JISC

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The United Kingdom has arguably seen some of the largest digitisation activity in Europe during the last 10 years. The combination of government, lottery, education and research funding, plus well established programmes of activity, means that this is a relatively mature process. Dating back to the eLib programme of the 1990’s there has been a significant investment in digitisation projects in the education, heritage and cultural sector. A conservative estimate suggests £130 million of public money has been spent on the creation of digital content since the mid-1990s . Significantly, the New Opportunities Fund (NOF-digitise) invested £50 million of this total in programmes that are just coming to their final completion.

As the Loughborough University study on Digitised Content in the UK Research Libraries and Archives Sector reported:

On a national basis, digitisation work was stimulated by the Follett Report, as a result of which £20 million was set aside for new projects, some of which included digitisation. The New Opportunities Fund (NOF) contributed £50 million and JISC funding for digitisation was £10 million. The Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB) claims to have supported ICT related projects with digitisation output to the tune of some £45 million and NOF provided £3.285 million for Collect Britain for digitisation costs (this does not include costs for maintenance and access). These projects alone add up to an overall expenditure of £130 million of public money in the last 10 years or so.

The JISC has had a central role in encouraging and delivering digitisation projects from the eLib programme through to the current digitisation programme. This has enabled a series of positive impacts which serve best practice in the UK and are unusual in other countries, including:

• Standardisation of many aspects of image and text digitisation.
• Services to support and deliver digitisation of various physical forms (such as the Arts and Humanities Data Service  (AHDS), British Universities Film and Video Council  (BUFVC), EDINA national data centre, Higher Education Digitisation Service  (HEDS), JISC Digital Media, UKOLN.
• Detailed guidance and best practice for digitisation based upon a proven track record of successful digitisation projects.
• Information Environment Standards which has formed the basis of the digitisation activity.
• Metadata and description standards that are of increasing robustness as each programme progresses.
• JISC provides a central point of focus for national and international partnership in the development of digitisation practice and policy.
• JISC digitisation programmes have provided a series of model licences, services and standard processes for intellectual property rights which benefit current and future activity, for example, JISC Legal Information Service provides information on model licences  
• The digitisation programmes have delivered a number of alternate and hybrid business models for sustaining digitised resources. These provide an active testbed for future projects to reference.
• JISC joins up activity such that conservation activities, mass data storage, interoperability, grid computing and digital preservation, amongst others, provide an unrivalled level of integration that is not seen elsewhere in Europe or America. 
• JISC has actively promoted Open Source and Open Access models for delivering digitised content making the UK a leading source of expertise in these activities.

• Standardisation of many aspects of audio, video and film digitisation.
• Increased the knowledge base for metadata implementation of audio and moving image content.
• Established a number of unique relationships with commercial entities to enable sustainable business models to be implemented. The agreements through the Medical Journal Backfiles and the NewsFilm Online projects in particular are unique in Europe. 
• Further established and improved the framework for intellectual property rights usage in UK education. This is a uniquely pro-active role for a government agency to take and is not matched elsewhere in Europe.
• Increased interoperability between projects and resources plus an enhanced set of exemplars for both Open Source and Open Access models.
• Study on Digitised Content in the UK Research Libraries and Archives Sector commissioned by JISC and the Consortium of Research Libraries (CURL) 
• Work on the Strategic e-Content Alliance has been developed from this work.  Its aim is to build a common information environment where users of publicly funded e-content can gain best value from the investment that has been made by reducing the barriers that currently inhibit access, use and re-use of e-content.
• A draft Digitisation Strategy informed by previous JISC activity.

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