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.
Content Architecture: Exploiting and Managing Diverse Resources – Conference
The International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO), in cooperation with University College, London will be holding their first biennial conference entitled: Content Architecture: Exploiting and Managing Diverse Resources. The conference will run from the 22 – 23rd June, 2009, and will take place in London.
In our networked world, enabling easy access to multiple services and resources is often reliant on a team effort involving specialists from very different backgrounds: website design, knowledge engineering, audio and video engineering, linguistics, computer science, etc. This Conference aims to bring together people from all the diverse specialisms that contribute to integrated information systems and services.
Important themes running through through the conference include:
- Integration and semantic interoperability between diverse resources – text, images, audio, multimedia
- Social networking and user participation in knowledge structuring
- Image retrieval
- Information architecture, metadata and faceted frameworks
Further information can be found from the conference programme, and by visiting the conference home page.
Commercial Images Means Better Websites
A previous article on another digi blog illustrated how the commercial arms of the British Library and British Museum seemed to produce more efficient and innovative websites for users to browse and buy their digital wares.
Following on from this, Christie’s the Auctioneers have an excellent website which allowed potential customers and interested bystanders to browse the collections they sell, such as the the recently sold Yves St Laurent collection of art. You can visit the various lots via the Christie’s calendar of events.
As well as being well designed, there are plenty of easy-to-use functions to allow buyers to navigate through the images, including a slide rule which allows them to determine the price, and a plenty of meaningful categories (eg. painting, jewellery, furniture) which make it simple to navigate through the many thousands of images in each collection.
Again, certain public sector sites, for whatever kind of digital content, could take a leaf out of commercial sector’s book.