JISC

The JISC Digitisation programme is made up of six pioneering projects spanning centuries, disciplines and media from previously difficult or impossible to access collections were endorsed by our community following an online consultation in 2003. The start dates for these new and innovative e-resources vary, with the first service commencing in a phased roll-out from April 2005 (Medical Journals Backfiles) and the last services commencing in February/April 2007 (Online Historical Population Reports and NewsFilm Online). Each new e-resource will contain a ‘critical mass’ of primary research material across a range of disciplines.

e-Resources Factsheet

Contents

• Archival Sound Recording 
• Medical Journals Backfiles
• Newsfilm Online
• Online Historical Population Reports
• British Parliamentary Papers
• BL Newspapers
• Downloads

Archival Sound Recording

A slice of the world’s rich audio heritage at your fingertips

Lead site: British Library Sound Archive
Launch date: September 2006
Website:www.bl.uk/collections/sound-archive/archsoundrec.html

This ground-breaking project will offer users an online fullysearchable digital library of sound recordings from one of the world’s treasure houses of audio heritage.

Resource Interface

Browsing
There are nine areas of digitised content on the site. A user will be able to select one of the areas such as ‘400 Popular Music Tracks’. The music will be browsable in an A-Z tree: The user will select a letter of the alphabet then click on a performer/group to see the available audio. Clicking on the title will open a page containing the information about the recording and also the embedded media player and a download button for the mp3.

Searching
The web site will be indexed using a Google Search Appliance. So that users will be able to search for a particular recording. There will be advanced searching options to enable users to search specific content areas.

Authentication
This site is intended for Students in further or higher education. Any user will be able to search or browse but they will be required to log in using their Athens or Shibboleth ID before they can gain access to any audio.

Technical Details

Minimum Browser Configurations
The design of the web interface has been kept simple to ensure that the maximum number of users can access this system. There is no reason to think that the interface will not work with any browser that supports cascading stylesheets. The site will be tested with the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox. The embedded media player functionality has been built for Internet Explorer/JavaScript but it has been designed to work with somewhat reduced functionality with other browsers/operating systems and without JavaScript.

Supported Media Players
The files will be available as mp3 and Windows Media. Any media player that can play these formats will work. Mp3 files are for download and offline manipulation. The Windows Media files are for streaming to enable users to preview and save links to segments of the audio.

Media Formats
The audio will be downloadable in mp3 format, encoded at 128kbps (or possibly 192 kbps).
The audio will be streamed in Windows Media format at a low and high bit rate. Any images associated with the audio clips will be in JPEG format.

Tools
The final version of the site will contain a page that links users to freeware/shareware audio tools. There will be some guidance on how to make the best use of these tools.
On the site users will be able to bookmark sections of audio to email and save groups of them as a project.

Compliance
Descriptive metadata will be compiled from The British Library Sound Archive catalogue. The metadata will be converted into XML that will be DCMI and OAI-PMH compliant. The XML will employ METS to encapsulate all the information and related files relevant to each single digital resource.
DCMI – Dublin Core
OAI-MPH – Open Archives Initiative
METS – Metadata Encoding and Transmission Scheme

Medical Journals Backfiles

Free access to the best in medical publications – past, present and future

Lead site: Wellcome Trust (UK) and National Library of Medicine (USA)
Launch date: Progressive roll-out from April 2005
Website:http://library.wellcome.ac.uk/backfiles

This project will deliver around 2 million pages of text, derived by digitising the complete backfiles from a number of historically significant medical journals. All digitised content will be made freely available through PubMed Central This project is jointly funded by JISC and the Wellcome Trust, who are working with the National Library of Medicine (NLM) in the USA.

Resource Interface

Browsing
Through www.pubmedcentral.gov

Authentication
Any user will be able to access the site and resources

Technical Details

Minimum Browser Configurations
Anything above Internet Explorer IE5.5, Netscape 4.7, Firefox 0.8

Compliance
Section 508 - the US equivalent of the UK DDA. Please refer to www.section508.gov/

Newsfilm Online

See and hear the events that shaped the 20th and 21st centuries online

Lead site: British Universities Film and Video Council
Launch date: April 2007
Website:www.bufvc.ac.uk/newsfilmonline

Delivery of 60,000 segmented encodings, totalling some 3,000 hours from the archives of ITN and Reuters Television – including some of the most significant events of the past century such as the Crystal Palace fire (1936) to the first interview with Nelson Mandela (1961), from the battle of Newport Bridge (1975) to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales (1997) are all included. The rationale is to digitise the broadest possible range of material to ensure relevance across a whole range of academic disciplines.

Resource Interface

Browsing
Downloading will be via Windows Media Player v.9 (Audio Codec; Windows Media @64Kbps and Video Codec; Windows Media @704Kbps) and Quick Time 6 (Quick Time 6 MPEG-4 Audio Codec @64Kbps and Video Codec @704Kbps). Copies of the scripts will be in PDF (150dpi)

Authentication
This site is intended for Students in further or higher education.

