Another impressive resource is launched by JISC

ULCC Moodle Blogger apologises for the late arrival of this blog. Encamped in a Bedouin settlement somewhere in the Moroccan Sahara, I had dispatched it with a passing spice merchant by camel train, and hoping for a westerly wind to take it up the coast to Tangier and onto Europe.

On Monday 22nd October, I attended a launch at the British Library of JISC's digitisation project: British Newspapers of the 19th Century. The resources displayed to the assembled guests were impressive indeed:

10 billion words and 2 million pages are being digitised from complete runs (or the majority) of 19th century local, regional and national British newspapers.

Iconic historical events will be amply represented from the Battle of Waterloo, the Great Exhibition of 1851 to the opening of the Suez Canal. Read the factual reporting of the Battle of Trafalgar in the Examiner and the gory details of the Whitechapel murders in the melodramatic Illustrated Police News to name but a few. Many famous authors of the 19th century period wrote for newspapers, and their work is represented, Dickens and Thackeray included

Opened by the respective heads of BL and JISC, it was certainly a grand affair. We're now able to celebrate another excellent resource made accessible that weren't thought possible a few years ago (details of licensing and accounts will be made available shortly - watch this space).

One thought that struck me was that, in an age where a keystroke brings thousands of resources to the desktop, this can be as much a problem as having access to only a few. Sitting around the Bedouin camp fires, I was reminded of a story I presented to a JISC conference a couple of years back, illustrating one of the key issues ...

A group of English teachers, attending a 'Subject Day' organised by RSC London, were demonstrated a JISC resource by LION (Literature Online) and were all impressed. Everyone present demanded to know how they could get hold of this fantastic resource. The JISC representative said that he would check and get back to them after lunch. He returned to say that all their colleges already owned the licence for this resource. This highlights a problem of how we ensure that we're able to break down the internal organisational barriers so that these treasures are actually used effectively by the people they were designed to support?

Answers on a postcard to ULCC Moodle Blogger, c/o Sahara Desert