JISC News Web Feed

Access thousands of TV clips from across Europe

n.yeeles@jisc.ac.uk (Nicola Yeeles) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 14:26:39 GMT

Over 14,000 items of archived TV footage from 17 European countries are now available via the EUscreen online portal.

EUscreen – the result of collaboration between 36 partners across Europe – provides a rich insight into Europe’s television heritage with content dating from the 1920s to the present day.

The portal includes rare footage and commentary on key events in history, including a 1962 interview with Martin Luther King about racial discrimination in the US.

John Ellis, Professor of Media Arts at Royal Holloway and principal investigator on the EUscreen project, said: “This is a valuable resource for anyone interested in social history or indeed TV history, as it brings together tens of thousands of clips from across Europe. The portal is available to anyone (not only academics) and it is very easy to get absorbed and spend hours browsing all of the footage.”

The expansive footage has also proved popular as a learning aid for foreign language students, with clips available in 14 languages.

The British Universities Film & Video Council which is partly funded by JISC, and Royal Holloway, University of London, are the two UK partners in the project.

The three year EUscreen project began in October 2009 and is funded by the European Commission. The project aims to standardise and provide a framework for the diverse collections held throughout Europe and encourage exploration of Europe’s rich and diverse history.

By the end of September 2012, there will be around 30,000 items of digital content freely available on the portal as the European providers continue to add carefully selected material.

Explore the EUscreen footage

Libraries help researchers save time, says new report

n.yeeles@jisc.ac.uk (Nicola Yeeles) — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 15:40:43 GMT

University libraries are saving academics time by helping them find quality material more quickly, says a new report.

Academics are choosing the library as their first choice for getting hold of scholarly material because access is quick, it helps them make new connections to related information and the library may be the only place they can access that material.

Academics are then using their reading to inspire new thinking and improve their research results.

This picture of the library at the heart of university life has emerged as part of a new JISC Collections report which canvassed over 1000 academic and associate staff at six UK universities in 2011.

Lorraine Estelle is chief executive of JISC Collections which is responsible for negotiating journal and database deals for the higher and further education communities as a whole. She said: "This report provides further evidence about the value and impact of the resources and discovery systems which UK academic libraries make available. This makes it even more important for JISC Collections to continue to work with publishers and libraries to secure affordable and sustainable journal deals for the future."

Although the survey focuses on academics, reading articles also helps them teach, so staff and students alike are benefiting from access to these resources.

Dr Hazel Woodward, chair of the electronic information resources working group and librarian at Cranfield University said: "At this time of economic constraint, it is important for policy makers and Library directors to provide additional evidence of the value of library-provided resources. Whilst in the past these resources have been regarded as implicitly valuable, this research goes some way to making that value more explicit by focusing on specific benefits and outcomes for academics."

The research is part of a wider international Lib-Value project being coordinated by the Center for Information and Communication Studies at the University of Tennessee.

Read the report

How to make your JISC funding bid stand out from the crowd

n.yeeles@jisc.ac.uk (Nicola Yeeles) — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 10:32:53 GMT

Are you looking to secure JISC funding this year? As competition grows for funds, our advice on successful bidding can help you make a strong application.

Sarah Porter, JISC director of innovation, said: “We want to attract bids from a wide range of universities and colleges, those that know JISC well and others that might be bidding for the first time or need additional help with their application. We know bidding for funds is a time-consuming process and we are therefore aiming to give organisations the best possible chance of being successful in their applications.”

More useful resources:

Find out what you can bid for now and sign up for funding updates

Read a briefing paper about applying successfully for funding (PDF)

Read a blog post from Joss Winn on his experience of writing JISC bids

Find out more about what JISC is looking for in grant bids

Find out what we’re looking for from responses to tender invitations

Are you a college? Your regional support centre can give you advice on writing an effective bid. Find your nearest representative

JISC advice for successful bidding includes:

·   Describe how your proposed project meets the criteria set out in the call
·   Demonstrate how your idea is aligned with the objectives of your college or institution, including what buy-in you have from senior management
·   Carry out an initial assessment of the risks of undertaking the project – and then mention this in your bid
·   Include an initial project plan and show how the project will be managed
·   Think ahead – include information about dissemination, embedding and evaluation mechanisms
·   Show that your project is sustainable once the funding has ceased – not just financially but also in terms of the skills sets of the people involved, and any data/software preservation
·   Go green – show that you have considered the environmental impact of your project, eg. server power and data storage space you need
·   Consider the wider benefits of the project for UK education and research to show that your project is good value for money. You might think about generating workshops, briefing papers or web pages to help disseminate the findings of your project more widely
·   Check you understand JISC’S position on IPR and that your bid is in line with this
·   Don’t let your bid fail on the easy stuff: make sure you stick to the page limit and get your bid in on time

Dominic Tate, repository and digital assets manager at Royal Holloway, university of London, who has compiled advice on successful JISC funding bids, said: “I would recommend an email or telephone call to the contact at JISC to sound them out about whether your idea for a bid is in scope for the call for funding. I would also recommend that you ask someone else outside your immediate team/colleagues to review a draft of your bid and give you feedback on the clarity of what you are proposing to do and deliver.”

