Visual Resources Digitisation Officer - Job Vacancy
Visual Resources Digitisation Officer (FIXED TERM CONTRACT)
5 months (1.0 FTE) or 10 months (0.5 FTE)
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Salary: £27,318to £30,748 pa based on 1.0 FTE
Location: Farnham
Ref: 10-LIBR143-02
The University for the Creative Arts has campuses at Canterbury, Epsom, Farnham, Maidstone and Rochester and is home to 6,500 students from over 70 countries studying on courses in fashion, graphics, design, media, fine art and architecture.
The Imagio project is a Library and Learning Services project funded by the University to support teaching and learning.
Phase one of the project produced a policy and technical framework for the capture and storage of digital images. The Visual Resources Digitisation Officer will be responsible for the implementation and dissemination of phase two: the creation of a digital still image resource for use by academic staff.
This newly created post provides an exciting opportunity for someone wishing to gain experience in the development of digital image databases within an HE library setting.
It would suit a candidate with initiative who enjoys interacting and liaising with a wide-range of people.
Candidates should have a professional qualification in librarianship or information science with library experience, preferably in the HE sector. Experience of visual resources in a creative HE environment, and digitisation skills would be an advantage, as would a knowledge of copyright and IPR.
Application forms, Vacancy Summary and further information relating to the University for the Creative Arts are available for download or alternatively contact the Human Resources Department via email HR@ucreative.ac.uk or on 01252 892681 (24 hours -quoting the relevant reference).
The closing date for receipt of applications is 25 February 2010
Interviews will be held on week commencing 08 March 2010
We value the diversity of our organisation and welcome applicants from all sections of the community.
Pre-Raphaelites project wins award
The Pre-Raphaelites online resource has won the BETT Award for best digital collection and resource bank after being recognised as one of the UK’s leading educational websites.
Further details of the award can be found on the Birmingham City Council’s website.
This latest accolade follows earlier victories in the BIMA (British Interactive Media Association) and DADI (Drum Award for Digital Industries) Awards.
This continued acknowledgement of the websites design and usability helps highlight the importance of making these areas an integral part of a projects planning and execution.
Key features of the site include:
• full record information for each image
• zoom-in function, to allow users to examine images in great detail
• browse and advanced search
• background resources on the Pre-Raphaelite movement and artists
• exemplars of learning resources, such as “Gender and Sexuality”, as well as the facility for teachers to create their own
• personal collection, a functionality which allow users to group and theme images from the collection as well as take part in online discussions
The Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource was funded by the JISC Digitisation programme and created by the Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery.
Digitisation and Community Engagement - Future JISC funding
Following the success of projects such as the University of Oxford’s Great War Archive, JISC have continued exploration into the concept of community collections, that is digital resources that are created or enhanced by both user groups inside and outwith traditional academic audiences.
1914 Christmas ‘Comforts tin’ and card, from the Great War Archive
This was followed up the report by Chris Batt Consulting, Digitisation, Curation and Two-Way Engagement, which looked at some of the key strategic issues in creating and curating under such a model.
JISC will be continuing this work by publishing a call for projects undertaking the development of community content. It will be a joint call between the JISC Digitisation & eContent, and the Business and Community Programmes. Around £400,000 will be made available, for funding projects up to £75k each.
There will be two strands. Details are also on the JISC roadmap.
Strand A) Rapid Innovation – Rapid enhancement of existing digital resources to provide for greater engagement with previously untapped audiences
Strand B) Content development – Building new digital collections, or significant extending existing collections, via community engagement
The call will be published in December 2009, with a closing date for proposals likely to be the very end of January 2010.
Potential applicants may also be interested in the follow on project by the Great War Archive team at the University of Oxford. Entitled RunCoCo, the project will be helping to share and establish best practice in the development of community collections.
Furer-Haimendorf Photographs Launch Event
Friday 30th October sees the launch of the Fürer-Haimendorf archive at the School of Oriental and Arfican Studies in London.
The day will includ
e a seminar, 10am-5pm, and an evening launch event from 5pm-7pm.
The photographs of Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf are the world’s most comprehensive picture of tribal cultures in the himalayas and naga hills in the mid-twentieth century.
With this launch, they will be available to everyone on the web.
The uses of these photographs in contemporary fieldwork and the significance of digital archives will be discussed at the semina
r.
More information about the launch of this amazing collection of photographs can be found on the SOAS website.
More details about the project and the 25 projects that make up the Enriching Digital Resources programme can be found on the JISC webiste.
After Work, Guinness
Iconic British Poster Design Launched Online
From the ‘Keep Britain Tidy’ campaign to advertisements for Gillette and Guinness, the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS) is pleased to announce that a further 100 images from the archives of designer Tom Eckersley have now been made publically available online.
The collection was formed by Eckersley and is held at the University of the Arts London Archives and Special Collections Centre. The collection is available online at:
http://www.vads.ac.uk/collections/TEC
National Portrait Gallery / Wikipedia argument
There has been quite a lot of information flying around since a Wikipedia user downloaded and then stitched together high-resolution images from the National Portrait Gallery, before putting them up as a single files on Wikipedia.
The statement from the National Portrait Gallery clears up a lot of confusion and seems quite even handed.
The National Portrait Gallery is very strongly committed to giving access to its Collection. In the past five years the Gallery has spent around £1 million digitising its Collection to make it widely available for study and enjoyment. We have so far made available on our website more than 60,000 digital images, which have attracted millions of users, and we believe this extensive programme is of great public benefit.
