Digitisation Phase 2: Brochure and Overview
The JISC Digitisation Programme is funded with a £22 million grant from the Higher Education Funding Councils for England and Wales in recognition that a series of large-scale digitisation projects would bring significant benefits to the UK academic sector.
Foreword
Creating online resources that inspire and motivate is crucial to the use of ICT across all education sectors, and central to the Department for Education and Skills’ (DfES) e-strategy. By bringing some of the UK’s greatest scholarly collections to the desktops of all in further and higher education and research, JISC’s Digitisation Programme is beginning to realise some of the enormous potential of online resources in a wide variety of formats – sound, images, journals, moving pictures, census data and newspapers.
The programme is not only about digitising resources, but also about fostering new collaborations as we have seen with the innovative and productive partnership between JISC, the Wellcome Trust and the National Library of Medicine to make journal articles freely and openly available to the education sector. Collaborations across the programme are also establishing new business models that provide the education community with groundbreaking and sustainable online resources.
The success of JISC’s current digitisation projects, which have already made available sound resources, population data and medical journals and will soon deliver further important resources, has been crucial in raising the profile of digitised resources and attracting further investment for 16 new projects. JISC is delighted that this success has been recognised and that the programme will continue its important work.
Professor Sir Ron Cooke
JISC Chair