JISC RSC YH Exchange News

The JISC Digitisation programme is pleased to announce that a new funding call will be issued at the beginning of March 2009.  The call will focus on three key themes.

• Institutional Skills and Strategies – including activities aimed at embedding digitisation into institutional strategies and practices, eg development of institutional skills, policies and capacity to perform digitisation; creating, or building on existing, institutional infrastructure, workflows and processes to streamline digitisation; developing partnerships and collaborative models at regional or other levels aimed at carrying out digitisation in a more cost effective way, for example by reaching economies of scale, or capitalising on institutions’ own particular areas of expertise in different aspects of digitisation activity, and through fostering knowledge exchange and sharing of good practice.
• Enhancing Existing Online Digital Collections- in order to increase their current use, including enhancing interfaces, enriching existing metadata, improving resource discovery mechanisms, for example by making use of Web2.0 networks and functionalities or search engine optimisation, promotion and marketing activities within relevant research and teaching communities as well as embedding resources into teaching and learning.
• Clustering of Existing Online Digital Collections – in order to create critical mass of content and increase its current use, including bringing together collections which have been identified as being complementary from a thematic, chronological or format point of view or making use of existing platforms and services to deliver digital content through a variety of entry points. This may involve merging the metadata or technical infrastructure for related resources; developing cross-search functionality; exploiting Web2.0 methodologies such as data mash-ups to ‘cross-fertilise’ the content in existing resources.

A total funding of just over £2M will be available and projects will be expected to start in September 2009 and be completed by March 2011.  Higher education institutions funded by HEFCE and HEFCW and FE institutions in England that teach HE to more than 400 FTEs are also eligible to bid provided proposals demonstrate work that supports the HE in FE agenda.

More information on the funding call will be available through this digitisation blog http://digitisation.jiscinvolve.org/2009/02/16/jisc-digitisation-programme-funding-call-pre-announcement/ as well as the JISC web site http://www.jisc.ac.uk/fundingopportunities.aspx