Hidden Costs and Hidden Hours in Digitisation

Hidden Costs and Hidden Hours: A Funder’s Perspective on Digitisation Cilip Executive Briefing 26th March 2009 Alastair Dunning, JISC Programme Manager a.dunning @AT@ jisc.ac.uk 0203 006 6065 http://digitisation.jiscinvolve.org/

What funding bodies look for

Breaking down some project costs

Examples drawn from JISC Digitisation Programme

Three strands, totalling >50 projects and £22m worth of funding, from 2004 to present

Speaking in capacity as working for JISC, HE focussed, but hopefully generic

Equally, this is not just relevant for digitisation

Peer-reviewers do the marking; often interpret criteria differently

You can be unlucky with a good bid; expect to fail before succeeding .

Winning teams show evidence of broader strategic thinking

Evidence of Impact and Use

Testimonies from potential users

Embedding in national curriculum and elsewhere

Break down your audiences and target them

Good dissemination and marketing

Do not rely on historical significance – what makes your project special ?

JISC Discmap and Impact Analysis Projects

Linking up with Others

Ensuring good resource discovery (e.g. RLUK 19 th -century pamphlets project )

Improve Your Online Presence workshop

Economies of scale in terms of equipment, software tools, delivery mechanisms

Avoid creating isolated resources

Organisation

Strong leadership where necessary

Advisory and Steering Boards obligatory for larger projects

Considered approach towards IPR

Recognition of risks and work to be done

Understanding of licensing beyond copyright clearance

Workflows and Standards

Not the same emphasis as 5 years ago, but still important

Use of existing standards, but also need for metadata manipulation

Integrating Web 2.0

Innovative interfaces becoming a must

User-generated data to contextualise your content?

Practical Matters

Do what you are asked for not what you blindly want – use your strategy in imaginative ways.

Preparation before bids – partners, strategies, pilot studies – proactive not reactive

JISC has paid for servers and capture equipment, but do not exaggerate

Other sources of funding – show value for money

JISC e-Content Call – Closes 1 st June 2009

Strand A – Developing Institutional Skills

Economies of Scale for Digitisation and Delivery; new strategies for institutional digitisation

Strand B – Enhancing Digital Content

Improving metadata, resource discovery, usability etc.

Only open to English and Welsh HEIs but partnerships are possible

Future for digitisation is a little unclear

Often some overlap in other JISC calls

Approximate figures – end of projects reports will finalise numbers Freeze Frame Polar Images British Cartoon Archive John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera East London Theatre Archive Mixture of photos, negatives, glass plates Prints & sketches of newspaper cartoons in various media Huge range or textual and printed material, playbills to cigarette cards Mainly theatre posters £523,490 – project cost £946,770 £1.764m £628,987 c.20,000 images c.15,000 images c.65,000 images c.15,000 images Largely done in-house Cost included significant metadata & hardware costs Mixed public private investment Many posters in fragile state

But each project had different scope so differences are to be expected!

Problems in digitisation often incur not extra costs, but take up more time, and involve more people within an institution

Unclear lines of communication or weak management slow down projects with partners

In the JISC Digitisation Programme , Transport, Licensing, Copyright Clearance, Metadata Creation, Metadata Manipulation, Quality Control all caused more problems than antcipated

This is a subjective approximation of project costs and time spent on the East London Theatre Archive Project

This is a subjective approximation of project costs and time spent on phase 2 of the Archival Sound Recordings Project