paul walk’s weblog

I have been invited to give a short presentation to the JISC Digitisation Programme on Friday, giving an overview of different ways of exposing content and metadata. I’ll be talking to projects which are concerned with Cultural Heritage content which is being surfaced in websites to support eLearning. Formats vary tremendously. This is the complete list:

• 18th century parliamentary papers
• 19th century pamphlets online
• A digital library of core e-resources on Ireland
• Archival sound recordings 2
• British Cartoon Archive digitisation project
• British Governance in the 20th century: Cabinet papers, 1914-1975
• British Library 19th century newspapers
• British Library archival sound recordings project
• British newspapers 1620-1900
• Electronic ephemera: Digitised selections from the John Johnson collection
• First World War poetry digital archive
• Independent Radio News Archive digitisation
• InView: Moving images in the public sphere
• Medical journal backfiles
• Modern Welsh journals online
• NewsFilm online
• Online historical population reports
• Portsmouth University: Historic boundaries of Britain
• Pre-Raphaelite resource site
• Scott Polar Research Institute: Freeze Frame – Historic polar images
• The East London theatre archive
• UK theses digitisation project

Aside from the obvious stuff like OAI-PMH, Google, RSS, what should I be talking about? Persistent identifiers? Cool URLs? Any other suggestions?

Tags: Digitisation, JISC

Disdain for Google on the part of some academics is not new, but Tara Brabazon in her inaugural lecture at Brighton University, has created something of a stir. Alexandra Frean, Education Editor for The Time Online says:

Google is “white bread for the mind”, and the internet is producing a generation of students who survive on a diet of unreliable information, a professor of media studies will claim this week.

Meanwhile, Andy Powell over at eFoundations counters with:

Blaming the Internet for “a generation of students who survive on a diet of unreliable information” is a bit like blaming paper for the Daily Star.

Indeed.

What I find interesting is the implicit notion of a ‘Google generation’. When I hear this term used pejoratively, I tend to substitute the phrase ‘the trouble with the youth of today….’.

In a wonderful coincidence of timing, I note, via the JISC news feed, that the ‘Google Generation is a myth‘. Apparently, there is some evidence to suggest that age/generation is not an indicator for particular research behaviour:

The report ‘Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future’ also shows that research-behaviour traits that are commonly associated with younger users – impatience in search and navigation, and zero tolerance for any delay in satisfying their information needs – are now the norm for all age-groups, from younger pupils and undergraduates through to professors.

Hmmmm.

Caveat: I like white bread - it makes the best toast. Also, I found all of the material I’ve read so far about this via Google (apart from the stuff delivered to my RSS reader).

Tags: eFoundations, Google, Google Generation, Tara Brabazon, white bread