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There is clearing copyright.

And there is licencing to users.

Make mistakes here and your project is handcuffed

Engage Multiple Audiences

And engage them early

Targets are boring, but will keep you focussed

Some compelling lessons from

previous JISC projects

Both

the Welsh Journals project

and the Bodleian's Electronic

Epehmera project felt intimidated by the

promises they had made in their project plans - 500,000 pages digitised! 150,000 images! Why did we promise that?

Will JISC notice? What will the

Vice-Chancellor say?

Alastair Dunning, JISC Programme Manager

JISC Content Programme Meeting

Oxford, 15th November 2011

But they

realised that such

targets allowed them

to work a particular goal

and give the project an

ongoing focus

Please have cool URLs

Don't neglect graphic design and artistry

Not having stable, identifiers for your web content dramatically

reduces the chances of that content - what ever the content

being re-used in the myriad ways possible on the web. Both

machines and humans will find it more difficult to discover,

share, document and re-use your content if your URL naming

is confused

Better!

Eek!

The more open your content

the more it will be used

Every digital object within the School of Oriential and African School's (SOAS) Digital Collections is available via Creative Commons - the terms of use and re-use are clear and easy to implement

Have a look at the Splashes and Ripples report:

http://microsites.oii.ox.ac.uk/tidsr/case-study/359/splashes-and-ripples

You'd be surprised how many websites showing

'beautiful objects' are poorly designed. But not

only did Birmingham Museum produce a stylish

website, they had exceptionally high standards

for their digital capture, meaning some great

images were produced for them to use now in

the future. The site has won numerous awards

both for its functionality and its design - another

way of bringing more users to the site

http://www.preraphaelites.org/

http://www.cartoons.ac.uk/

Usability testing is difficult to implement

Get institutional buy-in

A project is not just about the project staff working, but how they all interact with the

relevant parts of the university. (This is particularly true for the current projects dealing

with institutional strategies!)

The East London Theatre Archive is a great resource, full of great content.

But it took them a long while to get the website into a position where people

could find and engage with this content - a simple Google-tpye search box is

not enough when users aren't sure what to find - hence the different ways

into the content via categories, types, dates and places.

The theatre project also found it difficutlt to conduct usability testing - when

and how should it be done, who does it, how does one react to suggested

changes. Skills and experience to cope with this is either expensive or

difficult to find

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

Other contact points within the university

  • IT support to run your hardware and software
  • Marketing and PR to disseminate info both internally

and externally

  • Senior library staff who will have to sustain the

resouce in the long term

  • Human Resources :-(
  • Finance stuff who will look after your budget
  • Teachers and researchers who will use your content,

hopefully for a long time into the future

  • Senior management - political clout
  • Line managers who have other demands on staff time

Are all these contact points on board? Do you have an internal

communications plans?

Do lots of planning early on

Everyone has a story to tell

Cambridge's Freeze Frame project took a while to recruit the right staff, but they used this to their advantage, calculating workflows, doing some test digitisation and refining the policies and strategies that underpinned their project plan

When staff were in place, and digitisation started in earnest, the project proceeded rapidly

Slow start, rapid finish

The project did not have some of the obstacles other projects faced, but nevertheless it was a very competently run project

http://www.freezeframe.ac.uk/

This Oxford project (http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/) started off by identifying JISC, Oxford University, Researchers, Teachers, Students, Literary Estates, Collections Holders and General Public but as the project expanded (especially via the crowdsourcing Great War Archive) the list of stakeholders was larger and more refined, as specific partnerships with other bodies - specific libraries, WW1 groups, local schools, other museums - allowed for much richer dissemination

While it may seem like others have the best tunes (e.g. Freeze Frame images), there are always good stories within projects - it just might be that they are little parts of your project which you have never thought about. JISC workshops on comms will be able to help tease them out

It's also useful to think about your branding - a clear visual appearance with a siomple message that can be used to convey what you are doing to a wide audience. Once you have done

that, then you can tell the more complex stories

However, if you really want to get

big number of hits - do your press

releases in the USA. The Codex

Sinatiticus got 450,000 hits on its

first day - thanks to press coverage

in the United States.

http://www.codexsinaiticus.org/

however, some projects felt a

more agile management structure

(focussing only on the next few months) allowed them to focus on particular problems and issues better

Remember why you're involved in digital content!

