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By Paul Miller and Sally Criddle - October 2001
Paul Miller and Sally Criddle report on the announcement of successful projects in the New Opportunities Fund's £50,000,000 nof–digi Programme.
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On 2 July 2001, Baroness Pitkeathley unveiled the names of more than 150 UK national and local organisations to receive a share of £50,000,000 (€79,000,000) from the New Opportunities Fund [1]. This event, held at the Science Museum in London, marked the culmination of a process begun almost two years earlier with the original call for applications in August 1999 [2]. These projects are now funded to digitise a broad range of resources from the UK's cultural heritage, and to make the results of their work freely available online, to the benefit of lifelong learners in the UK and beyond. Early results will begin to appear in the coming months, with most projects expected to complete their funded programme of work during the first half of 2003, and all of them required to remain visible and freely accessible online for at least a further three years.
The 37 Consortia and 34 individual projects cover a broad swathe of topics, and their awards range in size from £14,000 to £4,000,000. Each falls within one of NOF's broad themes of Cultural Enrichment, Citizenship in a Modern State, and Reskilling the Nation, and all are intended to support lifelong learning in its broadest sense, rather than being focused upon any single educational system such as the National Curriculum which operates in English, Welsh and Northern Irish schools.
All of the projects are working to digitise pre–existing content, and to make it available in a useable form to a wide range of users, via the Web. Content to be digitised includes newsreel footage from Pathé, early Ordnance Survey maps of the UK held by the British Library and others, images of museum objects, Citizen's Advice information, newspapers, music, and more. The digitised surrogates of this content will further be supported by a wealth of interpretive material, and a variety of packaged learning resources. Other projects are modelling vanished aspects of the Heritage, for example building computer models of Cistercian monasteries with which visitors will be able to interact.
Details of the funded projects are available on the nof–digi site [3], and links to project websites are being added there as they go online.
From the outset, this was seen as a managed Programme, with a two–stage application process followed by continuing monitoring and support throughout the life of the projects.
The initial call, in August 1999, resulted in 343 bids, totalling over £140,000,000 in value. Working closely with partners in Resource [4] and elsewhere, NOF sought to leverage economies of scale and reduce duplication, whilst aiming to ensure that as many of the worthwhile projects as possible received funding.
A consortial approach was adopted, in which apparently similar projects were clustered together and asked to submit revised bids that took account of the potential for financial savings and added value of cooperative working. A set of Technical Guidelines were developed [5], backed up by a support service at UKOLN [6], and workshops were held nationwide at which those selected to submit applications to Stage Two were guided through the process, and encouraged to share ideas and issues.
Even following the award of funding, support for the Programme's participants continues, with a further series of workshops taking place during the Autumn of 2001. In addition, all participants in the Programme receive support from the Technical Advisory Service [6], which is now being provided by UKOLN and the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS).
The Advisory Service will be publishing a Manual covering topics such as the management of projects and human resources, quality assurance issues, benchmarking and evaluation processes. Information Papers on specific issues such as XML and multi–media issues are also planned. The Advisory Services' Web site offers links to useful resources and a growing databank of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs). It is anticipated that for many, participation in the Programme will provide a learning experience and will offer a 'kick–start' to developments in other areas of digital services provision and/or collaborative working, particularly cross–sectorally. To facilitate this, projects are being encouraged to offer each other support and help by sharing experiences. Email discussion lists have been established and an important aspect of the workshops will be the opportunity for participants from different projects to meet and talk through aspects of their own technical solutions.
An important aspect of the Programme is the need to ensure a visible high–value return on investment, with content remaining useful and useable for many years to come. Given the speed with which technology changes, and the wide range of technical skills across the funded projects, ensuring this long–term interoperability was never going to be straightforward.
The solution adopted was the provision of a set of Technical Standards and Guidelines [5]. This document was made available to all projects invited to submit Second Stage bids, and conformance to the mandatory elements of the document was assessed during the marking process. As well as a relatively small set of Programme–wide mandatory requirements, the document included a great deal of guidance and pointers to Best Practice, which is being backed up by the activities of the Advisory Service. [6].
Although explicitly not intended to act as a straitjacket upon the innovative ideas of individual projects, the Guidelines do serve to ensure a common base level of functionality, hopefully ensuring that the digitised content will be accessible for many years to come.
The true test of the Guidelines will come, of course, several years from now, but it is heartening to note both that a number of organisations running NOF–funded projects are voluntarily applying the Guidelines to other areas of their work, not funded by NOF, and that the Guidelines are being used as the basis of similar documents in other UK funding programmes and in those of other countries, such as Canada.
So far as we are aware, this is the largest single body of funding ever granted for the digitisation of Cultural Heritage material. As such, it marks a hugely important step forward, both in creating a truly significant learning resource, but also in tackling a number of the open issues related to digitisation of cultural materials, the use to which those digitised resources are then put, and their long term value and sustainability.
As this article goes up on the Web, the first adverts for NOF–funded posts are already beginning to appear, and projects are beginning the process of tendering for systems and services. It is an open question as to whether the European digitisation market has sufficient capacity to meet the demand, and ways may need to be found to counter any significant inflation in prices brought about by this sudden rush of work.
This funding will create a resource of huge value. Allied to other NOF programmes devoted to installing computers and network access in Public Libraries, training teachers and librarians in the use of information technology, and providing opportunities for the general public to gain computing skills and confidence, this marks a significant step forward in Government agendas to move the UK online.
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Interoperability Focus
UKOLN
United Kingdom
p.miller@ukoln.ac.uk
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/
Phone: +44 1482 466890
Paul Miller holds the post of Interoperability Focus at UKOLN. This post is jointly funded by the Joint Information Systems
Committee (JISC — http://www.jisc.ac.uk/
) of the United Kingdom's Further and Higher Education Funding Councils, and
by Resource, the Government agency responsible for libraries, museums and archives (http://www.resource.gov.uk/
).
Paul's background is in archaeology, where his PhD research examined the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in mapping deposits buried beneath modern cities, concentrating specifically upon the archaeologically rich and varied city of York.
In his current work, Paul is responsible for encouraging and facilitating the development of interoperable solutions
across a range of domains, principally museums, libraries, archives, and government. Paul sits on a wide range of committees
and working groups related to this area, both internationally (for example, the executive committees of the Dublin Core
Metadata Initiative (DCMI — http://www.dublincore.org/
) and the CIMI Consortium (CIMI — http://www.cimi.org/
) and within
the UK.
Previously, Paul worked for the Archaeology Data Service (ADS — http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/
), a
service provider of the UK Arts & Humanities Data Service. Here, he was responsible for designing and establishing the
catalogue, which now contains content from local and national archaeological agencies across the UK.
nof–digitise Technical Advisory Service
UKOLN
United Kingdom
s.criddle@ukoln.ac.uk
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/nof/support/
Phone: +44 1225 826250
Sally Criddle is Resource Co–ordinator at UKOLN and is managing the Technical Advisory Service for NOF.
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For citation purposes:
Miller, P. and Criddle, S. "A True New Opportunity for Cultural Content Digitisation in the UK", Cultivate Interactive, issue
5, 1 October 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue5/nof/>
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