JISC

Universities and colleges hold an untapped wealth of unique and authoritative materials. New avenues for education and research would open up if these resources were digitised, giving institutions a competitive edge at a time of rising student and academic expectations.

Digitisation is expensive and continual investment is needed to ensure that materials are maintained. At a time of severe budget cuts, new business models are required if institutions are to reap the rewards of digitising and managing these collections.

We’ve identified new and emergent business models and successful strategies adopted by colleges and universities for managing digital collections. We also provide advice on how to digitise and plan for the sustainability of digital collections.

• Our interactive Digitisation Toolkit will guide you through the steps needed to digitise your content, including initial planning, the digitisation process itself, and how and where to store your digitised content so that it is easily discoverable.
• In partnership with a number of key organisations, we’ve examined the business models of 12 digital collections in Europe and North Americaand have found they combine a variety of techniques to secure funding, share costs and generate revenue. These include research grants, government and institutional funding, organisational partnerships, licensing, consulting fees, and subscriptions.
• Our video lecture series, aimed at universities, museums and libraries, considers sustainability in particularly challenging economic times. 
• Institutions are still not paying adequate attention to the sustainability of their digital content, according to a report by Jisc and Ithaka S+R. The Sustainability Health Check Tool will help you identify the steps you need to take to assess the sustainability of your content.
• The resources to preserve collections should come from public-private partnerships, according to a study by the Blue Ribbon Task Force, an international initiative part-funded by JISC. Institutions should decide what to preserve based on long-term strategy, the material’s intrinsic value and how it might be used now and in the future.
• JISC Digital Media provides practical advice on sustaining your digital collection.
• You’ll want to measure how well your digital resources are used to guide future investment decisions. We’ve supported the development of a toolkit, to guide you through the quantitative and qualitative methods available to measure use and impact. The toolkit also provides case studies and invites users to contribute their own.