The JISC Digitisation Programme was a series of projects to digitise the cultural heritage and scholarly materials in universities, libraries, museums, archives, and other cultural memory organizations in the United Kingdom, from 2004 to 2010 The program was managed by the UK's
Joint Information Systems Committee, the body that supports United Kingdom post-16 and higher education and research in support of learning, teaching, research and administration in the context of ICT.
The Programme had three main strands.
* Phase 1 ran from 2004 to 2007 and funded six separate digitization projects.
* Phase 2 ran from 2007 to 2009 and funded sixteen projects.
* Enriching Digital Resources ran from 2008 to 2010 and funded twenty-five projects.
Phase 1 (2004-2007)
The six projects funded under Phase 1 were the following
NewsFilm Online
This project digitised 3,000 hours from the archives of
ITN
Independent Television News (ITN) is a UK-based media production and broadcast journalism company. ITN is based in London, with bureaux and offices in Beijing, Brussels, Jerusalem, Johannesburg, New York City, New York, Paris, Sydney and Washin ...
(Independent Television News), featuring clips relating to British and world news from the 1920s to the present day. These included, for example, interviews with Nelson Mandela. The video content was only available to Higher and Further Education institutions in the United Kingdom and required access via the Athens or Shibboleth authentication systems.
Online Historical Population Reports
The
University of Essex
The University of Essex is a public university, public research university in Essex, England. Established by royal charter in 1965, it is one of the original plate glass university, plate glass universities. The university comprises three camp ...
has made available population reports from the UK, 1801 - 1937. The reports, drawn from census and other related information, include information on births, deaths, marriages, housing, religion, and other social factors relating to the UK population. The resource is freely available.
Medical Journals Backfiles
The
Wellcome Trust
The Wellcome Trust is a charitable foundation focused on health research based in London, United Kingdom. It was established in 1936 with legacies from the pharmaceutical magnate Henry Wellcome (founder of Burroughs Wellcome, one of the predec ...
led this project to publish electronic versions of 2m pages of text from medical journals.
18th-Century Parliamentary Papers
Led by the
University of Southampton
The University of Southampton (abbreviated as ''Soton'' in post-nominal letters) is a public university, public research university in Southampton, England. Southampton is a founding member of the Russell Group of research-intensive universit ...
, this project digitized eighteenth-century parliamentary papers bills and related journals from the House of Commons. The resource is freely available to staff and students in UK further and higher education, plus those working in Irish universities.
Archival Sound Recordings
This project (which has received two sections of funding from JISC) has made available some of the Sound Archive of the
British Library
The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. Based in London, it is one of the largest libraries in the world, with an estimated collection of between 170 and 200 million items from multiple countries. As a legal deposit li ...
, including oral histories from the Holocaust, wildlife recordings, and accents and dialects. Some of the content is freely available, others are only open to Further and Higher Education in the UK, depending on copyright and data protection restrictions.
British Library Historic Newspapers
The
British Library
The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. Based in London, it is one of the largest libraries in the world, with an estimated collection of between 170 and 200 million items from multiple countries. As a legal deposit li ...
received two tranches of funding from JISC to digitise nearly 3m pages of historic newspapers, largely covering the nineteenth century.
Phase 2 (2007-2009)
The sixteen projects funded under Phase 2 were the following
19th Century Pamphlets Online
This project is providing online access to collections of 19th-century pamphlets held in UK research libraries. Over 26,000 paper copy pamphlets, which focus on the political, economic, and social issues that fuelled the great Parliamentary debates and controversies of the 19th century, have been digitised. The project was led by the University of Southampton, on behalf of a consortium of seven UK universities. The digitised material is being delivered via the
JSTOR
JSTOR ( ; short for ''Journal Storage'') is a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources founded in 1994. Originally containing digitized back issues of academic journals, it now encompasses books and other primary source ...
service. The content is free to UK universities and colleges.
A digital library of core e-resources on Ireland
Led by
Queen's University Belfast
The Queen's University of Belfast, commonly known as Queen's University Belfast (; abbreviated Queen's or QUB), is a public research university in Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom. The university received its charter in 1845 as part of ...
, this project has digitised backfiles from over 70 journals in Irish studies, including ''The Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland'' and various sections from the ''Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy''. The content is free to UK and Irish universities and colleges.
Archival Sound Recordings 2
Archival Sound Recordings is a continuation of the original JISC-funded project. It provides further online access to selections of spoken word, music and environmental recordings from the
British Library
The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. Based in London, it is one of the largest libraries in the world, with an estimated collection of between 170 and 200 million items from multiple countries. As a legal deposit li ...