Joss Winn, senior lecturer at the University of Lincoln who has managed a number of JISC projects, said: “When I write a bid, it is a somewhat open, collaborative process that proposes to formalise and build on work that we’re already doing and what we already know. I know that this is not uncommon and is not a guaranteed ‘secret to success’, but it is worth underlining.”

He adds: “Bid writing can be a useful reflective exercise - rather than simply 'bidding for money', it's part of the overall narrative of the project itself that starts with the bid and ends with the project outputs and papers.”

End of an era as Malcolm Read retires

n.yeeles@jisc.ac.uk (Nicola Yeeles) — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 10:16:11 GMT

Dr Malcolm Read, head of Jisc, today begins his retirement after 18 years service.

He also leaves Jisc with an OBE, awarded in 2009 for his services to further and higher education.

Malcolm said: “In my time at Jisc I have steered the organisation from its earliest foundations focussed on networking and the library sector to a world-class organisation supporting education and research. I am immensely proud of Jisc’s achievements, largely due to the enthusiasm and hard work of its staff and funded services. I look forward to following its future successes with interest. My retirement begins with a trip to Antarctica. Such plans, combined with my confidence in Martyn Harrow and colleagues, means I am looking forward to moving into the next stage of my life.”

Read more recognition for Malcolm on his retirement:

JISC EMBEDDED OBJECT

Watch Malcolm’s personal milestones from his time at JISC: http://youtu.be/cI6WF4eDhU8

Jisc now welcomes its new head Martyn Harrow who will guide the organisation through the next year.

Martyn joins Jisc from Cardiff University, where he was chief information officer, and has previous experience in global business (Unilever and ICI), local government and running his own IT leadership consultancy and coaching practice.

New website launched to help students transfer from school to university and employment

l.clifford@lipa.ac.uk (Lisa Clifford) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 09:00:00 GMT

A new website designed to help students make the transition between school, university and employment is launched today, by Queen Mary, University of London's Thinking Writing team.

The 'Writing in Schools, Higher Education and Employment Settings' (WISHEES) project is funded by JISC, and aims to help raise aspiration and attainment in schools and universities.

Working in collaboration with local schools and employers, Teresa McConlogue and Debra Hills of the Thinking Writing team have developed an online collection of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) writing texts and podcasts. The site features examples of real student texts, with tutor commentaries on those texts and interactive tutorials to help students think about quality in STEM writing.

The team hope school teachers and academics will find the website useful when designing STEM writing tasks that better prepare students for the demands of university and employment.

Sally Mitchell, Thinking Writing Co-ordinator at Queen Mary, commented: "This resource provides fascinating insights into what teachers and lecturers value in their students’ writing. It’s a great addition to the Thinking Writing website which supports academics to develop their thinking and practice in relation to writing."

"This resource provides fascinating insights into what teachers and lecturers value in their students’ writing."

Resources like WISHEES help to celebrate the good work that goes on in schools and universities around writing, and help students explore the trajectory of student writing from school to employment.

Academics from Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, USA and employers such as Transport for London and Astrium Ltd (space transportation and satellite systems) have also contributed to the WISHEES collection.

Osman Bawa from Astrium Ltd commented: “Technical writing is an essential skill on which industry and business as a whole depend. To our thousands of engineers and managers it is their main means of communication. Students and young engineers need to actively develop and practice their technical writing, not only to speed up the process or reduce the time it takes, but to guarantee a project's success.

“Astrium is pleased to be a part of the STEM WISHEES project as it is an excellent way of helping students and academics to understand just what industry expects.”

JISC Digitisation Programme Manager Paola Marchionni added: "This resource is an excellent example of how the higher education sector, schools and employers can work in partnership to tackle the need for innovative resources which are engaging and at the same time develop students' digital literacy skills to prepare them for the demands of tertiary education as well as for the job market."

This project is funded by the JISC eContent programme 2011.

Click here to find out more about the project and view the resources or contact Teresa McConlogue (WISHEES Project Director).

For more information, please contact:

Siân Halkyard
Communications Manager
Queen Mary, University of London
020 7882 7454
07970 096 175
s.halkyard@qmul.ac.uk

Eight international research funders announce winners of 2011 Digging into Data challenge

n.yeeles@jisc.ac.uk (Nicola Yeeles) — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 12:06:00 GMT

Analysing 600 years of music, drilling down into population databases, understanding social unrest through digitised newspapers – these are just some of the new lines of research that the winners of the second Digging into Data Challenge will now undertake.

