image©2005 JupiterImages Corporation
Newsline from EDINA
November 2005: Volume 10, Issue 3
image©2005 JupiterImages Corporation
EDINA is leading a partnership sponsored by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) to scope and build a demonstrator for a national Visual and Sound Material (VSM) Portal.
The portal will access material licensed for the JISC community, those available 'free' on the internet, and those generated within the academic and publicly-funded community.
EDINA's partners are the Spoken Word Project at Glasgow Caledonian University, the University of Hull, and St Helen's College, Merseyside.
One of the main recommendations arising from a recently completed JISC study is that "the JISC community now has enough experience with time-based media to know that they carry with them more challenges than most other media . . . their rights issues are more complex . . . they present special challenges for storage, indexing, and retrieval. An exploration of their potential will need novel and sustained research and development."
The VSM Portal project is previewing numerous reports to guide the specification and development of a facility providing a single integrated access point for the range of still-image, moving-picture and sound collections in the JISC Information Environment.
The VSM Portal is an outcome of JISC co-ordinating policy for multimedia service provision, following examples in 1997 "to integrate access to distributed high-quality image resources and encourage their use in scholarly research and teaching"[1]. JISC has supported both programmes of digitisation, with focus on format, and the provision of multimedia resources for Further and Higher Education communities, mainly through the licensing of a number of commercial image collections.
A recent report from the JISC Images Working Group (IWG)[2] indicated awareness that the maturity of the content, coupled with high demand and fragmented competition, means that a VSM portal could offer a much needed user interface to an "image reservoir network".
More information on the VMS Portal.
1. Report from JISC Collections Manager, January 1998
2. JISC Images Working Group Vision Document (May 2005)