Sound Archive. Some of the highlights included several early recordings of the music of composers such as
Chopin,
Bach
Johann Sebastian Bach (German: �joːhan zeˈbasti̯an baχ ( – 28 July 1750) was a German composer and musician of the late Baroque period. He is known for his prolific output across a variety of instruments and forms, including the or ...
,
Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven (baptised 17 December 177026 March 1827) was a German composer and pianist. He is one of the most revered figures in the history of Western music; his works rank among the most performed of the classical music repertoire ...
,
Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (27 January 1756 – 5 December 1791) was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical period (music), Classical period. Despite his short life, his rapid pace of composition and proficiency from an early age ...
and
Brahms
Johannes Brahms (; ; 7 May 1833 – 3 April 1897) was a German composer, virtuoso pianist, and conductor of the mid- Romantic period. His music is noted for its rhythmic vitality and freer treatment of dissonance, often set within studied ye ...
.
[
British Cartoon Archive digitisation project
This project has made available political cartoons from 20th-century UK newspapers, including the ]Carl Giles
Ronald "Carl" Giles OBE (29 September 1916 – 27 August 1995), often referred to simply as Giles, was a cartoonist who worked for the British newspaper the ''Daily Express''.
His cartoon style was a single topical highly detailed panel, usuall ...
Archive. The resources is freely available on the web.
British Newspapers 1620-1900
The British Library
The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. Based in London, it is one of the largest libraries in the world, with an estimated collection of between 170 and 200 million items from multiple countries. As a legal deposit li ...
had already digitised two separate collections of newspapers: British newspapers 1800-1900 and the Burney collection of British 18th century newspapers. This project added another 1m pages of historical newspapers to the platform.[
UK Cabinet Papers, 1915-1977
The UK's National Archive has digitised the Cabinet Papers from 1915 and 1977 (with new material for later years being added once it becomes available). It has opened up access to primary source material on the outbreak and events of the first and second world wars, the post-war division of Europe, the creation of the welfare state and the end of empire. It is freely available to all - there are additional tools for A-Level school pupils in the UK.
Digitisation of the Independent Radio News Archive
This project focuses on over 3,000 hours of radio recordings relating to news and current affairs, taken from independent radio broadcasters in the UK. The material digitised includes recordings of a wide range of broadcasts including coverage of the Falklands war, the miners' strike, Northern Ireland and the whole of the Thatcher period of government.
The East London Theatre Archive
This project facilitates research into East London theatres and their history by making their archives freely available to researchers and students with an academic interest in charting the influence of the area's contribution to theatre today.
First World War Poetry Digital Archive
Building on Oxford's ]Wilfred Owen
Wilfred Edward Salter Owen Military Cross, MC (18 March 1893 – 4 November 1918) was an English poet and soldier. He was one of the leading poets of the First World War. His war poetry on the horrors of Trench warfare, trenches and Chemi ...
archive, this multimedia digital archive contains images, text, audio and video of primary material from five other major British poets of the First World War. The collection brings together material, currently dispersed across the UK and the US, on the poets Edward Thomas, Robert Graves, Isaac Rosenberg, Roland Leighton.
Freeze Frame – historic polar images
This project has developed a repository of freely available visual and textual resources to support learning, teaching and research into topics relating to the history of Arctic and Antarctic exploration and science. It provides access to hidden collections for use at all educational levels.
Historic Boundaries of Britain
The Vision of Britain holds information on towns, places and regions in the UK, and users can find which historical constituencies covered a location by typing a postcode or clicking on a map.
InView: Moving images in the public sphere
The project delivered 600 hours of unique moving image materials and digitised contextual documents to educational communities and the public across the UK. It pursued a curated and thematic approach; demonstrating how the key social, political and economic issues of our time have been represented, illustrated, expressed and debated through moving image media forms. One example of British broadcast television which was made available online through InView was the celebrated Channel 4
Channel 4 is a British free-to-air public broadcast television channel owned and operated by Channel Four Television Corporation. It is state-owned enterprise, publicly owned but, unlike the BBC, it receives no public funding and is funded en ...
discussion programme '' After Dark''.
The John Johnson Collection: An archive of printed ephemera
The John Johnson collection is a collection of printed ephemera
Ephemera are items which were not originally designed to be retained or preserved, but have been collected or retained. The word is etymologically derived from the Greek ephēmeros 'lasting only a day'. The word is both plural and singular.