Their research is part of an international competition that promotes innovative humanities and social science research using large-scale data analysis.

Funded by eight international research organisations from four countries – including JISC, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the arts and humanities research council (AHRC) from the UK - the successful 14 teams are mixed groups of researchers from the United Kingdom, Canada, the Netherlands and the United States.

They will receive grants of over £3m in total to investigate how computational techniques typically applied to the sciences can also be applied to change humanities and social sciences research.

Alastair Dunning, digitisation programme manager at JISC, said, "Digitised data offers researchers radically new opportunities for understanding old questions and formulating new ones. The range of projects demonstrate some of these opportunities."

The successful projects being led by UK organisations are:

1. Cascades Islands or Streams? (Indiana, Wolverhampton and Montreal universities) will measure the impact of humanities and social science research on traditional scholarly sources but also across social networks, blogs and other informal modes of communication.

2. ChartEx (Washington, Leiden, York, Toronto, Brighton and Columbia universities) will develop new ways of exploring medieval charters in their full text versions

3. Digging into Connected Repositories (The European Library Office, Open university) will analyse the effects of open access publishing on research

4. Digging by debating (universities of Indiana, East London, Dundee and London) will develop and implement a workbench called InterDebate, with the goal of digging into data provided by millions of expert books and articles

5. Digging into Metadata (Universities of Drexel, Manchester and Glamorgan) will create new metadata tags to help researchers discover information across multiple repositories

6. Electronic Locator of Vertical Interval Successions (ELVIS) (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, universities of Aberdeen, McGill and Yale) will study changes in Western musical style from 1300 to 1900, using the digitized collections of several large music repositories

7. Imagery Lenses for Visualizing Text Corpora (Universities of Utah and Oxford) will explore whether data visualization can help researchers make new observations and generate new hypotheses about literature and linguistics

8. Integrated Social History Environment for Research (ISHER)-Digging into Social Unrest (Manchester, Illinois and Tilburg universities and International Institute of Social History) will develop an integrated tool to help social history researchers use sophisticated text mining

9. Integrating Data Mining and Data Management Technologies for Scholarly Inquiry (University of California, Berkeley; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; University of Liverpool; the Internet Archive and JSTOR) will integrate large-scale collections into a stored and managed preservation space

10. Mining Microdata (Minnesota, Leicester, Guelph, Alberta, Montreal and Essex universities) will make use of make use of data-mining technology to exploit one of the largest population databases in the world originally digitized for genealogical research

11. Trading Consequences (Universities of Edinburgh, York and St Andrews) will examine the economic and environmental consequences of commodity trading during the nineteenth century using information extraction techniques to study large corpora of digitized documents

Total programme funding is approximately £3,075,000

Find out more about the competition and why JISC is involved

JISC 2011 round up

r.west@jisc.ac.uk (Richard West) — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 10:03:00 GMT

What did you come to JISC to find out about in 2011?

This year has seen approximately half a million people visit the JISC website – who have looked at over 2.3 million pages in 2011 taking advantage of our resources and guidance across teaching, learning and research.

Nearly 800 of you took time to visit the JISC website on Christmas Day 2010 with the most popular searched story on the day being the Great War Archive rolled out in Germany.

JISC EMBEDDED OBJECT

What were you looking for?

Funding, online resources and JISC Collections were the three most searched-for terms on JISC’s website in 2011, with the top topics you wanted to know about shown below:

What were you reading?

Top five news stories as viewed by you in 2011:

What were you viewing?

Over 25,700 of you watched us online.

The top five YouTube videos you visited were:

Libraries of the Future strategy video
myExperiment film about the social media site for scientists
British Newspapers 1620-1900 Showreel
Knowledge Is - a short film about opening up access to archives
Using audio in higher education - Film & Sound Think Tank

What did you listen to?

Top five podcasts:

What did you download?

Top five reports:

Do you want to be part of the conversation in 2012?

Keep abreast of our latest funding opportunities and strategic developments through JISC Announce by sending us an email to jiscmail@jiscmail.ac.uk containing the line: join jisc-announce yourfirstname yourlastname

View the JISC Annual review 2010/2011 here

Newton’s thought processes exposed online

l.clifford@lipa.ac.uk (Lisa Clifford) — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 14:10:00 GMT

Isaac Newton’s own annotated copies of his works, notebooks and manuscripts are being made available online by Cambridge University Library and the University of Sussex with JISC funding.

Digitised title page from
Newton’s own copy
of Principia

Researchers, students and the public can now zoom in to each page to explore texts like Principia Mathematica in incredible detail and make use of transcriptions to understand Newton’s mind – and handwriting.

