National Library of Wales

Roy Jenkins was probably (in the popular parlance) ‘the best Prime Minister Britain never had’. Although he never reached 10 Downing Street, he left a more enduring mark on British society and poli...

This paper is concerned with the development of digital humanities infrastructure – tools and resources which make using existing e-content easier to discover, utilise and embed in teaching and research. The past development of digital content in the humanities (in the United Kingdom) is considered with its resource-focused approach, as are current barriers facing digital humanities as a discipline. Existing impacts from e-infrastructure are discussed, based largely on the authors’ own discrete or collaborative projects. This paper argues that we need to consider further how digital resources are actually used, and the ways in which future digital resources might enable new types of research questions to be asked. It considers the potential for such enabling resources to advance digital humanities significantly in the near future.

Computer vision has addressed many problems in art, but has not yet looked in detail at the way artistic style can develop and evolve over the course of an artist's career. In this paper we take a computational approach to modelling stylistic change in the body of work amassed by Sir John “Kyffin” Williams, a nationally renowned and prolific Welsh artist. Using images gathered from catalogues and online sources, we use a leave-one-out methodology to classify paintings by year; despite the variation in image source, size, and quality we are able to obtain significant correlations between predicted year and actual year, and we are able to guess the age of the painting within 15 years, for around 70% of our dataset. We also investigate the incorporation of expert knowledge within this framework by consdering a subset of paintings chosen as exemplars by a scholar familiar with Williams' work.

ABSTRACTThis article discusses the reaction to television in Britain in the immediate postwar years. Despite its invention many years before, television was not really successful until after World War II, for a number of social and technological reasons. However, the acceptance of television was by no means inevitable, and many voiced concerns about its influence, often manifested in anxiety around the objects themselves as well as what was broadcast. These apprehensions influenced the way television was discussed and how it was put to use. In a nation recovering from war and directing resources towards exports, television in Britain was constructed as an agent of production rather than consumption. The presence of the television in the home also demonstrated and contributed to the complex relationship between public and private space in postwar Britain. The resistance surrounding television did not prevent its popularity but did have a profound impact on the form it eventually took.

Background and context The aims of this volume A key motivation for developing this volume was the need to address the ‘use’, ‘value’ and ‘impact’ of digital collections in the context of an expanding mass of digital content with tremendous potential. Specifically: • How can we understand how digital collections are being used, and by whom? • How do we assess their value, and add value over time, in order to make decisions about which collections to digitize or make available, and how? • How do we assess their impact on scholarship, on knowledge transfer and on information management and access? • How do we ‘measure’ value? What can be measured, and how? • Is it possible to ensure their sustainability, value and impact over time? • How might we apply indicators of use, value and impact to inform funding decisions and policy making for the future? The explosion of digital initiatives This volume of essays is, in many respects, a follow up and companion to Digitizing Collections: strategic issues for the information manager (Hughes, 2004). Since its publication, digitization initiatives have continued at a tremendous pace in libraries, archives and museums, as well as in higher education. Digitization of existing library, museum and archive collections is still a major priority, where funding can still be found for these initiatives. The National Library of Wales is continuing to digitize two million pages of historic Welsh newspapers and journals in a three-year project that will conclude in 2012, with funding from the Welsh Government. The British Library is partnering online publisher Brightsolid to digitize up to 40 million pages of newspapers. In the USA, the Smithsonian Institute has a remit to digitize its entire collection: a challenge considering that the Smithsonian is home to 137 million objects, 100,000 cubic feet of archival material and 1.8 million library volumes. In the UK, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has launched a new phase of digitization via its e-Content programme, for projects that will be completed in 2012. This is the era of Google, and mass digitization initiatives to put our cultural heritage online are flourishing.

Macdonald, N., Jones, C. A., Davies, S. J., Charnell-White, C. A. (2010). Historical Weather Accounts from Wales: An Assessment of their Potential for Reconstructing Climate. Weather, 65 (3), 72-81

PurposeThis paper aims to provide an overview of developments in digitisation policy and practice at the National Library of Wales (NLW) from 1995 to 2007 and drawing out the lessons learnt.Design/methodology/approachA chronological overview of developments focusing on the pilot phase, policy statements of 2001 and 2005 and on specific projects that have been undertaken during this period.FindingsProvides a comprehensive view of digitisation at NLW and its evolution over time as well as identifying some key strategic decisions and some important lessons learnt.Research limitations/implicationsThis paper aims to outline developments as they occurred at NLW and does not aim to place those developments, or any current or future strategies, in a wider context.Originality/valueThis paper provides the digitisation community with an account of how digitisation was adopted as a core function (at a relatively early stage) by a national repository and can be of value to those still considering implementing digitisation in earnest for the first time or are looking anew at their digitisation strategy.

is the determinent of religious courses. According to this, the undertaker of religious course is thereligious community itself. By reason of the muslims in Germany cannot answer the requirementsthose defined in the constitution and the states being independent within themselves has putdifferent religious education models into practice. These models are, government supported coursesof which the language is German or Turkish or the courses which are performed in German withthe leadership of the roundtable organizations of Islamic Religious Communities. These are alltemporary processes to reach the religious course that Constitution requests