The launch of JISC Digital Media
JISC Digital Media is the new name for the Technical Advisory Service for Images (TASI). The JISC Digital Media team will continue to provide advice, training and guidance on the creation and use of digital media collections, with the expanded service now providing expertise in moving images and sound in addition to still images and their use in learning, teaching and research.
From help with finding and using the right media, to advice on creating and delivering digital formats or consultancy on managing a digitisation project, JISC Digital Media promotes good practice, technical expertise, the use of appropriate standards and the sharing of knowledge within the UK FE and HE communities.
JISC Digital Media are also holding a number of reception events where you can find out more about the service. Visit the team blog to get further details, or email launch@jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk .
For further information about JISC Digital Media’s services please visit the website, email: info@jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk or call 0117 331 4447
First hand accounts of the Holocaust
Today is Holocaust Memorial Day and to mark the occasion the British Library’s JISC funded Archival Sound Recordings project has added a new tool for Holocaust research and education, available online.
Here are some of the details of the collection by the project manager, Peter Findlay (more can be read on the Sound recordings blog):
Jewish Survivors of the Holocaust documents the moving testimonies of Jewish immigrants to Britain, many of whom survived Nazi concentration camps. Over 440 hours of life story recordings explore 66 personal experiences of persecution across war-torn Europe and the impact of the Holocaust, covering:
- Anti-Semitism before the Second World War
- Ghettos and concentration camps
- Resistance and liberation
- Searching for family in the aftermath
- Building a new life in Britain
- The legacy of the Holocaust
The Jewish Survivors of the Holocaust resource will also support primary and secondary education, supplementing the study materials and lesson plans provided by the British Library’s Learning team’s Voices of the Holocaust package.
The testimonies now available are drawn from a major oral history programme The Living Memory of the Jewish Community which between 1987 and 2000 gathered 186 audio life story interviews with Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and their children. It was initiated by National Life Stories based in the British Library’s oral history section and funded by a number of organisations including the Harold Hyam Wingate Foundation, the John S Cohen Foundation and the Porjes Charitable Trust.
The collection joins a growing range of oral history recordings on Archival Sound Recordings, which makes selections of music, spoken word, and environmental sounds from the British Library Sound Archive available online. Recordings can be accessed from British Library reading rooms and are available for free to licensed UK higher and further education institutions. In addition, over 2000 recordings, including Jewish Survivors of the Holocaust, are available to the public via the website.
UK higher and further education librarians can email (asr@bl.uk) to request a free licence.
Ginevra House
Engagement Officer
Higher Education Team
The British Library
Ginevra.house@bl.uk
www.bl.uk
+44 (0)20 7412 7245
Make sure collection names are obvious
The British Library’s Sound Archive has some fascinating collections but they tend to have some quite obscure names.
For example, the St Mary-le-Bow public debates have contributions from Iris Murdoch, Peter Cook and Enoch Powell.
A previous version of the Sound Archive website replicated these collection names – and quite possibly put off users who failed to understand what may actually have been in each collection.
However, a new browsing structure has now been created.
It is much more obvious – collections are organised organised according to subject name giving users a more immediate understanding of what might be available.
Unlocking Audio 2: Connecting With Listeners
On 16-17 March 2009, The British Library will be hosting the conference Unlocking Audio 2: Connecting With Listeners.
The conference is a key event exploring the use of sound recordings online, focussing on ways that researchers and other audiences expect to discover, browse, audition and analyse archival audio resources. It will be of interest to content owners, academics & students, service providers, user groups, resource managers, system integrators, and designers and implementers of search & content analysis tools.
Keynotes speakers include Charles Leadbeater, a leading authority on innovation and creativity in organisations, and Andy Powell, Head of Development at the Eduserv Foundation.
Unlocking Audio 2 is supported by JISC and will also celebrate the successful end of the 2nd Archival Sound Recordings project, funded as part of the JISC Digitisation programme.
Important dates
Deadline for abstracts: 12:00 hours GMT on 12 December 2008
Deadline for early registration: 12:00 hours GMT on 19 December 2008
Deadline for late registration: 12:00 hours GMT on 16 February 2009
For more information, see the conference web site.
Learning on Screen 2009 – Call for Papers
The Learning on Screen Conference 2009 will be held at The Wellcome Collection (183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE) on 7th and 8th April 2009.
This annual conference was established by the Society for Screen-Based Learning and focuses on the delivery of learning and research with moving image and sound – be it broadcasting, web delivery or cinema.
Two key themes of the conference will be:
• Disability and Access to Moving Image and Sound
• Online Moving image and Sound Services for Learning
The programme will be arranged in 30 minute sessions. The organisers are therefore seeking proposals with a speaker presentation time of 20 minutes each.
Proposals should be submitted (with a title and 200 word summary, along with your name, current position and short biography) to pa@bufvc.ac.uk on or before 15th January 2009.
For more information about the conference please visit the BUFVC web site.
Digitising Moral Panic – Video in the Classroom
Carol Green, from Craven College Skipton, was one of the first lecturers to use the NewsFilm Online resource in a classroom setting, selecting a suite of films from the archive that explore the idea of moral panic.
In particular, she wanted to show her class of Journalism students that the idea of moral panic is not a contemporary one. Clips from the NewsFilm Online archive were central to her argument that moral panics are not only a contemporary concern, but had an imapact in the 1950s.