Alastair Dunning, programme manager at JISC, said: “The end results of Newton’s work are world famous but his notebooks and annotations give a rather different insight into the process that he went through to get there. JISC looks to share insights like those with as wide an audience of possible and digitising this collection means that researchers and students now have online access wherever they are.”

However, while the two universities have received JISC funding to help expose Newton’s papers to the eyes of the world, a closer look at some of the pages from the newly digitised archive reveals that not all his peers thought his output should be shared so openly.

Several of the manuscripts in the collection contain the handwritten line ‘not fit to be printed’, scrawled by Thomas Pellet, a Fellow of the Royal Society, who went through Newton’s papers after his death to decide which ones should be published.

Project manager Rob Iliffe, Professor of Intellectual History and History of Science at the University of Sussex, said: “The publication of these foundational texts, thanks to funding from JISC, represents the result of a great deal of hard work put in by both the Cambridge and Sussex teams over the past year. It is a significant milestone in the work of the Newton Project, and with access to nearly five million words of Newton's personal, scientific and religious writings, readers can now look at Newton's creativity in its broadest contexts.

Cambridge University librarian Anne Jarvis said: “With great collections comes a responsibility to make these as accessible as we can. Now, through the use of new technologies and with vital support from the Polonsky Foundation and bodies such as the JISC, we are able to open up our collections in ways that would have been inconceivable a few years ago. Wherever possible we will seek to enhance our digital collections by aligning them with scholarly research.

“Our initial collection, the Newton Papers, is a good example. Through our collaboration with the Newton Project at the University of Sussex, we’ve been able to provide superb transcriptions alongside the images of many of Newton's manuscripts.”

Launching the website with more than 4,000 pages of its most important Newton material, Cambridge University Library will upload thousands of further pages over the next few months until almost all of its Newton collection is available to view and download anywhere in the world.

Interactive maps reveal London’s history in unprecedented detail

l.clifford@lipa.ac.uk (Lisa Clifford) — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 11:03:00 GMT

Researchers have today unveiled a new interactive map that reveals London’s social history in unprecedented detail, enabling users to explore everything from the world’s first gay scene to eighteenth century riots.

Locating London’s Past is a new JISC-funded website that lets users delve deep into the capital’s past, revolutionising our understanding of London’s history. The website is the first to map information from a vast array of sources, covering:

crime and punishment
the distribution of wealth, poverty and occupations
the ownership of consumer goods
mortality

Alastair Dunning, programme manager at JISC, said: “Researchers in the humanities and social sciences are turning increasingly to geographical analysis as a way of bringing the facts and figures to life. What’s exciting about this resource is that the existing data you can explore today is just the start – the interface could be expanded to include new data sets and new maps, making it potentially useful to scholars in dozens of different disciplines. JISC’s commitment to funding open source projects means that other universities are already looking at how they might reuse the programmes that the Sheffield team has developed.”

Trial accounts from the Old Bailey, tax and population data, and even archaeological records can all be uploaded onto John Rocque’s famous 1746 map of London, now fully referenced to modern geographical coordinates by Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA).

Locating London’s Past is the result of a collaborative project between the University of Sheffield, the University of Hertfordshire, and the University of London.

Using the new website, people are now able to explore fully geo-referenced detail using Google maps technology to reveal the distribution of crimes, wealth and poverty, mortality, archaeological finds, voting records and much more.

Professor Tim Hitchcock from the University of Hertfordshire commented: “This project has allowed us to add a new, third dimension to our understanding of the first ‘World City’. Text on the page can now be reconfigured around place and space to create a new historical landscape to reveal pockets of crime and poverty, wealth, and illness. It allows us to know the past in a new way.”

18th Century riot trials

The interface for the website was developed by the University of Sheffield’s Humanities Research Institute (HRI), publishers of the prize-winning Old Bailey Online website.

Professor Robert Shoemaker from the University of Sheffield’s Department of History commented: “Locating London’s Past makes it possible for the first time to map a wide variety of data from London’s past onto fully geo-referenced historical maps of the metropolis. For me, the most exciting findings concern the spread of crime locations from Old Bailey trials. Rather than simply reflecting the distribution of poverty (or wealth), criminal prosecutions took place in mixed areas, where social tensions were highest. These and other discoveries will transform our understanding of the historical development of Europe’s first modern city.”

Dr Matthew Davies, Director of the Centre for Metropolitan History at the University of London’s Institute of Historical Research, School of Advanced Study, commented: “The project’s website provides a new tool for understanding the relationships between the people and places of pre-modern London. It will enable the visualisation through maps of important characteristics of the metropolis during a time of rapid growth, from everyday patterns of family, home and work, to the interactions between inhabitants and institutions such as the parishes, hospitals and city companies.”

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