On ...
. Containing 1.5 million items ranging in date from 1508 to 1939, it spans the entire range of printing and social history. Drawn from the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, it contains a high proportion of unique material which up until now has largely remained hidden to researchers.
The John Johnson Collection is available free of charge to all UK universities, further education institutions, schools and public libraries.
Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource
The project has digitised Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery's (BM&AG) entire Pre-Raphaelite collection, including painting on canvas, works on paper, sculpture, designs for stained glass, textiles, tiles, printed books, unpublished artists’ and associates’ letters, notebooks relating to major patrons of the BM&AG collection, and associated photographic material.
It has created over 3,000 files with new metadata and over 3,000 high quality images. Including the work of artists such as: Edward Burne-Jones
Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, 1st Baronet, (; 28 August 183317 June 1898) was an English painter and designer associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's style and subject matter.
Burne-Jones worked with William Morris as a founding part ...
, Ford Madox Brown
Ford Madox Brown (16 April 1821 – 6 October 1893) was a British painter of moral and historical subjects, notable for his distinctively graphic and often William Hogarth, Hogarthian version of the Pre-Raphaelite style. Arguably, his mos ...
, John Everett Millais
Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Baronet ( , ; 8 June 1829 – 13 August 1896) was an English painter and illustrator who was one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He was a child prodigy who, aged eleven, became the youngest s ...
, Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti (12 May 1828 – 9 April 1882), generally known as Dante Gabriel Rossetti ( ; ), was an English poet, illustrator, painter, translator, and member of the Rossetti family. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brother ...
, William Holman Hunt
William Holman Hunt (2 April 1827 – 7 September 1910) was an English painter and one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. His paintings were notable for their great attention to detail, vivid colour, and elaborate symbolism ...
, Arthur Hughes, Frederick Sandys
Anthony Frederick Augustus Sandys (born Antonio Frederic Augustus Sands; 1 May 1829 – 25 June 1904), usually known as Frederick Sandys, was a British painter, illustrator, and draughtsman, associated with the Pre-Raphaelites. He was also asso ...
, Simeon Solomon
Simeon Solomon (9 October 1840 – 14 August 1905) was a British painter associated with the Pre-Raphaelites who was noted for his depictions of Jewish life and same-sex desire. His career was cut short as a result of public scandal following h ...
.
UK Theses Digitisation Project
Under this project, nearly 10,000 digitised theses are now freely available as open access, enabling all researchers regardless of location or time to search for, identify and order digitised UK theses.
Welsh Journals Online
All academically significant Welsh periodicals published since 1900 are being digitised by the National Library of Wales
The National Library of Wales (, ) in Aberystwyth is the national legal deposit library of Wales and is one of the Welsh Government sponsored bodies. It is the biggest library in Wales, holding over 6.5 million books and periodicals, and the l ...
, to provide a substantial corpus of material in the Welsh language
Welsh ( or ) is a Celtic languages, Celtic language of the Brittonic languages, Brittonic subgroup that is native to the Welsh people. Welsh is spoken natively in Wales by about 18% of the population, by some in England, and in (the Welsh c ...
freely available online to readers in all parts of the world.
Enriching Digital Resources (2008-2009)
The twenty-five projects funded under Enriching Digital Resources Programme were the following:
Anglo-Saxon Cluster
Developed at King's College London, the Anglo-Saxon Cluster (ASC) brings together various online resources relating to Anglo-Saxon
The Anglo-Saxons, in some contexts simply called Saxons or the English, were a Cultural identity, cultural group who spoke Old English and inhabited much of what is now England and south-eastern Scotland in the Early Middle Ages. They traced t ...
society.
Automatic Biodiversity Literature Enhancement (ABLE)
The aim of the project was to establish and extend information extraction techniques from scanned taxonomic
280px, Generalized scheme of taxonomy
Taxonomy is a practice and science concerned with classification or categorization. Typically, there are two parts to it: the development of an underlying scheme of classes (a taxonomy) and the allocation ...
literature in the Biodiversity Heritage Library
The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open-access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. BHL operates as a worldwide consortium of natural history, botanical, research, and national libraries working ...
. Scanned texts contain errors introduced by imperfect Optical Character Recognition
Optical character recognition or optical character reader (OCR) is the electronics, electronic or machine, mechanical conversion of images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text, whether from a scanned document, a photo ...
(OCR) and other sources, so techniques are required that are robust in the face of such errors.
