The past zooms into the 21st century

Jisc has just selected 25 diverse projects at UK universities that are going to receive £1.8m of funding in the ‘Enrich Digital Resources’ programme. The support has been allocated to projects designed to benefit both researchers and learners, to improve existing digital content and to digitise new materials for sustainable access in the future.   

The projects will use innovative technologies to create vibrant learning resources which serve to enhance or revitalise Britain's scholarly and cultural heritage. They are broad reaching in scope, varying from using podcasts to improve access to Newton’s influential scientific texts to creating a digital archive to reflect the social change in East London arising from hosting the Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2012.     

’Enrich Digital Resources’ will run from October 2008 until 2009, after which all the enhanced or completely new digitised content will be freely available via the Internet, in efforts to be as useful as possible to international research and learning communities.

'Another huge step forward in making materials accessible that were previously almost impossible to get hold of.' Alastair Dunning, digitisation programme manager at Jisc, said: ‘These really exciting projects will add a new dimension to existing digital resources. They’ll also mark another huge step forward in making materials accessible that were previously almost impossible to get hold of, largely restricted to specialist audiences.’

Projects involved in Jisc’s Enrich Digital Resources programme

• Cardiff University: Welsh Ballads - Completing the British Ballad Network
• Durham University: Sudan Archive Digitisation Project
• King's College London: Anglo-Saxon Cluster
• King's College London: Historical Hansards: Completing the Jigsaw
• King's College London: Musicians of Britain & Ireland 1900-1950
• King's College London: The Service Soldier
• Manchester University: In the Bigynnyng: The Manchester Middle English Digital Library
• School of Oriental and African Studies: Fürer-Haimendorf Archive Digitisation
• The Arts Institute at Bournemouth: Museum of Design in Plastics Digitisation Project
• The Open University: Automatic Biodiversity Literature Enhancement
• University College for Creative Arts Farnham Campus: Enhancing the VADS Image Collection
• University of Birmingham: Eton Myers Collection Virtual Museum
• University of Birmingham: Virtual Manuscript Room
• University of Bristol: Resurrecting the Past - Virtual Antiquities in the 19th Century
• University of East London: East London Lives
• University of Exeter: CHARTER (Creating Heritage Artefacts for Research and Teaching in an e-Repository)
• University of Huddersfield: Climbié Inquiry Data Corpus Online
• University of Kent: VERsatile Digitisation Framework Project
• University of Leeds: Image Path (Pathology Slides)
• University of Oxford: Enriching the First World War Poetry Archive
• University of Reading: Digitisation of Countryside Images
• University of Sunderland: UK Colonial Registers and Royal Navy Logbooks
• University of Sussex: Enlightening Science: Teaching and Learning Newtonianism in the 18th and 21st Centuries
• University of Warwick: Exposing Marandet: French Plays from the 18th and 19th Centuries
• University of York: Enhancing Stained Glass Studies

Read more about Jisc's digitisation programmes

Read a background article introducing the Enrich Digital Resources programme