JISC Digitisation Programme

The JISC Digitisation Programme is a series of projects to digitise the cultural heritage and scholarly materials in universities, libraries, museums, archives and others cultural memory organisations in the United Kingdom.

The programme continues to be managed by the UK's [JISC] (Joint Information Systems Committee). JISC supports United Kingdom post-16 and higher education and research in support of learning, teaching, research and administration in the context of ICT.

The Programme has had three main strands

Phase 1 from 2004 to 2007, funded six separate digitisation projects. Phase 2 from 2007 to 2009, funded sixteen projects Enriching Digital Resources, from 2008 to 2010, funded twenty five projects

Phase 1

The six projects funded under Phase 1 were the following

NewsFilm Online

This project has digitised 3,000 hours from the archives of ITN (Independent Television News), featuring clipes relating to British and world news from the 1920s to the present day. These inlclude, for example, xyz.

The video content is only available to Higher and Further Education institutions in the United Kingdom, and requires access via Athens of Shibboleth. However, all the information is about each of the clip is freely available and searchable to all.

Online Historical Population Reports

The University of Essex has made available population reports from the UK, 1801 - 1937. The reports, drawn from census and other realted information, includes information on births, deaths, marriages, housing, religion and other social factors relating to the UK population. The resource is freely available.

Medical Journals Backfiles

The wellcome Trust led this project to publish electronic versions of 2m pages of text from medical journals. All the content is freely available via PubMed Central service.

18th-Century Parliamentary Papers

Led by the Univeristy of Southampton, this project digitised parliamentary papers bills and related journals from the House of Commons. The resource is available for free to all those in Further and Higher Education in the UK as part of a larger site thats contains nineteenth and twentieth century parliamentary material as well. Others can gain access to this site by subscribing to the resource.

Archival Sound Recordings

This project (which has received two sections of funding from JISC) has made available some of the British Library's huge Sound Archive, including oral histories from the Holocaust, wildlife recordings and accents and dialects. Some of the content is freely available, others are only open to Further and Higher Education in the UK, depending on copyright and data protection restrictions.

British Library Historic Newspapers

The British Library has received two tranches of funding from JISC to digitise nearly 3m pages of historic newspapers, largely covering the nineteenth century. The resource is freely available to UK Higher and Further Education via institutional gateways. Other users can access the newspapers via subscription or single payments.