Climbié Inquiry Data Corpus Online
This is an archive of transcriptions of the examination of witnesses regarding the murder of Victoria Climbié
Victoria Adjo Climbié (2 November 1991 – 25 February 2000) was an eight-year-old Ivorian girl who was tortured and murdered by her great-aunt and her great-aunt's boyfriend. Her death led to a public inquiry, and produced major changes in ...
in February 2000. This project has taken this large data set and made it available via the University of Huddersfield
The University of Huddersfield is a public research university located in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, England. It has been a University since 1992, but has its origins in a series of institutions dating back to the 19th century. It has made te ...
digital library.
Creating Heritage Artefacts for Research and Teaching in an e-Repository (CHARTER)
This project was a small-scale digitisation pilot, delivering an open-access repository (based on DSpace
DSpace is an open source repository software package typically used for creating open access repositories for scholarly and/or published digital content. While DSpace shares some feature overlap with content management systems and document manag ...
software) populated with a critical mass of 4,000 digital images drawn from resources in the Special Collections of the University of Exeter
The University of Exeter is a research university in the West Country of England, with its main campus in Exeter, Devon. Its predecessor institutions, St Luke's College, Exeter School of Science, Exeter School of Art, and the Camborne School of ...
. The research collection includes over 2,000 images showcasing Victorian culture
In the history of the United Kingdom and the British Empire, the Victorian era was the reign of Queen Victoria, from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. Slightly different definitions are sometimes used. The era followed th ...
.
Digitisation of Countryside Images
The project has created digitised images of 13,000 glass plate negatives from the British magazine 'Farmer and Stockbreeder' and 'Farmers Weekly
''Farmers Weekly'' is a magazine aimed at the British farming industry. It provides news; business features; a weekly digest of facts and figures about British, European and world agriculture; and livestock, arable and machinery sections wi ...
' photographic archive, dating from 1920 to 1965. These images have been catalogued and made available via the Museum of English Rural Life
The Museum of English Rural Life, also known as The MERL, is a museum, library and archive dedicated to recording the changing face of farming and the countryside in England. The museum is run by the University of Reading, and is situated in Red ...
's website.
East London Lives a Digital Archive of 'London 2012'
Beginning with interviews done in 2009, this archive has helped capture the feelings, aspirations and hopes of the communities of East London as they confront the reality of hosting the Olympics in 2012. The archive also contains academic research and contextual information from research teams working at University of East London
University of East London (UEL) is a public university located in the London Borough of Newham, London, England, based at three campuses in Stratford, London, Stratford and London Docklands, Docklands, following the opening of University Squar ...
.
Enhancing Stained Glass Studies
The Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi (CVMA) website provides access to 17,000 images of stained glass in British buildings and collections. This project has delivered enhanced metadata
Metadata (or metainformation) is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data itself, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including:
* Descriptive ...
, an improved public interface, and a facility to create and manage user-generated content.
Enhancing the VADS Image Collection
This project has enhanced the VADS (Visual Arts Data Service) Image Collection, which holds over 130,000 images, freely available for educational use. The project developed mechanisms to automatically share data for teaching and research, improving the academic user experience, and facilitating greater academic use by giving users the ability to curate, annotate and publish their own image sets, thus stimulating use of the collection in new and potentially rejuvenating ways.
Enlightening Science: Teaching and Learning Newtonianism in the 18th and 21st Centuries
This project has created a series of tools that both general and expert users to understand the central concepts of Newton's his scientific achievements. This includes textual and audio introductions to freely available transcriptions of his most influential scientific texts, and also by employing video recreations of 18th century lecture courses in which doctrines were explicated for both 18th century genteel and academic audiences.
Enriching the First World War Poetry Archive
Based at the University of Oxford, the First World War Poetry Digital Archive has now added a number of new poetry collections, including David Jones and Siegfried Sassoon, to its existing online website. This new project sets out to enhance digital resources by making them more useful to practitioners and tying them in directly to curricula for pupils and students.[
Eton Myers Collection Virtual Museum
The Eton Myers Collection provides free access to ancient Egyptian art through the creation of 3D models. Laser scanning in conjunction with the generation of a catalogue has created a Virtual Museum enabling global access to the collection, and will provide the centre piece of the ]University of Birmingham
The University of Birmingham (informally Birmingham University) is a Public university, public research university in Birmingham, England. It received its royal charter in 1900 as a successor to Queen's College, Birmingham (founded in 1825 as ...
