Transatlantic collaboration on digitisation becomes a reality

A call for proposals was issued today by Jisc and the US’s National Endowment for the Humanities to support collaborative digitisation projects by UK and US scholars. The aim of the £360,000 ($730,000) programme is 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.

The programme is funding Transatlantic Digitisation Collaboration Grants which will be awarded to one-to-one partnerships in the ‘Digitisation is transforming access to vital scholarly resources on both sides of the Atlantic and this initiative is an important indication that issues of access and scholarly needs are increasingly international issues.'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.

Projects awarded grants will join the Digital Library of Core Materials on Ireland digitisation project currently underway at Queen’s University Belfast, which 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. The project is being run in partnership with JSTOR, who will be responsible for delivering the materials on the web and marketing the resource to the substantial North American audience interested in this theme. 

Alastair Dunning, Jisc programme manager, said: ‘Digitisation is transforming access to vital scholarly resources on both sides of the Atlantic and this initiative is an important indication that issues of access and scholarly needs are increasingly international issues. Jisc looks forward to working with the National Endowment for the Humanities to bring real benefits to scholars in both our countries.’

The closing date for proposals is 29th November 2007 

For further information and to read the full invitation to tender, please go to: Jisc/NEH funding call