Film and Sound in Education: New Videos
Despite the unbiquitous presence of moving image and sound in much of our daily lives, it has largely failed to make any impact in academic teaching, learning and research.
In an attempt to strengthen the role of film and sound in further and higher education, the Film and Sound Think Tank has recently launched a set of videos.
The films examine the role of audio and visual content in education, and how the protential of this media can be unlocked.
The fourth video is available on Vimeo:
JISC – Unlocking Artists’ Rights – JISC Film and Sound Think Tank
As an aside, it is interesting to note the number of views these videos have had in their short life on YouTube (one of the videos – Using Ausio in education – had 138 views).
While the numbers don’t necessarily tell us the whole story – how long were they viewed? – this may already signal the importance and levels of interest in this topic to the education community and beyond.
Community Content Call: Strand II Winners
The second strand of Grant 13/09: BCE, e-Content & Digitisation programmes: Developing community content aims to build new digital collections, or transform existing collections through genuine co-creation with specific external communities.
Below are the five winning projects from strand II of this call (two are currently conditional awards):
OurWikiBooks
(Conditional Award)
University of Manchester (Alexandria Walker)
This project will undertake co-development, with teachers and GCSE and A-level students, of a new digital collection of key concerns and knowledge in computing education. In the process, the project will build a community that collaboratively creates digital collections of imaginative educational materials for use in learning and teaching computing, with this content being made available to the computing education community in the UK and worldwide.
My Leicestershire
University of Leicester (Ben Wynne)
This project will create a base digital archive comprised of historical texts from the University of Leicester Library’s Special Collections complemented by video recordings from MACE, oral history recordings from EMOHA and private collections of historical photographs of ‘ghost signs’, buildings, bridges and other architecturally significant sites from across the county.
Media and Memory in Wales, 1950-2000
(Conditional Award)
University of Aberyswyth (Dr. Iwan Rhys Morus)
This project will collect and archive oral testimony relating to the age of television in Wales. It will solicit memories of significant televisual moments in politics and culture. By focussing on four distinct geographical and linguistic communities, it will seek to provide a spectrum of memories that represent a national collective memory of television in Wales.
Welsh Voices of the Great War Online
University of Cardiff (Gethin Matthews)
This project will work with the families of those in Wales who fought, or otherwise served, in the First World War in order to collect and make available online the range of artefacts that are held in private hands. The results will be presented via the People’s Collection website, a Welsh Assembly Government funded project.
Community Cafe Projects
University of Southampton (Alison Dickens)
The project will address the scarcity of up to date, online resources for community languages. The aim of the project is to co-create a community collection of online language and cultural materials which will significantly enhance existing materials to support community languages.
Writers Respond to the John Jonson Collection
The first of this year’s releases of the John Johnson Collection: An Archive of Printed Ephemera has just been announced.
The publication is a series of fourteen specially commissioned essays that respond to a diverse selection of items from the John Johnson Collection.
These concise and illuminating studies – which have been contributed by Rob Banham, Troy Bickham, Robert Colls, Simon Eliot, D. J. Taylor, Michael Twyman and Mariana Warner – are available in the John Johnson Collection alongside digital facsimile images of the items to which they relate.
The complete list of essays is accessible via a link on the John Johnson Collection home page or by clicking the Responses link in the toolbar that appears at the top of every screen in the John Johnson Collection.
New Content
Facsimile images of more than 13,700 items have been added to the John Johnson Collection with this release, bringing the total number of scanned items to 62,421 (a total of 167,356 images), including more than 19,700 pieces of theatrical and non-theatrical ephemera from the Nineteenth-Century Entertainment category and more than 9,500 items from the Booktrade category.
Over 10,900 Popular Prints are now available in facsimile form, along with more than 20,700 items from Advertising and over 1,400 from Crimes, Murders and Executions.
Future Developments: Enhanced Records for Crime, Murders and Execution
Of the five major categories of material included in The John Johnson Collection, the Crimes, Murders and Executions section is one of the most popular and most often consulted, providing documentary evidence which supports research in various aspects of social history.
The Bodleian Library and ProQuest are enhancing this material, with the help of JISC e-Content funding, by mapping individual records to the appropriate entries in a number of external online resources that contain references, citations or other related material, thereby offering users the scope to explore more easily themes and narratives encountered in the John Johnson Collection.
The project will guide researchers to other information directly related to their line of enquiry, and allow them to build connections or follow trails between different resources.
The resources that the project will link to are:
- Old Bailey Proceddings Online
- Harvard law School Library’s digitised broadside collection: Dying Speeches and Bloody Murders
- Newgate calendar
- Bodleian Library’s digitised catalogue of broadside ballads.
More information is available about the project on the JISC website for this project.
Alice in Wonderland’s adventures digitised
I recently blogged about the launch of the University of Exeter’s Digital Collections Online.
Some of the amazing images that were digitised and added to the repository demand to be highlighted in more depth.
With all the hype about Tim Burton’s new Alice in Wonderland film, it seems appropriate to highlight the amazing collection of images that the archive holds on film and cinema (and the optical and visual more generally).
The image of Alice included in this piece, is taken from a box of slides that come originate in a Magic Lantern Collection.
This pre-cinematic invention used a series of slides that were projected onto a wall. Smallscale shows were put on by travelling lanternists using a candle to project the images.
Occassionally visual tricks were employed to engage and capture the audiences attention – not dissimilar to 
our ongoing fascination and the appeal of 3D at the movies!
