UK; the full text of all twentieth century Cabinet papers; the Desmond Tutu archive; the historic boundaries of Britain; Islamic manuscripts; all photographic negatives held by the Scott Polar Research Institute; the Carl Giles newspaper cartoon archive; rare pamphlets and newspapers from the Anglo-Jewish community, and primary material, including sound, images and video, of the major First World War poets…

These are just some of the proposals for digitisation which JISC has received since its April call and which the education community is being consulted on until September 1st. With around £4m of further investment in the digitisation of unique resources of national importance being made by JISC in the coming two years, widespread consultation is taking place to help decide which projects will receive funding.

Those selected will join six funded projects in the £10m JISC Digitisation programme , projects which are currently digitising a wide variety of online content, including sound, moving pictures, newspapers, census data, journals and parliamentary papers. The first resources to be made available from the programme – the Medical Journals Backfile project – were launched in May and the coming year will see other major scholarly resources made available to the further and higher education communities.’

To view the shortlisted projects, please go to: http://jiscdigitisation.typepad.com/

To make your views know, please go to: http://survey.bris.ac.uk/jisc/digiconsultphase2