JISC

Massive £12m boost for digitisation of national scholarly resources

25 January 2007

JISC today announced the successful bids in a further £12m investment in the digitisation of major resources of national importance. Following the enormous interest in last year's call for proposals and the high quality of the many bids received, the extra investment has been made by HEFCE to support the wider availability of national, scholarly resources.

The 16 winning bids represent a wide range of rich and vivid perspectives on the history, culture and landscape of the UK and beyond. The successful consortia include nearly 60 organisations from education and other sectors, including the British Film Institute, The National Archive, the BBC, ITN, the British Library, the National Library of Wales and the Bodleian Library, alongside nearly 30 universities.

Projects will capture a wide variety of aspects of UK life, from Cabinet papers to First World War poetry, radio news to East End music hall, political cartoons to British borders, and in a wide range of media, including sound, film, images, journals, newspapers, maps, theses, pamphlets and cartoons.

The 16 projects will join six current projects funded since 2004 which have begun to deliver resources of enormous value to education and research, widening access to otherwise inaccessible and in some cases fragile and unique resources.

The successful bids (with their lead institutions) are:

• First World War Poetry Archive (University of Oxford) – Preserving and sharing memories of the Great War through the words of its poets
• Voices – Moving Images in the Public Sphere (British Film Institute) – Watch the key social, political and economic issues of our time unfold
• British Governance in the 20th Century, Cabinet papers 1914-1975 (The National Archive) – The British Government at peace and war
• Historic Boundaries of Britain (University of Portsmouth) – Mapping the past – a digital library of Britain’s borders
• British Cartoon Archive Digitisation Project (University of Kent) – Browse the largest online archive of cartoons in the UK
• Modern Welsh Journals Online (National Library of Wales) – Free, online searchable access to the best Welsh periodicals – past, present and future
• Electronic ephemera (Bodleian Library)– Discover hidden treasures of everyday life from the 16th to the 20th centuries
• 19th Century Pamphlets Online – Polemical voices from the past on the great debates of the 19th century
• Discovering the Poles – Historic Polar Images 1845-1960 (Scott Polar Research Institute) – Making historic Polar resources accessible to all
• A Digital Library of Core e-Resources on Ireland (Queen’s University Belfast) – Visit a one-stop shop for Irish studies e-resources
• Archival Sound Recordings 2 (British Library) – A critical mass of rich audio materials from all over the world, at your fingertips
• UK Theses Digitisation Project (British Library) – Opening access to over 5,000 of the most popular British research theses
• British Newspapers 1620-1900 (British Library) – Read the first three centuries of newspapers from all regions of the British Isles
• Digitisation of the LBC radio archive (University of Bournemouth) – From apartheid to Blair – hear history being made with the UK’s largest commercial radio news collection
• Pre-Raphaelite Resource Site (Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery) – Trace a movement that changed the face of English art
• The East London Theatre Archive (University of East London) – Putting the spotlight on East End music hall heritage

Professor David Eastwood, CEO of HEFCE, welcomed the announcement, saying: 'The JISC Digitisation programme has been leading the way in making more widely available resources which are either inaccessible or hard to access, something that is quietly but rapidly transforming education and research in this country. I look forward to seeing the results of these projects in the coming years and the uses to which these important resources will be put.’'

Professor Sir Ron Cooke, Chair of JISC, said: 'The success of JISC’s current digitisation projects, which have already made available sound resources, population data and medical journals and will soon deliver further important resources, has been crucial in raising the profile of digitised resources and attracting this further investment. JISC is delighted that this success has been recognised and that the programme will continue its important work.'

Further information

For the JISC Digitisation blog, please go to: http://jiscdigitisation.typepad.com/

Contact: Philip Pothen (JISC)

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