The Gallery supports Wikipedia in its aim of making knowledge widely available and we would be happy for the site to use our low-resolution images, sufficient for most forms of public access, subject to safeguards. However, in March 2009 over 3000 high-resolution files were appropriated from the National Portrait Gallery website and published on Wikipedia without permission.
The Gallery is very concerned that potential loss of licensing income from the high-resolution files threatens its ability to reinvest in its digitisation programme and so make further images available. It is one of the Gallery’s primary purposes to make as much of the Collection available as possible for the public to view.
Digitisation involves huge costs including research, cataloguing, conservation and highly-skilled photography. Images then need to be made available on the Gallery website as part of a structured and authoritative database.
To date, Wikipedia has not responded to our requests to discuss the issue and so the National Portrait Gallery has been obliged to issue a lawyer’s letter. The Gallery remains willing to enter into a dialogue with Wikipedia
“Ideal Women” online
“Many, if not all, of the Pre-Raphaelites had their own ideal of beauty“,
as the recently launched Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource illustrates through beautiful images of Pre-Raphaelite paintings and sketches in its Learning resources section.
The Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource gives free access to over 3000 images related to the works of artists belonging to one of the most important British art movement, including founding members William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais as well as material from the broader context.
Key features of this beautiful and easy to navigate web site are:
• full record information for each image
• zoom-in function, to allow users to examine images in great detail
• browse and advanced search
• background resources on the Pre-Raphaelite movement and artists
• exemplars of learning resources, such as “Gender and Sexuality”, as well as the facility for teachers to create their own
• personal collection, a functionality which allow users to group and theme images from the collection as well as take part in online discussions
The Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource was funded by the JISC Digitisation programme and created by the Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery.
‘Staying Stylish in Hard Times’: Wartime cosmetics archives launched online
In these times of economic hardship and ever decreasing household budgets, it is always good to remind ourselves of times when money was extremely short.
The Visual Arts Data service (VADS) has just launched an online wartime cosmetics archive.
The archives of Gala, Miner’s and Crystal, three prominent cosmetics companies operating during and after the Second World War, are held at London College of Fashion and have been digitised and made freely accessible through the VADS website.
The archives are a valuable resource for the study of the history of cosmetics, advertising photography, fashion promotion and women in the Second World War.
One of the company’s in the archive, Gala of London, was also the first company to introduce lip stick in a tube when they introduced their lipline in 1957.
During the War when silk was needed for parachutes and stockings disappeared from the shops, Miner’s had particular success with its leg make-up, Miners Liquid Stockings,allowing women to draw black lines down theback of their legs to simulate the seams.
The three cosmetics archives have been digitised by the London College of Fashion and made available online through the ‘Enhancing VADS’ project, funded as part of the Enriching Digital Resources programme from JISC.
The collection is available through the VADS website.
Getting Your Resource Noted: Penguins, Icebergs and Heroes
The recently launched Freeze Frame project, which has digitised over 20,000 images of historic polar expeditions, has achieved phenomenal interest in the press.
The press page on the JISC website lists 32 news articles or features, including an audio slideshow on the BBC website, and articles in newspapers as diverse as the Scotsman, the Daily Mirror and the magazine Computer Active.
Offering the press eye-catching images such as the one featured here certainly help but a number of other issues also aided the project gain such recognition
- Having particular stories to about the images to tie into the images (in this case Scott’s journey to the Antarctic)
- Identifying a press day for the media to visit to take photographs, undertake interviews and get quotes
- Having a clear URL for the website accessible to all
- Support from a PR agency to contact media outlets to offer the story (JISC has offered this service to all its large-scale digitisation projects)
New online resources launched: polar images and theatre in the East End
Two new online collections, funded by the JISC Digitisation programme, launched yesterday giving global access to thousand of images ranging from polar expeditions to theatre and entertainment in the East End of London.
Freeze Frame: Historic Polar Images features an archive of 20,000 images depicting the history of polar exploration, inlcuding the adventures of famous explorers such as Captain Scott, Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton and, more recently, Sir Ranulph Fiennes.
The project was carried out by the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge, in collaboration with DSpace@Cambridge.
The Scott Polar Research Institute in the University of Cambridge holds a world-class collection of photographic negatives illustrating polar exploration from the nineteenth century onwards. Freeze Frame is the result of a two-year digitisation project that brings together photographs from both Arctic and Antarctic expeditions. Here you can discover the polar regions through the eyes of those explorers and scientists who dared to go into the last great wildernesses on earth.
The project has had extensive media coverage, all of which can be found on the JISC’s Communications page and a slide show on the BBC website.
The East London Theatre Archive (ELTA) website brings together selections of material from a variety of theatre collections, including the V&A Theatre Collections, Hackney empire, Half Moon Young People’s Theatre, Hoxton Hall, Theatre Royal Stratford East, Theatre Venture and Wilton’s Music Hall.
The collections can be searched or browsed and a number of thematic essays contextualise the material, exploring issues such as East London immigration, black characters in theatre, crime and punshment and nautical drama, among others.
ELTA represents an innovative step towards unlocking the theatrical past of East London for academics and historians on a national and international basis. While the theatre of the West End has been subject to a notable amount of research, less attention to date has been paid to the East End, despite its significant contribution to performing arts in the 19th to 21st centuries. This resource will help to address this and enrich researchers’ knowledge of East London’s pivotal role in theatre.