JISC Digitisation programme in the context of world activity
The JISC Digitisation Programme is possibly the most advanced and integrated of all those in Europe. It delivers a larger range of subject content, more densely and with more value added components and integration of resources for Higher Education than any other such programme in Europe. Only the highly centralised Netherlands programme shows more advancement in terms of technologies, techniques or integration but here the activity is so focussed through one organisation, the National Library, Koeninkleik Bibliotheek that is not comparable in subject scope or depth to the JISC programmes.
A significant change to how JISC programme impact might be evaluated is the entry to the market of Google in 2004 through its
book digitisation initiative that saw major investment into University research libraries mainly in the USA, UK and Spain. Google’s aim is to provide “access to all of the worlds knowledge” (
ref)
Although this digitised content can have educational benefit, the model will simultaneously drive Google’s advertising business model by creating a significant call for scholarly resources or generating use of the internet search engine and ancillary services. There has been a strong reaction in the rest of the world over concerns of cultural imperialism and the dominance of American internet corporations. This has led to increased funding and activity in countries such as France and Italy plus the creation of joint activities responding to the Google activity. One such is the
Open Content Alliance, which is a federation of commercial, research and education players and led in most part by the Internet Archive and Yahoo!. This activity is also matched by a third strand of funding from Microsoft which is the
MSN Book Search project which is digitising a large corpus of 19th century English literature material held in the British Library. Basically, all of these above activities are providing digitisation and scholarly resources to drive their own business models.
The impact of the JISC digitisation programme in relation to such massive mainly book focused digitisation projects has still been very significant. The commercial entities are basically cherry picking the low hanging fruit of cohesive book resources formed by decades or centuries of library selection. The JISC programme is providing a depth and range of scope in both format (audio, moving image, visual content and newspapers) and subject specificity (such as medicine, Parliamentary papers or historical population reports) that will not be attempted by the commercial entities so active mainly in America. JISC leads the international community in this respect and both its past programmes and the emerging second round of the JISC digitisation programme show the same intent to provide a very wide range of resource types from distinctly desirable subject areas that will have a significant positive impact upon UK Higher Education.
A significant comparable programme internationally is the
National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program from the Library of Congress in America. This program’s objective is to:
…develop a national strategy to collect, archive and preserve the burgeoning amounts of digital content, especially materials that are created only in digital formats, for current and future generations
Whilst not necessarily generating a large volume of new digitisation funding (funding sources are disparate and widely distributed in America) it does provide a central concentration point for activity and networking that is often seen as missing in the USA. The only other forum that provides similar cohesion is the
Digital Library Federation but again this tends to attract the larger institutions and the benefits are not equal across the full spectrum of education in America. The recent merger of the RLG and OCLC has created a large and authoritative co-operative forum, albeit operating on a membership model not as a funder, which has made considerable contributions including the award winning
PREMIS (PREservation Metadata Implementation Strategies) model. The
Coalition for Networked Information (
CNI) is another authoritative forum and point of focus that undertakes some digitisation related activity in America, but has not funded digitisation on a scale comparable to JISC. It is axiomatic that America looks to the JISC digitisation and digital preservation activities as being valuable in partnership terms, a model for enabling a great impact from the smallest expenditure and a model for how interoperability, guidance and best practice can be promulgated through a community. At the same time, they view JISC as being an unachievable ideal for America due to their differing infrastructures, scale and academic structures.
The
European Commission's I2010 Digital Libraries Programme and the various Framework Programmes (FP5, FP6 and now FP7) beneath it are trying to drive the digitisation of resources within Europe. They are also trying to address issues such as social exclusion, community cohesion and at the same time provide help with interoperability, best practice and identify centres of competence. It should be noted that the UK has the most respected and numerous centres of competence in Europe and that many of these are either directly funded by JISC or were formed due to a JISC programme.