I arrived late for the first session of the JISC Digital Content Conference, and the wifi wouldn't work, at least for me. Others seem to have managed it, so I hope to be able to connect later on. And, at least for the moment, there's no streaming of the Twitter feed. All a bit useless: i shall have to do things the old-fashioned way, making notes and blogging afterwards, when I can get a connection.
I missed Malcolm Read's introduction, but arrived half way though Alison Allden's introduction to Catherine Grout, who gave a tour d'horizon of JISC, from the point twenty years ago when two ISI data-sets were licensed, through the formation of the committee in 1993 and progress in the ten years since 1999, amusingly illustrated with video of some of the technical and socio-political context of the times
She compared the White House website of 1999 with the post-Obama one of 2009 and reminded us of the huge challenges, for example of interoperability. we faced back then.
Some of her slides were very hard to see from the back of the hall, but she covered JISC's role in buying content and in hosting user-generated content, and in integrating content from outside further and higher education, from the BBC, the NHS and schools and museums.
A thread of what Marx called economic shit ran through her talk. She mentioned more than once the economic challenges JISC and the groups it serves face,and the changes that may be brought about by a change of government. How will JISC fare when the public spending axe, Labour or Tory falls?
She ran through the content of JISC collection, mentioning inter alia the JISC FE books deal, though she gave the number of titles as 2,900 rather than the greater than 3,000 figure we've been working with, a site devoted to polar photography I did not know called Freeze Frame, and Archival Sound Recordings which, alas, we have still to get to work with federated access at South Thames. One of her more interesting points was that we do not yet know how the widespread availability of lots of content will change research and teaching and learning. She suggested various ways, the most interesting of which to me was that interdisciplinarity would grow. She also cited a cheese rolling video as an example of the use of content to engage learners. In a curious example of how perceptions change from generation to generation was given when she cited some of the material they have in the East London Theatre archive on the Hackney Empire. It seems the theatre's radical origins, well know to everybody when I lived in the area, are now forgotten.
JISC has fostered the development of new skills and knowledge in digitising and managing digital content; they have responded to government imperatives: industrial activism, value for money, and the green agenda. On the sustainability front they have many partners eg JISC NEH Digitisation, European partners and the Strategic Content Alliance, which aims to develop content for every citizen and respond to Digital Britain. She mentioned Digipedia, an attempt to develop guidebook for digital life cycle
She posed some questions to the audience: how should JISC sustain services? By offering content free to all, free to education, supported by advertising, or on some PFI-type model? (No, no to this last idea).
She showed us a video made by the builders Laing in the 1960s using Pete Seeger's song Little Boxes. Laing. or the advertising agency who made the film, had totally missed the satirical point of Seeger's song.
There are rough seas ahead and times will be economically tough; the momentum for digitising assets is growing, we are better at showing impact and value of work suggestion; but there is a commonplace view that the slump will hit the public sector 18 months after private
There are some advantages: she suggested the growth of Web 2.0 (though she gave Google Video as an example of Web 2.0: I'm not sure I would have chosen that ); there will efficiency and quality gains; the desire for collaboration will grow.
In questions form the floor she was asked where the UK stood internationally; ahead, more or less was her answer. What could JISC do to improve the position of copyright of visual materials? Someone asked about work on information literacy agendas. Catherine said it starts in nursery school, JISC is exploiting digital literacy, with different age groups and at different stages in education in a multi-pronged approach.
Someone else asked about the mass digitisation of photographic collections. While lots of text, audio and video have been digitised, photography lags behind and there are hundreds of thousands of photos. Catherine's answer was to work with subject communities.
Someone from EDINA said that we needed to foster an attitude of critical appraisal, for example to Google suggestions.
