JISC

Over 500 hundred people have responded to a consultation designed to help inform decisions concerning around £4m of investment in the digitisation of unique scholarly resources.

A total of 49 proposals were originally received in response to a call for proposals, involving 120 partner institutions from education, research, public libraries, museums and the commercial sector, totaling more than £34m of requested funding. A selection panel agreed on a shortlist of 24 projects which formed the basis of the consultation process held until September 1st.

The shortlisted proposals have been marked by independent evaluators and their recommendations will be presented to the JISC Digitisation working group for their consideration. A final decision will be announced next month.

JISC Digitisation programme manager Stuart Dempster expressed delight at the high level of interest in the consultation, saying: ‘We’ve had a tremendous response, both in terms of the number of respondents but also the quality of the feedback given. This will now provide an excellent basis for the working group’s decisions. Providing resources that reflect the needs of the academic and research community is central to the programme and I’d like to thank everyone who took the time to share their views with us.’

Those projects selected will join six funded projects in the £10m JISC Digitisation programme 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 programmme – 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 find out more about the JISC Digitisation programme, please go to: [Digitisation href=http://www.jisc.ac.uk/digitisation_home.html]