Thursday 27 – Friday 28 January 2005
Queens University Belfast
Day 1 : 27 January 2005
10.00 – 11.00 Registration
10.30 – 11.00 Tea/Coffee
Session 1
11.00 – 11.30 Michael Stocking, British Library – Turning the Pages: From Pixels to People – providing public access to digitised material.
The British Library initiated an ambitious digitisation programme in 1997. Subsequently it became apparent that there should be some sort of technology developed to allow public access to that digitised material. But what form should the technology take, how much access should be provided and how interactive should it be? The answer was Turning the Pages.
Winner of numerous international awards, Turning the Pages has provided worldwide access to British Library treasures to a broad audience. We’ll be looking at the product rationale, production process, success criteria and future developments, as well as asking whether we need interpretation alongside access.
Session 2
11.30 – 13.00 Paul Ell (QUB/CDDA www.qub.ac.uk/cdda) Act of Union project
This paper discusses the Act of Union Virtual Library project which was funded under the New Opportunities Fund (now the Big Lottery Fund) Digitisation Programme. The Act of Union Virtual Library is a unique collection of pamphlets, newspapers, parliamentary papers and manuscript material contemporary with the 1800 Act of Union between Ireland and Britain. The entire content is searchable bibliographically, the search results displaying individual images that can be browsed by turning the pages of each virtual book or document. A free text search is provided for the pamphlets and parliamentary papers.
The website (www.actofunion.ac.uk or www.actofunion.ie) is of inestimable use for scholars in that it provides immediate access to a panoply of documents held in various public institutions in Belfast, more often than not, in specialised collections. Those with a more general interest in the Act of Union will also benefit both from exposure to these archives and to the myriad search functions and explanatory notes contained within this website. The project was completed on time, contains more data than initially planned and was under budget. Save for design of the project website the project was completed in-house by staff of the Centre for Data Digitisation and Analysis (CDDA) and Information Services (IS).
The paper will also include a discussion of other digitisation projects relating to Ireland by CDDA, some in collaboration with IS. Our aim is to develop a comprehensive digital library for Irish materials which are easily accessible through deep-linking. The backdrop to this larger project is an Irish historical Geographical Information System.
Questions
Lunch 13.00 – 14.00
Session 3
14.00 – 17.30 Simon Tanner and Marilyn Deegan (King’s College London) :
Introducing digitisation – from vision to implementation
Digitisation is a means of making important cultural resources and information available to a wider audience and for enabling new research perspectives. This talk will provide an introduction and overview of digitisation, why it is useful to libraries and advice on how to make digitisation a mainstream library activity.
Questions
15.00 – 15.30 Tea/Coffee
Evening Free
Day 2 28 January 2005
Session 4
09.00 – 10.30 Maggie Jones, Digital Preservation Coalition : Digital Preservation
Digital preservation differs from traditional preservation in several fundamental ways, not least the very short timeframe during which action must be taken to manage digital resources. This means that there are many more players involved in the successful preservation of digital resources than is the case with printed materials. The presentation will look at the major differences between digital and traditional preservation, the range of digital resources being created, and the role of creators in helping to ensure those resources are appropriately managed over time. The work of the Digital Preservation Coalition in progressing the digital preservation agenda in the UK will also be referred to, as well as other sources of guidance and support. www.dpconline.org
Questions
10.30 – 10.45 – Tea/Coffee
Session 5
10.45 – 13.00 Grant Young, TASI (Technical Advisory Service for Images – a JISC funded service for Further and Higher Education) : Technical issues – Metadata & Website creation
Grant’s focus will be ‘description and delivery’, the creation and use of metadata and the development of Web sites for delivering digital collections. He will talk about building a suitable metadata framework (schemas, vocabularies, etc), the practicalities of metadata creation, and the effective exploitation of metadata in search and retrieval. He will also consider various options for storing and delivering digital collections; the importance of ensuring the Web delivery is a good ‘fit’ for its collection and users; and, briefly, strategies for addressing some of the ‘holy grails’ of digitisation: interoperability, digital rights management, and sustainability. www.tasi.ac.uk
Questions
FINISH
Notes on speakers
Dr Paul Ell
Dr Paul S. Ell is founding director of the Centre for Data Digitisation and Analysis at Queen’s Belfast. The Centre has the twin associated aims of creating electronic resources from analogue sources and using these data in new scholarship. Dr Ell has received more than 40 grants since the inception of CDDA. He is the author of six books and is currently working on A Historical atlas of Warwickshire to be published by Phillimore Press and Geographical Information Systems in Historical Research to be published by Cambridge University Press as part of their studies in Historical Geography series.
Dr Marilyn Deegan
Dr Marilyn Deegan has a PhD in medieval studies: her specialism is Anglo-Saxon medical texts and herbals and she has published and lectured widely in medieval studies, digital library research, and humanities computing. She is currently Director of Research Development in the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King’s College, London and (until February 2004) was Digital Resources Director of the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford University. She has held a number of posts in digital library research and humanities computing over the past fifteen years. She is Editor-in-Chief of Literary and Linguistic Computing, the Journal of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, and Director of Publications for the Office for Humanities Communication based at King’s College London. Dr Deegan is co-author with Simon Tanner of Digital Futures: Strategies for the Information Age
Simon Tanner
Simon Tanner has a Library and Information Science degree and background.
He is the founding Director of King’s Digital Consultancy Services at King’s College London. Before joining King’s, he was Senior Consultant at HEDS – the Higher Education Digitisation Service – and had a key role in its successful development as a JISC Service. He has also previously held IT, management and library roles for Loughborough University (Library Systems Manager), Rolls-Royce and Associates (Head of Library Services) and IBM (UK) Laboratories (Information Officer). Simon has been a consultant to the British Library, Kew Gardens, the Royal Academy of Arts, Imperial War Museum, Oxford University, the National Library of Ireland, Birmingham Public Libraries, the House of Commons and to Denmark’s National Electronic Research Library amongst many others. He has also carried out research projects for the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation on charging models for digital cultural heritage in Europe and the USA.
Simon is the co-author of the book, Digital Futures: Strategies for the Information Age with Dr Marilyn Deegan. He co-edits the Digital Futures Series of books and is a theme editor for the Journal of Digital Information on the Economic Factors of Managing Digital Content and Establishing Digital Libraries.
Maggie Jones
Maggie Jones is a librarian and worked at the National Library of Australia for 17 years before returning to the UK in 1999. While at the National Library of Australia, Maggie was in charge of preservation and management of the library’s collections and became interested in digital preservation during this time. She was one of the founding members of PADI (Preserving Access to Digital Information) Working group, which ultimately led to the establishment of the PADI database. Since returning to the UK, Maggie has been involved in a number of digital preservation projects, working with the AHDS to produce a Handbook of Digital Preservation Management, and she was also the project Manager for the final year of the Cedars project. Since May 2003, Maggie has been working for the Digital Preservation Coalition, a membership-based organisation.
Grant Young
Grant Young has worked with the Technical Advisory Service for Images since 2002. His work covers all aspects of digital imaging, but he takes a particular interest in digitisation project management, metadata and digital rights management. Grant writes for TASI’s Web site, tackles questions addressed to its helpdesk, and supports its training and consultancy activities. Before joining TASI, Grant spent five years with ORT, an international training organisation based in London. While there, he managed digitisation projects and established an institutional archive and photo library. Originally from New Zealand, Grant trained as a librarian and archivist, working from 1987-97 in several academic and research libraries and in New Zealand’s national library service for the visually impaired.
