The JISC Digitisation Programme is a series of projects to digitise the cultural heritage and scholarly materials in universities, libraries, museums, archives and others cultural memory organisations in the United Kingdom. The programme continues to be managed by the UK's Joint Information Systems Committee. JISC supports United Kingdom post-16 and higher education and research in support of learning, teaching, research and administration in the context of ICT.
Contents
The Programme has had three main strands.
Phase 1 (2004-2007)
The six projects funded under Phase 1 were the following
NewsFilm Online
This project has digitised 3,000 hours from the archives of ITN (Independent Television News), featuring clips relating to British and world news from the 1920s to the present day. These include, for example, interviews with Nelson Mandela. The video content is only available to Higher and Further Education institutions in the United Kingdom, and requires access via the Athens or Shibboleth authentication systems.
Online Historical Population Reports
The University of Essex has made available population reports from the UK, 1801 - 1937. The reports, drawn from census and other related information, includes 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 led this project to publish electronic versions of 2m pages of text from medical journals. All the content is freely available via the PubMed Central service.
18th-Century Parliamentary Papers
Led by the University of Southampton, this project digitised 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, 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 has 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 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, 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 Sound Archive. Some of the highlights included several early recordings of the music of composers such as Chopin, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and Brahms.
British Cartoon Archive digitisation project
This project has made available political cartoons from 20th-century UK newspapers, including the Carl Giles Archive. The resources is freely available on the web.
British Newspapers 1620-1900
The British Library has 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 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 delivers 600 hours of unique moving image materials and digitised contextual documents to educational communities and the public across the UK. It pursues 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 available online through InView is the celebrated Channel 4 discussion programme After Dark.
The John Johnson Collection: An archive of printed ephemera
The John Johnson collection is a collection of printed ephemera. 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, Ford Madox Brown, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, Arthur Hughes, Frederick Sandys, Simeon Solomon.
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, to provide a substantial corpus of material in the Welsh language freely available online to readers in all parts of the world.