The JISC e-Content programme

Connected Histories is one of 11 projects funded under JISC's e-Content programme which is running from September 2009 to February 2011. Projects are aligned under two strands, some looking at the skills and strategies required in universities to embed digitisation as a core part of its remit, whilst others are creating enhanced digital resources by bringing together disparate collection of related digitised material.

Strand I - Institutional Skills and Strategy for Digitisation

Centre for Digital Asia, Africa & the Middle East, School of Oriental and African Studies

http://www.soas.ac.uk/cedaame/

The Centre for Digital Africa, Asia and the Middle East has been established to lead digitisation activities at SOAS, improving access to its valuable research and learning material.

Centre for Heritage Imaging and Collection Care, John Rylands University Library, University of Manchester

http://www.library.manchester.ac.uk/centreofdigitalexcellence

The centre is exploring various models by which it can sustain a regional digitisation centre, embedded within the University of Manchester.

Lifecycle strategies and architecture for regional e-content, University of Leeds

http://www.leeds.ac.uk/library/projects/lifeshare/

The Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York are undertaking test digitisation, with the aim of establishing, institutional and consortial strategies for the creation, curation and preservation for digital content

Look here! Visual Arts Data Service, University for the Creative Arts (Farnham Campus)

http://www.vads.ac.uk/lookhere/

The Look Here! Project is developing a community of expertise in the creation, management, and use of digitised library, museum, and archive collections for learning, teaching, and research in the creative arts.

OCRopodium, King’s College London

http://ocropodium.cerch.kcl.ac.uk/

OCRopodium is testing open source approaches to Optical Character Recognition (OCR) of textual documents, with the aims of embedding such software in digitisation workflows

Running a community collection project, University of Oxford

http://projects.oucs.ox.ac.uk/runcoco/

‘RunCoCo: how to Run a Community Collection’ online offers free training and open-source software to help institutions develop collections of ‘community content’, such as Oxford’s Great War Archive

Strand II - Clustering and Enhancing Digital Resources

Clustering & enhancing digital archives for research, University of East London

http://blog.elta-project.org/

This project is embedding the JISC-funded East London Theatre Archive (ELTA) into three popular Theatre Studies programmes, at Royal Holloway, Nottingham and Sheffield universities.  

Connected Histories: Sources for Building British History, 1500-1900, University of Sheffield

http://www.history.ac.uk/projects/connected-histories

Connected Histories is creating a federated search facility for a wide range of distributed electronic resources relating to early modern and nineteenth-century British History

GrassPortal, University of Sheffield

http://www.grassportal.org/

GrassPortal will allow users to access and visualize information on the name and description, geographical distribution, ecological characteristics and evolutionary relationships for the entire world’s grass species.

Visualising China, University of Bristol

http://visualisingchina.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/

The project is developing a web-based resource that allows users to explore more than 6,000 digitised images of historical photographs of China taken between 1870 and 1950.

Mapping Crime beyond the John Johnson Collection, University of Oxford

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/digitisation/econtent/mappingcrime.aspx

This project will see the Bodleian Library map between the crime material available through the John Johnson Collection: An Archive of Printed Ephemera and other online resources containing related material.