's Virtual Worlds Laboratory (VWL). The project will also significantly reduce the need for the future transportation of these artefacts, thus ensuring their long-term conservation. The resulting digital data will be curated at the University of Birmingham
The University of Birmingham (informally Birmingham University) is a Public university, public research university in Birmingham, England. It received its royal charter in 1900 as a successor to Queen's College, Birmingham (founded in 1825 as ...
.
Exposing Marandet: French Plays from the 18th and 19th Centuries
The Exposing Marandet project has made openly and freely available a coherent set of pamphlets
A pamphlet is an unbound book (that is, without a Hardcover, hard cover or Bookbinding, binding). Pamphlets may consist of a single sheet of paper that is printed on both sides and folded in half, in thirds, or in fourths, called a ''leaflet'' ...
during a seminal period of French history
The first written records for the history of France appeared in the Iron Age.
What is now France made up the bulk of the region known to the Romans as Gaul. Greek writers noted the presence of three main ethno-linguistic groups in the area: t ...
. The archive is an essential part of teaching at the University of Warwick
The University of Warwick ( ; abbreviated as ''Warw.'' in post-nominal letters) is a public research university on the outskirts of Coventry between the West Midlands and Warwickshire, England. The university was founded in 1965 as part of ...
, and of interest to a broad audience of enthusiasts and researchers. The digitised material is 1,500 18th- and early 19th-century French plays - comprising 75,000 pages - from the Library's Marandet Collection, and to investigate opportunities to improve connections with the CESAR repository of French theatre resources.
Furer-Haimendorf Archive digitisation
This project is a comprehensive study of tribal cultures in South Asia including cine film, photographs and written journals before the influence of mid-twentieth century external influences. Fürer-Haimendorf was one of the few anthropologists of the inter-war generation in Europe to realise the importance of visual documentation. His collection of 26,000 images have now been digitised. The project will also use specialists in the relevant tribal cultures to catalogue these images and cross-reference a select group of them together with an unpublished diary, film footage and written material in the collection.
Historical Hansards: Completing the Jigsaw
The project will take more than 50 years of debates from the Upper Chamber of the Parliament of Northern Ireland
The Parliament of Northern Ireland was the home rule legislature of Northern Ireland, created under the Government of Ireland Act 1920, which sat from 7 June 1921 to 30 March 1972, when it was suspended because of its inability to restore ord ...
from 1921 to 1972, the, and make it available online. The debates are wide-ranging in nature concerning the socio-economic and political development of a sometimes troubled part of the United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Northwestern Europe, off the coast of European mainland, the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...
over a period of dramatic change. The project meets a clear demand amongst scholars in England and Wales for research material relating to the Northern Ireland that they simply do not have access to.
Image Path
This project has digitised three collections of pathology slides held by the University of Leeds – The Matthew Stewart Collection, the Cancer Research Campaign Soft Tissues Sarcoma collection and early cases from the Pathology archive collection. The slides contain valuable information about diseases that are rare or were common but are now not seen or are not seen at such advanced stages.
In the bigynnyng: the Manchester Middle English Digital Library
This project has digitised 41 medieval English manuscripts from the John Rylands Library at the University of Manchester.. A total of approx 12,000 images and metadata will be accessible via a dedicated project website. The project is closely aligned with the Library's strategic goals and with the wider strategic development of the University of Manchester
The University of Manchester is a public university, public research university in Manchester, England. The main campus is south of Manchester city centre, Manchester City Centre on Wilmslow Road, Oxford Road. The University of Manchester is c ...
.
Musicians of Britain and Ireland 1900-1950
This project recovered 2000 recordings selected to showcase British and Irish performers recorded between 1900 and 1950, especially artists neglected by the newly formed EMI after the merger of the Gramophone Co and Columbia in 1931. The project also is to raise awareness of the extent to which record company policies shape public perceptions of musical excellence and the reputation of artistic communities.
Resurrecting the Past: Virtual Antiquities in the 19th century
This project aims to develop and digitise at the University of Bristol
The University of Bristol is a public university, public research university in Bristol, England. It received its royal charter in 1909, although it can trace its roots to a Merchant Venturers' school founded in 1595 and University College, Br ...
a collection of material of the Pompeii Court of the Crystal Palace. A virtual recreation of the Pompeii Court in the Crystal Palace exhibition has now been successfully created. Like the original exhibition, the model is a complete life-size model of an ancient Roman house, including paintings and everyday objects, that was preserved after the eruption of mount Vesuvius
Mount Vesuvius ( ) is a Somma volcano, somma–stratovolcano located on the Gulf of Naples in Campania, Italy, about east of Naples and a short distance from the shore. It is one of several volcanoes forming the Campanian volcanic arc. Vesuv ...