A news-clip reporting on violence between Mods and Rockers was a key part of her work.
You can see a video of Ms Green explaining her usage of the resource from the JISC website.
Yesterdays’s Headlines …. Televised News Online
NewsFilm Online, launched last week, contains 60,000 digitised clips from the archives of ITN and other news sources.
It’s an incredibly rich resource, featuring news stories relating to events such as the Suez crisis in 1956, Nelson Mandela’s first interview in 1961, the moon landing in 1969 and the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997.
For the moment, it’s fun just exploring some of the content that is there.
But it will be interesting to see how the resources get used in the educational community.
Video has not had a great take up in teaching and learning – is this because of the content, or because of the medium? How NewsFilm Online is used will give us much more evidence in this area.
(Note the videos can only be accessed by those in UK university and college sector.)
Will a BBC video archive swamp everything else?
Various events earlier in the summer gave the BBC the chance to parade their plans to digitise their entire back archive of televisual material. (Although it’s interesting to note there is little info on this on the BBC site itself, particularly on its archive pages).
The plans are not new. Back in 2006, there were reports about this as well.
As often happens when the BBC gets involved, other providers are might be a little nervous about the effect of this.
With the power of the BBC brand and its related marketing strength, and the undoubted brilliance of technologies like the iPlayer, does this not mean that all users, irrespective of background, go straight to the BBC for their video content, rendering the offerings of other content providers somewhat useless?
Other content providers, such as JISC-funded projects like Newsfilm Online or InView will certainly have to work harder at persuading users to visit their site. However, compelling reasons do exist for getting those users to come.
- Comparative video - for instance, InView (due to launch in Spring 2009) is providing comparative videos, which allow users to see how different media outlets have covered the same historical event – something the BBC obviously cannot do by itself.
- Unique content- Newsfilm Online (the full version of which is due to launched on October 3 2008) will have content simply unavailable to the BBC. To choose at random – news items relating to Bird Flu, the Twin Towers attack or, from early Gaumont Screen reels, highlights from England Australia cricket matches, and also film rushes which never made it to the TV screen.
- NewsFilm Online will also provide a different editorial viewpoint, delivering content from media sources such as ITN and Reteurs, rather than the Beeb.
- Both the JISC-funded projects will be making their content freely available to the HE and FE communities, not just for streaming but to download, remix and re-edit. The flexibility to allow users to do what they want with such video clips is vital if users are to exploit the resources in as many ways as possible.
- It’s also worth remembering that the BBC, however impartial, sees the world via a British lens. Perspectives from other countries are supplied by digitisation projects by the National Archives in the United States, or various national bodies in the Netherlands, France or Norway.
- Additionally, the BBC is more news-focussed, and, although the BBC seems to represent a huge mass of content, it is only a drop in the ocean of what could be digitised and made available online.
- So for example, the Performance Shakespeare collection, which is part of Film and Sound Online and the Arts on Film Archive can focus on performing arts content not readily available from the BBC archives.
So that all goes to show there are plenty of reasons for users to work with video content beyond that made available via the BBC (which it should not be forgotten is only talking about these plans for digitisation at the moment).
But other content providers need to have focussed marketing and communications plans to ensure users are aware of this.
Public libraries digitising music
During a recent meeting on digitisation in the EU, the JISC Digitisation Programme came across this interesting digitisation model from the Rotterdam Central Record Library
- The library in Rotterdam owns 300,000 CDs (including mainstream stuff)
- They are digitising every CD
- CDs are then lent digitally, ie via Internet, to library users (for free)
- Users can use the tracks for a limited period before DRM kicks in and blocks use
- Publishers were initially suspicious but have been won over because users are now getting access to stuff that they never knew of before – and then they buy it if they like it
Using Sound in Education – Sound Archives User Panel
The Archive Sound Recording Project is developing its user panel, and holding a related event on 11th March 2008. Details below
The British Library’s Archival Sound Recordings (www.bl.uk/sounds) is a JISC funded project to make selected material from the Sound Archive available online to Higher and Further Education institutions. The project will be hosting a User Community event on 11th March at the British Library, St Pancras, for academics and postgraduate students who would like to become more actively involved with the service.
Reflecting the material we are making available, we are looking for specialists in Art and Design, Art History, Media, English, History, Social Sciences, Music, African Studies, Zoology, Political, Religious and Cultural Studies.
User Community members will have the opportunity to influence the direction and development of the project, support the development of case studies, host workshops, give conference papers and work with us to encourage use of the resource in the academic community.
There are two levels of involvement: User Panel members will be asked to attend a small number of meetings and workshop sessions during 2008 and early 2009, and Online Community members are invited to contribute from afar. Due to the large amount of interest that has been shown in the User Panel, we may have to be selective regarding membership of the Panel itself. Contributions by members of the Online Community are equally valuable to the project, as ultimately the community engaging with the website will be entirely online.
If you are interested in attending the event please send me an email (ginevra.house AT bl.uk) with a short CV or a link to your web-page. Places are limited, and we may have to select attendees to ensure an even spread of academic disciplines and geographical area.
Ginevra House
Engagement Officer
Archival Sound Recordings Project
British Library