But, the link between the past and present is not the only value of digitising and making these collections available online.
The collection held by Exeter is fascinating, not only for what it can tell us about the history of cinema and film; but also how the edges of each object and collection of objects touch upon, and overlap with other areas of study and research.
Many of the slide collections are incredibly rich resources for researchers and students looking not only at, for example, cinematic history, but also the subject matter and content of the images and objects themselves.
Magic lantern slides cover subject areas including, astrology and zoology offering a rare and primary source glimpse into Victorian culture and ideas.
The project has attempted to provide preliminary pathways through some of the content by creating ‘curated’ collections and e-learning packages centred around certain themes.
It seems this collection cannot help but cross new boundaries and inspire new ideas and avenues of thought.
Centre for Digital Excellence Captures Chaucer on Camera!
The Codex (Centre for Digital Excellence) project at the University of Manchester recently visited National Trust Petworth House in Sussex to digitise a medieval Chaucer manuscript.
The project aims to establish partnerships with museums, libraries and archive repositories throughout the region, and beyond, to develop and test collaborative models for digitisation.
This was the projects first visit to a collection to photograph and digitise a collection, and also gave the team at Petworth House a chance to ask the team questions and watch them work.
The event was captured by the BBC and includes an interesting piece of film with the curator at Petworth House.
Digital Collections Online is launched
Tuesday 16th March saw the launch of Exeter University’s Digital Collections Online.
Delivering images and digital objects from Exeter’s most prestigious research collections, including over 2000 images showcasing Victorian culture, openly available for teaching and research.
The website includes e-learning packages to help embed the collections use within the university’s teaching, learning and research.
Highlights of the collection include historic popular culture images from Queen Victoria to Alice in Wonderland.
The Launch was preceeded by a workshop on the Digital Futures of Special Collections.
Partly as a response to the Enriching Digital Resources programme, the workshop examined many of the issues Special Collections and Archives face in delivering digital resources to users in the twenty-first century and beyond.
Some of the themes that emerged from the presentations and discussions are worth sharing:
- Students don’t care where (physically) an object is stored: they simply want access, whenever they need it. Linked to this is:
- Objects must be easy to use and find: especially for students who will often take the path of least resistance in searching for content.
- The digital doesn’t replace the physical, instead it facilitates a dialogue between the object and its simulacra.
- Metadata is not dead, yet. Descriptions allow users to find the objects. But how do we overcome shortages of resources and expertise to enrich metadata?
- As much as possible content should be shared and set free. There are many challenges to this, but where possible this should be the norm, not the exception. This may also help answer the issue of enriching metadata.
- Sharing and opening up content is not a loss of authority or power… rather it is empowering others.
There were many others, some of which may inspire future blog posts, but these were the ones that stuck with me.
The workshop was collaborative and challenging as anything worthwhile should be, and it seems a fitting vehicle to launch a new online digital collection.
Visual Resources Digitisation Officer – Job Vacancy
Visual Resources Digitisation Officer (FIXED TERM CONTRACT)
5 months (1.0 FTE) or 10 months (0.5 FTE)
ADD LINKS
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.
European Conference on Digital Libraries – Call for Papers
14th European Conference on Digital Libraries - Call for Papers
September 6-10, 2010
Glasgow, UK
Overview
The European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL) is the leading European scientific forum on digital libraries and associated technical, practical, and social issues, bringing together researchers, developers, content providers and users in the field.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Digital Libraries and Mobility
- Digital Library Architectures
- Digital Library Infrastructure
- Digital Preservation and Curation
- Information Mining in Digital Libraries
- Information Retrieval in Digital Libraries
- Interoperability of Digital Library Systems and Services
- Knowledge Organisation Systems
- Metadata Standards and Protocols in Digital Library Systems
- Multilinguality in Digital Libraries
- Multimedia Digital Libraries
- Personal Information Management and Personal Digital Libraries
- Personalisation in Digital Library Systems and Settings
- Policies for Digital Library systems
- Social Networking, Web 2.0 and Collaborative Interfaces in Digital LibrariesUser Interfaces for Digital Libraries
- User Studies for and Evaluation of Digital Library Systems and Applications
- Visualisation in Digital Libraries
Submissions
All contributions must be written in English. They must follow the formatting guidelines of Springer’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) and must be submitted via the conference submission system.
Further information
For further information, please visit the conference web site at http://www.ecdl2010.org/ or email info@ecdl2010.org.
HEFCE funding decision and Digitisation calls
Last week it was announced that HEFCE would be making funds available for some of the JISC funding calls that had been postponed.
e-Content currently has a call out on Developing Community Collections. Strand II of this call has been on hold while HEFCE made their decision on funding.
It has been announced that funds are now available to continue this work, and Strand II will now be continuing, albeit with a slightly revised timetable for submission and project start times.
The revised deadline for submission of proposals will be the 15th March 2010, with projects starting in May 2010.
Further information about the revised timetable for this work is available on the JISC website.
JorumOpen
The recent launch of JorumOpen sees free access to a growing collection of open educational resources.
JorumOpen will allow lecturers and teachers to share materials under the Creative Commons licence framework. This will allow for easier sharing, grants users greater rights for use and re-use of online content and is easier to understand.
Jorum has also developed a range of Youtube videos on using JorumOpen.
For digitisation projects this is an ideal place to both deposit any educational resources you may have developed as outputs for your project, and also offers a unique resource for uncovering and reusing new resources.