Start date: 1 April 2003
End date: 31 March 2009
JISC theme(s): e-Resources
Committees: JISC Content Services committee
Working Groups: Digitisation advisory group
Spanning centuries, disciplines and sources, the JISC series of pioneering digitisation projects is unlocking a wealth of unique, hard-to-access material from the 16th century to the present day, creating a critical mass of rich, permanent digital resources for the benefit of the widest user base possible within UK further and higher education.
JISC is changing the world of authoritative e-resources through its investment in digitising content from some of the UK's greatest collections.
Phase one of 6 projects began in 2004 and included the 18th century parliamentary papers, Archival sound recordings, British Library 19th century newspapers, Medical journals backfiles, NewsFilm Online and Online historical population reports.
Phase two of 16 equally ambitious projects, totalling a further £12 million, was announced in January 2007. Phase two of the digitisation programme is part of a capital programme funded by HEFCE with contributions from the Welsh Assembly.
Phase two features projects that will enable all users, regardless of location and time, online access to a range of authoritative digitised e-resources previously difficult or impossible to access. Together, the projects represent a diversity of rich and vivid perspectives on the history, culture and landscape of the UK and beyond. They 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 resources created will have an emphasis on being re-usable and, where possible, be shared through national repositories, such as Jorum. The projects will enable rich resource discovery and interoperability of new e-resources through the use of the JISC Information Environment Standards, MINERVA digitisation guidelines and the exposure of metadata to Internet Search Engines. They will also assist in the preservation of rare or fragile collections by the provision of digital surrogate. These digital surrogates will, where viable, represent the originals as near as possible.
JISC Collections Open Educational User Licence (Word) from CASPER project
Digi posters: At-a-glance guide to all the digitisation projects (PDF)