The JISC-funded TASI (Technical Advisory Service for Images) is no more. This service, which is based at ILRT, University of Bristol has been reborn as JISC Digital Media, with an expanded remit for supporting digital media in general and not just images, which was the focus of the TASI service. Further information is available on the JISC Web site.

This change has been accompanied by a new domain name – http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/ rather than http://www.tasi.ac.uk/.

Now the TASI service provided many useful resources on best practices for digitisation.  But what has happened to links to these resources? Will we get a 404 error message? Or, even worse, will we get a message saying the domain no longer exists?

The QA Focus briefing document on “Improving The Quality Of Digitised Images” contains a reference to a Digital Imaging Basics resource which was available at the URL <http://www.tasi.ac.uk/advice/using/basics.html>. Following the link takes you to the resource, which is now available at <http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/advice/using/basics.html>.

There seems to have been a simple mapping of resources from the TASI domain to the new JISC Digital Media domain. And as the original resource has ‘cool URIs’ (i.e. they had no dependencies on a specific technology (such as a CMS, Java server pages, etc.) it was technically not a difficult task to migrate the links to the new domain.

Well done TASI / JISC Digital Media. The challenge now is to see how long such redirects will continue to function.