The UK's Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has announced that learners, educators and citizen scientists can expect to benefit from a recently launched, 18-month digitisation programme for scientific medical archives, historical records and health reports.
JISC will be investing £5.6 million in 24 projects across 30 universities and cultural heritage organisations to bring selected archives out of the vaults and onto computer screens. This is specifically aimed at creating resources for wide educational use. These archives will be publicly accessible too.
According to Alastair Dunning, JISC's programme manager, JISC believes that publicly-funded archives and collections should whenever possible be made openly available for people to be able to see, reuse and access.
These new collections vary greatly. King's College London is leading a project to digitise the entire 86 volume corpus of the Survey of English Place-Name. The University of Bradford is running 'Digitised Diseases' which seeks to bridge the gap between modern clinical medicine and the use of historic medical collections by digitising pathological skeletal specimens from world renowned archaeological collections in Bradford and London. The new collections to be digitised also include over 150 years worth of annual reports summarising the health of Greater London's population, held by the Wellcome Library.
This programme supports the findings of the "Seizing the opportunity for online learning for UK higher education" report. The report recommended the use of online learning to enhance student choice and meet learners' expectations; realignment of training and development to support academics to play a leading role in online provision; and the development and sharing of open educational resources to enhance efficiency and quality.
More details on this latest phase of digitisation projects are available online at http://bit.ly/sMFWnJ.
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