The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) is a UK government-funded organization that supports higher education. It provides the JANET network, infrastructure services, and funds innovative digital projects totaling around $50 million, including the digitization of over 70 collections. JISC is concerned with the usage of these digital resources and funds research on their impact. It also supports projects that combine multiple digital collections and enable new ways of exploring and engaging with the data, such as visualizations and tools that allow data to be transcribed by the public.

1. JISC: A Word from the Sponsors With the Strange AcronymAlastair Dunning@alastairdunning, http://digitisation.jiscinvolve.orgDigitisation Programme Manager, JISC

2. JISC ?Joint Information Systems Committee – World’s worst acronymCurrently government funded, $130m core fundingSupports Higher Education in three key areasProvides JANET – network for UK HE and beyondService infrastructure – email lists, collections licensing, data centresInnovative projects – digitisation, digital infrastructure, e-learning, admin systems

3. http://www.jisc-content.ac.uk is a gateway to all the content JISC has digitised or licensed. Some of the content is open access; some is gated. Around 70 projects, c.$50m

4. http://www.cartoons.ac.uk presents artwork of 150,000 political cartoons from UK 20th-century newspapers.

5. http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/cabinetpapers/ publishes all minutes of UK government cabinet meetings from 1915 to 1980

6. http://sounds.bl.ukmakes oral histories, classical music, accents and dialects available – some gated, some open access

7. http://oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1digitised classic WW1 poetry, but also introduced crowdsourced digitisation of the general public’s WW1 collections

8. Concern over usageLog Analysis of Resources in Arts and Humanities (2006) pointed out problems with digital resources - http://www.ucl.ac.uk/infostudies/LAIRAH/Splashes and Ripples (2011) demonstrated significant improvements - http://ssrn.com/abstract=1846535Toolkit for the Impact of Scholarly Digitised Resources - http://microsites.oii.ox.ac.uk/tidsrConcurrent focus on innovative uses of resources

9. http://www.connectedhistories.org provides a search tool, with added functionality, over 11 related digital resources, with more to come.

10. http://oldweather.org asks the general public to transcribe naval logs, with the resultant meteorological data used by climate scientists

11. Digging into DataLike other funders, looking at ways to exploit the entire corpus rather than individual itemsVisualisation and other outputs new forms of explication and engagementEnhances possibility of public engagement Importance of outputs that explain research without sacrificing integrity