JISC

Given the significance of the Digitisation Programme within the UK and also in terms of digitisation activity around the world, it is important that the key achievements and innovations of the six projects funded during the first funding round are recorded and disseminated. The projects have operated in a rapidly changing environment with fixed resources and their achievements and commitment should not be understated. The resources created through these projects will make a significant contribution to the educational community. (Quotes at the start of each section below are taken from interviews with project staff and steering group and advisory board members).

Eighteenth Century Parliamentary Papers (BOPCRIS)

"It should make available to a much wider public, both in the academic, and the general information, community, material which has been extremely difficult to access in the past."

"This material is difficult to access at the moment. There is no index, so it's less used than it might be, so digitising it, and making it more available, is crucial."

BOPCRIS will offer unprecedented access and flexibility to search, question and analyse 18th century Parliamentary Papers, Bills and Journals in a completely new way. Papers copies of this material are not generally held on open shelves in libraries and are poorly indexed, but through this project, there will be universal access to high-quality, fully searchable digital surrogates of up to 945,000 pages.

Key achievements

• The creation of a comprehensive collection of materials related to eighteenth century parliamentary activity which will be valuable to researchers in many fields.
• The exposure of material which would otherwise have been 'hidden' or extremely difficult to access
• The ability to search and retrieve information and to access material in new ways, thereby facilitating new research techniques
• The development of knowledge about mass digitisation including issues relating to storage, optical character recognition (OCR), preservation, data export, interoperability and user expectations.
  

Innovation

• The quality of digitisation is extremely high eg 96% accuracy for fonts
• The mass scale digitisation and OCR procedure undertaken by BOPCRIS is unique, for example, the innovative work in 'boxing content', the use of a robotic scanner, and interactions between scanning and indexing teams.
• The agreement with CCLRC at Rutherford Appleton to store large quantities of digitised data is a groundbreaking one in HE.
• The work to develop an automated workflow model using innovative software solutions for the capture and conversion of images directly to the web has proved innovative
• The work carried out on indexing methods for this type and age of material will be valuable for other project
• The workflow models and the robotic scanning facilities developed by BOPCRIS has the potential to provide infrastructure for future digitisation activities in the UK
  

Archival Sound Recordings

"It is, for the first time, making available a little fraction of the huge holdings of the Sound Archive; that's a major achievement."

"From having access to resources which have not been easy to get and, and also getting it back to the original; it's very important not to just rely on transcripts; it's very important to hear the original sound object."

"It's a fantastic resource to put it bluntly, a fantastic teaching and learning resource"

The British Library Archival Sound Recordings project draws material from 12,000 items, totalling 3,900 hours of recordings reflecting its strengths in oral history, popular and classical music, soundscapes and spoken word recordings.

Key achievements

• The successful completion of the procurement process under terms of the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU) is a major achievement for the project.
• Through the project, greater understanding has been developed about the needs and demands of the user community
• The project has developed applications that allow download, storage and manipulation of audio clips in order to embed them in learning and teaching materials.
  

Innovation

• The rights clearance agreements reached for the use of audio for educational purposes represents a significant achievement. The project is the only one in the UK engaged in this type of IPR activity to such a large extent; it has the potential to set a benchmark in this area.
• Previously undocumented recordings from the British Library's holdings have been listened to and catalogued.
• Innovative XML-based solutions have been implemented for harvesting descriptive metadata from pre-existing documentation
• The project has created a British Library Application Profile (BLAP) for sound, known as BLAP-S and has also completed extensive work on defining a Unique Identifier (UID) specifically for sound. This metadata schema can be transferred to other environments
  

British Newspapers 1800-1900

"It will revolutionise research…Everyone I've told about it has been incredibly excited, really, really excited."

"I think it's a huge advance; it will be massive. For the first time, a British-based institution is doing what the Americans have been doing for years…I think it's fantastic…it will transform research…"

This project will revolutionise scholarly research through the digitisation of two million pages of local, regional and national nineteenth century newspapers. Users will be able to search specific newspapers or to search by subject across the whole collection. Retrieved articles will be viewed as text or as an original page layout.

Key achievements

• The project has allowed a detailed examination of a selection of the British Library holdings involved. As part of its methodology for preparing volumes the project undertook an in depth condition check of each volume prior to filming. The decision to do this was taken at the beginning of the project to assist with the quality assurance of both the duplicate microfilms and the completed scans. This check has provided the British Library with a mass of information across 46 titles from all parts of the UK covering the entire 19th century looking at text loss, print errors and repairs both old and new.
• The project has explored the question of layout analysis and article segmentation, choosing a fairly high level of aggregation to suit the needs and budget of the project.
• It will provide users with cross-sector searching across a diverse range of material and via keyword searching on billions of words without having to visit the British Library.
• 86% of the material has been re-microfilmed to standards which exceed those set out by NewsPlan, a co-operative programme for the microfilming and preservation of local newspapers and for making them accessible to users
• The Framework contract is an important part of the project legacy; future call off orders can be raised under the framework agreement.
• The project team have produced robust project documentation and workflows which are exemplary.
  