.
Sudan Archive Digitisation Project
This project will digitise key printed and archive resources from Durham University
Durham University (legally the University of Durham) is a collegiate university, collegiate public university, public research university in Durham, England, founded by an Act of Parliament (UK), Act of Parliament in 1832 and incorporated by r ...
's Sudan Archive to make them freely accessible via the internet to scholars all over the world. It will be a pilot to establish a preservation quality digitisation suite within Durham University
Durham University (legally the University of Durham) is a collegiate university, collegiate public university, public research university in Durham, England, founded by an Act of Parliament (UK), Act of Parliament in 1832 and incorporated by r ...
's Archives and Special Collections.
Museum of Design in Plastics digitisation project
This project involves the creation of digital record of artefacts demonstrating design in plastics and the functional specification to support research into design in plastics and its cultural impact. It was created to enhance research and student learning and holds more than 8,000 (predominantly 20th Century) international, historical and contemporary design examples relating directly to the Bournemouth Art University College's specialist areas of study.
The Serving Soldier
The Serving Soldier will provide digital access to national archives held in the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives. As such it will support demonstrable internal and external demand. In taking the theme of the multi-faceted role of the soldier, it will expose a proportion of little known material (hidden stories) and provide a body of material of contemporary relevance to researchers, students and today's serving soldiers.
UK Colonial Registers & Royal Navy logbooks: Making the past available for the future
This project seeks to identify sources of old, previously overlooked, marine meteorological data from colonial (especially lighthouse) records and from the logbooks of Royal Navy vessels through from the 18th century and, thereby, to lend a longer-term perspective to more recent climatic variations. The project has digitised around 45,000 logbook pages, and over 20,000 images. Logbooks from many historic ships and voyages are included in the project, including those from: the Beagle, the Endeavour and Discovery.
Versatile Digitisation Framework Project
This project (VERDI) has developed a technical framework for the digitisation, cataloguing and web presentation of specialist material. The project has also created 'snippets' of code for embedding in websites and allowing searching of one or more specified collections. Documentation allowing for wider adoption of the framework will be available to academics at the University of Kent
The University of Kent (formerly the University of Kent at Canterbury, abbreviated as UKC) is a Collegiate university, collegiate public university, public research university based in Kent, United Kingdom. The university was granted its roya ...
and to the wider academic community.
Virtual Manuscript Room
The Virtual Manuscript Room (VMR) brings together previously unavailable manuscripts, including the Mingana Collection of Middle Eastern Manuscripts. The Virtual Manuscript Room (VMR) will bring together digital resources related to manuscript materials (digital images, descriptions and other metadata, transcripts) in an environment which will permit libraries to add images, scholars to add and edit metadata and transcripts online, and users to access material. The centrepiece of the VMR will be full digitised manuscripts from Birmingham's Mingana collection of Middle Eastern manuscripts. Two other groups of content, amounting to over 50,000 digital images of manuscripts, 500 manuscript descriptions and around 1000 pages of transcripts, will be included in the VMR: materials relating to the New Testament
The New Testament (NT) is the second division of the Christian biblical canon. It discusses the teachings and person of Jesus in Christianity, Jesus, as well as events relating to Christianity in the 1st century, first-century Christianit ...
and to medieval vernacular texts (Dante
Dante Alighieri (; most likely baptized Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri; – September 14, 1321), widely known mononymously as Dante, was an Italian Italian poetry, poet, writer, and philosopher. His ''Divine Comedy'', originally called ...
, Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer ( ; – 25 October 1400) was an English poet, author, and civil servant best known for '' The Canterbury Tales''. He has been called the "father of English literature", or, alternatively, the "father of English poetry". He ...
, and others).
Welsh Ballads – completing the British ballad network
The Welsh Ballads project will fill the final gap in the network of digitized collections of printed ballads around Britain, the Bodleian, National Library of Scotland and Glasgow University having undertaken projects on English and Scottish ballads already; between them these three contain about 30,000 ballads. A total of 5,000 ballads will be digitized, from the earliest 18th Century ballads to the final few published in the 20th Century. In total this will produce around 20,000 pages of digitized text images (all out of copyright).
References
External links
JISC Digitisation
Official Website
Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)
Official Website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Jisc Digitisation Programme
Digital preservation
Jisc