"Content" as infrastructure - reflections on Jisc's support for the Digital Humanities

This text came from the conference programme. In this talk, Paola and Peter will put the spotlight on another fundamental part of that infrastructure that Jisc has facilitated, “content”, the digital collections, and data, that are the backbone of much digital humanities activity. Innovation lies at the heart of this work and the programmes undertaken over many years have pushed at the boundaries where technology and humans meet, foregrounding more recent initiatives by other players. In the UK Jisc became known for large scale digitisation programmes that created millions of digital images and texts for use in teaching, learning and research. Less well known are the early explorations into the analysis of content at scale through the Digging Into Data programme and recent work on AI and its possible effects on the humanities; the impact of national licensing programmes in democratising access to expensive commercial archives and explorations into new business models to support digital collections. Through these activities, Jisc has also developed a “human infrastructure” of communities, networks and spaces, has built capacity and capabilities, and provided opportunities for exploration of new ideas and trends, knowledge sharing, collaborations, and in general for taking the long view. Surrounding issues of the value, use and impact, preservation and long-term sustainability of digital collections are as crucial today as they were two decades ago. Peter and Paola will reflect on their continued relevance against the backdrop of a changing landscape and Jisc’s evolving role. +++ Paola Marchionni is Head of engagement in the Jisc content and discovery directorate. She heads a wide-ranging team of subject matter experts who design and lead community engagement programmes in support of digital transformation as it relates to content and discovery. The team works with stakeholders across libraries, archives, technology vendors and publishers in areas as diverse as digital scholarship and collections, preservation, metadata, and open access monographs. Paola was previously head of product at Jisc for the content and discovery team and before then she worked as programme manager on Jisc’s flagship national digitisation programmes. Before joining Jisc, Paola worked as part of the first national government funded digitisation programme, the New Opportunities Fund. Peter specialises in digital scholarship, digital libraries and archives. His current focus is on the potential impacts of Artificial Intelligence on Arts & Humanities research and issues of rights retention in open access publishing. Peter has been consulting with UK academic libraries on developing strategies to make more machine-readable collections available for research. Prior to joining Jisc in 2012 he project managed the first online digital audio archive at the British Library delivering 12,000 hours of audio. He then worked on the library’s 10 year strategic vision, and later acted as the business change manager of the programme to relocate 50 Kilometres of British Library newspapers and re-engineer its newspaper reading room services.