I once asked a group of scholars on the eighteenth-century what the best thing about

digitised resources was, and the general consensus was that it allowed them to work

at home without putting their socks on.

But there are more compelling reasons for digitisation - it's worth holding on to them

during that mid-project stage when the thing seems like an arid exercise in pointlessness

Census material might not seem like the most engaging resource, but has a number of valuable uses in the classoroom. The following quotes concern the Online Historical Population Reports resource at http://histpop.org

A lecturer in Historical Geography at King’s College London reported that he had used Histpop in both second and third year undergraduate courses in Urban Historical Geography, allowing students access and freedom to explore primary sources at this stage of their undergraduate careers. This, he

said, led to several Final Year dissertations of high quality, which he said were enhanced by early access to primary sources. ‘I think [the students scored so well]... Because they had already been used to dealing with historical documents...using Histpop as a teaching tool fed into those particular

dissertations.’

Other comments about the resource collected during the course of this research:

‘Histpop made it possible to do a completely different project [at undergraduate level]... It allows them to start using primary sources and do some basic research, which otherwise they wouldn’t be able to do.’

‘You tend to get a very big spread of marks in this kind of coursework... It sorts out the really good students from the weaker ones.’

The King’s College London lecturer also stated that setting up undergraduate courses that make use of (easily accessible) digitised primary resources counters the plagiarism issue. ‘There’s a plagiarism problem with coursework, and getting them to use primary documents [means] there’s no chance

that they can plagiarise. That was a consideration.’

Taken from Oxford Internet Institute's Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources, http://microsites.oii.ox.ac.uk/tidsr/system/files/TIDSR_FinalReport_20July2009.pdf, page 26

Digitising royal navy logbooks

has allowed the University of

Sunderland's CORRAL project

to gain valuable metereological

data. Having data on

sea temprature, wind direction

and wind speed can help

provide an historical context

for current changes in the

climate

The map shows the route of the

HMS Isabella in 1818, based on

the logbook above.

http://www.corral.org.uk/

From the project plan for the Furer-Haimendorf Archival

digitisation,

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/programmes/digitisation/furer_haimendorf.pdf, page 3

The significance of this collection for future scholarship is considerable. In fact, it is the world's most comprehensive visual record of tribal cultures in South Asia. The breadth of the Fürer-Haimendorf collection for South Asia is matched only by the photographs taken by fellow anthropologist Verrier Elwin. The distinctive quality of the Fürer-Haimendorf collection, however, is that because he lived (in some cases for years) with the tribes he recorded, his collection has a visual density and historical depth unmatched by any other in the world. For each of the four primary regions documented, the collection presents a comprehensive ethnographic portrait of tribal cultures, ranging from agricultural practices to religious life, from house architecture to intimate portraits. In some instances, we have a dozen images of a single ritual, which enable the viewer to see this complex activity from a variety of perspectives and to identify small objects and details of clothing.

The Fürer-Haimendorf collection is also a valuable documentation of historical change in the tribal cultures of South Asia. There is a tendency, in both popular and academic writing, to view tribal cultures as 'timeless survivals' from history that preserve 'lost' forms of human culture. Like all cultures, however, tribal societies change and have always been changing, an important point that the Fürer-Haimendorf collection demonstrates. Once these photographs have been digitised and properly catalogued, they will enable scholars to make more accurate assessments of the changes that have transformed South Asian tribal societies during the 20th century.

For some of the cultures recorded in the collection, the rapid and fundamental changes in the 20th century (Christian conversion, hinduisation, the shift from barter to market economy, schools and roads) have led to 'new' societies emerging in the place of traditional ones. For example, the photographs record the following practices that have been abandoned in Arunachal Pradesh: holding 'slaves' (or debtors), blacksmithing, pottery, negotiations to end feuds, tattooing for men and women, wearing nose-plugs by women, and a form of mock warfare. We can also see that the gender-division of agricultural work has changed, that houses are built with different materials and that the landscape has been transformed. On the other hand, we can see that the general pattern of major festivals has remained largely intact, and that traditions such as back strap weaving and the wearing of necklaces have remained virtually unchanged.

Hold on to this information both for you, your project and others

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