Selecting alternative and underground press content for open access | Jisc Content and Digitisation

As Jisc’s own Independent Voices project is developing, we are working to identify an approach with will enable UK Higher Education libraries to benefit in the same way as their US counterparts. There are a couple of significant differences though. The copyright regime in the US and the UK differ considerable.  The US ‘Fair Use’ exceptions enable access to content for internal research and educational purposes.

Another difference between the UK and US initiative is the fact that some large US collections of independent press material had been scanned to microfilm. Though microfilm can be problematic in terms of quality, it does at least provide opportunity for a large amount of content to be easily located in one place. Digitising microform has provided a strong basis on which to build the US IV collection. We have so far not been able to identify such a readily available collection in the UK, at least not amongst the 10 libraries which have signed up the initiative to date.