Stepping Away from the Silos

For over twenty years, digitisation has been a core element of the modern information landscape. The digital lifecycle is now well defined, and standards and good practice have been developed for most of its key stages. There remains, however, a widespread lack of coordination of digitisation initiatives, both within and across different sectors, and there are disparate approaches to selection criteria. The result is ‘silos’ of digitised content.

Stepping away from the Silos

• Summarises the rise of publicly funded digitisation in the UK from the 1990s to date and identifies the need to improve coordination and content selection criteria
• Reviews the role of digitisation in government and organisational strategies from the 1990s to the present day
• Examines the strategic position of collaboration within and across different organisations
• Identifies common selection criteria and outlines the coverage of exemplar projects 
• Discusses the apparent emergence of a de facto selection strategy and the
  potential for national strategic planning of digitised content based on existing
  outputs and improved collaboration

UK Higher Education including institutional strategists, directors of information services, libraries, IT services and other units responsible for planning and creating digital content. Publicly funded UK national and regional organisations, including governmental units that create or support the creation of digital content (eg, JISC, ACE, BBC, Wellcome, Collections Trust, etc). Similar organisations in other countries active in the creation of digital content, and international organisations working across national borders