Technical Details

Minimum Browser Configurations
Access to the encodings, scripts and metadata will be via a suitable web interface and standard browsers, such as Internet Explorer v4+, Netscape v4+,Mozilla 1.4+, Safari 1.x. and desktop platform, e.g. Apple Mac and PC-compliant.

Supported Media Players
Media players for Mac and PC Windows Media Player 9, QuickTime 6, Media formats used for delivery MPEG 2, JPEG, TIFF

Online Historical Population Reports

Putting you in touch with historical population data

Lead site: Arts and Humanities Data Service History
Launch date: February 2007
Website: www.histpop.org
600 volumes of Census reports representing over 200,000 pages and a hundred years of population growth – from 9 million people in 1801 to more than 40 million by 1901. The project will give users free access to historical material that is currently widely dispersed in books and microforms across the UK. Reports relate to the demography, economy and sociology of the British Isles between 1801 and 1937.

Resource Interface

Browsing
Browsing, searching and downloads through www.histpop.org.

Authentication
This site is intended for Students in further or higher education.

Technical Details

Minimum Browser Configurations
The requirements for client-side software are as follows: 

• Web browser must support common CSS-1 features. 
• No client-side scripting support needed for web browsers. 
• Client side Javascript is not used, all webpage views are generated on the server-side. 
• Web browser must support PNG image format for viewing. 
• Web pages are dynamically re-sizeable in the web-browser. 
• Recommend a physical minimum screen size is 800x600 
• Web-browsers supported are: IE 5.5 or later, Netscape 6 or later and Opera 4 or later.

Supported Media Players and viewers
No media players are needed.

Tables can be downloaded for manipulation using Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice 2.x.

The following image viewers and/or software are recommended:
MS Paint (Windows), MS Picture viewer (Windows), Adobe Photoshop (Windows), The Gimp (Windows, Linux, MacOS X versions), KDE Image Viewer (Linux), Eye of GNOME 2.x.x, or any other image viewer or software capable of using TIF format.

Media Formats
Downloads of Hi-Res image downloads are available in TIF format. Users need a suitable TIF-image viewer.

Compliance
OHPR web pages are XHTML 1.x compliant and fully tested for use with the following rendering engines: IE Explorer, Mozilla (used in Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox, SeaMonkey), KHTML (used in Konqueror and Safari), Opera.

British Parliamentary Papers

Bringing the records of Britain’s 18th Century Parliament to users across the UK

Lead site: BOPCRIS – University of Southampton
Launch date: January 2007
Website:www.bopcris.ac.uk/18c

The BOPCRIS website provides users with full access to 1,500 compilated documents drawn from the archives of The British Library and the University Libraries of Cambridge and Southampton. These printed documents range from 1688 to 1834 and include Parliamentary Papers, Acts, Bills, Journals, Proceedings and Reports. 945,000 pages of texts, maps and diagrams are provided as greyscale or colour images to reproduce the original. The collection is fully browsable with text searching techniques that enable words and phrases to be located and specific pages to be viewed with hit-term highlighting.

Technical Details

Minimum Browser Configurations
Internet Explorer 6, Firefox 1.0 and Safari 1.

Compliance
Code is fully XHTML 1.0 and CSS2 compliant. Metadata will be XML exportable and DCMI compliant.

Media Formats
Images will be available in JPEG and PDF formats.

BL Newspapers

Read all about Britain and the world from the Industrial Revolution to the Boxer Rebellion

Lead site: British Library
Launch date: January 2007
Website:www.bl.uk/collections/britishnewspapers1800to1900.html

10 billion words and 2 million pages are being digitised from complete runs (or the majority) of 19th century local, regional and national British newspapers.

Resource Interface

Browsing
The website will allow the user to select the newspaper issue they want to see using a dropdown menu for choosing the newspaper title and a date selection facility, based on a calendar view, to select the individual issue.

Searching
The website will support both simple and advanced searching against the full text of the newspaper pages, the results set returned from a search will present all newspaper articles containing the search term entered.

Authentication
All users in UK further and higher education institutions will be able to access the full functionality and content of the site free of charge. An Athens or shibboleth ID may be required to use some of the site’s facilities.

Technical Details

Minimum Browser Configurations
Internet Explorer 5, Internet Explorer for Mac 5, Netscape 6, Mozilla 1.0, Firefox 1.0, Opera 7, Safari 1

Compliance
The metadata will be converted into XML that will be DCMI and OAI-PMH compliant.

Media Formats
Images will be available in JPEG and PDF formats.

Supported Media Players and Viewers
Adobe Acrobat or Acrobat Reader

The programme is funded through a £10 million investment by the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), through the Comprehensive Spending Review 2 and is being managed by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). Additional funding has also been made available for 2006-2008. For more information contact Stuart Dempster, Digitisation Programme Manager: s.dempster@jisc.ac.uk or visit the JISC website: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/digitisation

This document has been produced and edited by Dicky Maidment-Otlet and the JISC Communications and Marketing Team.