Innovation

• The project will be of interest far beyond traditional users of the British Library's newspaper collection, for example, genealogists, arts and popular culture researchers
• Researchers in the field agree that this resource will revolutionise the way in which people do research.
  

Medical Journals Backfiles

"It is great that it is delivering a whole mass of content that is free at point of use in an open access environment from a trusted set of providers"

A selection of high-impact medical journals, some dating back to the early nineteenth century, will be made accessible to everyone, through a standard search engine such as Google or, for specialist researchers, through the Pubmed database. This project delivers over two million pages of text by digitising the complete backfiles from a number of historically significant journals. Participating publishers will deposit current issues of their journals after a short embargo period, for permanent, free access.

Key achievements

• Successful negotiations have been carried out with a number of publishers and learned societies.
• Successfully managing a joint UK-US project is a major achievement.
• The partnership between the Wellcome Trust, JISC and the National Library of Medicine has provided another useful example of a collaborative model for digitisation
• The project has carried out faithful digitisation, making a complete copy of the original from cover-to-cover
  

Innovation

• Publishers have not only agreed to deposit their backfiles, but also their current editions.
• DTD standards used by the project have been recognised by the British Library and Library of Congress
• The conversion system design document, which sets out a detailed specification of what will be delivered is an important tool in managing the relationship with the supplier
  

Newsfilm Online

"It will make an absolute difference because such material simply isn't available at the moment"

"I know what I'll be using it for myself, but I'm hoping that there will be all sorts of other people using it for uses that I've not even thought of"

"There won't really be a resource that's comparable in terms of its content, span or ease of use, so it will be quite unique".

"A fantastic digital storehouse is being created"

Newsfilm Online will deliver 60,000 segmented encodings, totally some 3,000 hours from the archives of ITN and Reuters. The rationale is to digitise the broadest possible range of material to ensure relevance across a range of academic disciplines. Newsfilm Online will allow users to download and manipulate news broadcasts on a wide range of themes.

Key achievements

• Selecting 3,000 hours from the 130,000 available has been a major achievement
• The project has developed knowledge in dealing with 'ghosting' or 'field dominance'
• The British Universities Film and Video Council (BUFVC) and JISC have secured rights to material 'in perpetuity'
• The successful completion of an OJEU procurement process represents a significant achievement for the project.
  

Innovation

• The project has dealt with the problem of copyright for third party material by 'fuzzing'. This method may be useful for future projects.
• Users will be able to customise and repurpose resources, embedding clips in presentations or VLEs and 'quoting' source material in essays as they would quote from a printed resource.
• The outreach element of the project has been crucial, not only to raise awareness and gather feedback, but also to demonstrate how film can be used as a teaching resource in many subject areas.
  

Online Historical Population Reports

"The project is making available for the first time what is a very important national collection of materials which have relevance across a wide range of disciplines."

"The project will mean the easy accessibility of sources which are difficult to obtain outside London…most universities have an incomplete set and the resources are so fragile that you worry about handing them."

This project will give users access to the entire collection of published census reports for the British Isles, all registration reports for England, Scotland and Wales and a selection of ancillary materials. This material is currently widely dispersed in books and microfilms across the UK and are in poor condition or inadequately indexed. Users will be able to browse, search and download new primary e-resources.

Key achievements

• The digitisation and quality assurance (QA) processes have been carried out to a very high quality.
• The quality of the machine readable tables produced is exceptionally high
• The agreement which has been reached with The National Archive is a significant achievement and the resulting Memorandum of Understanding has the potential to be reused in the future
• The implementation of structural metadata using the Library of Congress Metadata and Encoding Transmission Standard (METS) surpasses the usual levels of granularity provided for parliamentary papers.

Innovation

• The project team have developed a 'hand-crafted' database specifically to meet the needs of academic users; the structure of this could be reused by future projects.
• A number of tools have been developed to ensure quality, namely:
• An "Issue Tracker" a Web based tool which enables tracking of QA issues
• An Image Batch Validator which ensures that file naming and directory structure conventions are adhered to.
• A Batch Comparator which highlights changes between a batch release and the previous release.
• Table of Contents Validator which ensures the document tables of content are consistent with supplied images before the database is populated.

This is an extract from the report Evaluation of the JISC Digitisation Programme Phase 1 and International Contextualisation. Download the full report below