About
The LIFE-SHARE project received funding from JISC in September 2009 to explore digitisation across the three White Rose Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York. The project runs from September 2009 to February 2011. The aim of the project is to identify and establish institutional and consortial strategies and infrastructure for the creation, curation and preservation of a variety of digital content.
Stage 1 – Digitisation Audit and Skills Map
The project will undertake an inventory of digitisation across the three White Rose Universities Libraries. This will contain information on all digitisation services, staff members’ skills and expertise, equipment and strategies. The skills map, produced by our partner JISC Digital Media, will provide an overview of the skills and training necessary across the whole lifecycle of a digitisation project.
Stage 2 – Case Studies
The Leeds case study will investigate the costing and workflow for digitising
print monographs for preservation purposes. The focus will be on a comparison
between the costs of the conservation of physically deteriorating monographs
from the early twentieth century and the costs of producing and preserving
digital copies of the same monographs.
The Sheffield case study will investigate the workflow for digitising audio
and video recordings from Special Collections with a particular focus on
the permissions required for preservation and dissemination.
The York case study will investigate the workflow for providing on-demand
digitisation services for online course readings and archive materials.
The study will explore
the two strands of on-demand digitisation and develop workflows for each
strand. The aim will also be to look at ways in which the two strands may
collaborate
and combine services.
Stage 3 – Consortial Models
This stage of the project will draw on the first 2 stages to establish whether the White Rose University Libraries could use shared expertise and equipment to provide a consortial digitisation service.
Stage 4 – Strategy Toolkit
The final stage of the project will draw on all previous stages to create a digitisation strategy toolkit. The toolkit will include policies and infrastructure necessary to develop and implement a digitisation strategy. It will also offer best practice guidelines for digitising different media across the White Rose consortium.
Dissemination
The project team will hold a series of workshops across the White Rose
Universities throughout the course of the project. These workshops
will have a number
of different functions including to act as forums for sharing expertise
across the consortium, to provide training on areas identified as
skills gaps, and
to embed the project findings within the three institutions.
