The Wellcome Library is pleased to announce that we’re the latest partners to join the Strategic Content Alliance. You can read the press release here.
Why join? Well, as our digitisation programme gathers pace, one of the key issues we face is making sure that our plans are not developed in isolation. We’re in a lucky position: unlike many libraries and archives, we have the financial resources of the Wellcome Trust to draw upon to support our work. But one of our aims is to make sure that our digitised content is made available to – and is useful to – as wide a range of users as possible, and to make sure that we achieve best value for, and embody best practice in, our programme.
The aim of the Strategic Content Alliance is to bring together key public and not-for-profit sector organisations involved in the creation, management and exploitation of digital content for the common good. By facilitating high-level discussion between partners, the SCA aims to ensure the maximum return on public sector and charitable investment in digitisation. Being part of the Strategic Content Alliance enables us to keep abreast of what others – including the BBC, JISC and the British Library – are up to, and to identify and pursue opportunities for partnership. Some of these are around the sharing of expertise (such as Digipedia, a pilot project developed by SCA), tools to make digital content accessible, and business models that ensure the sustainability of the content we create and the repositories that house it (see for example this post on the SCA blog about work being undertaken by Ithaka S+R for the SCA). Others are about aggregating content and finding ways to complement each others’ work (as with the recent JISC meeting on the First World War Commemoration). The SCA also acts as a coordinating body to provide sound business intelligence and ensure effective advocacy on issues that cut across our shared interests, such as copyright and orphan works. Nor is the benefit limited to our in-house programmes: our involvement with the SCA will also help to inform the Wellcome Trust’s strategy towards the funding of digitisation projects elsewhere.
