Stills from a selection of IWF films in Film & Sound Online.
Anopholes: Blood-sucking female mosquito
Anatomy of a Transverse Leaf Section
Aibom (New Guinea, Middle Sepik) - Painting a Sago Jar
Newsline from EDINA
December 2006: Volume 11, Issue 4
Stills from a selection of IWF films in Film & Sound Online.
Anopholes: Blood-sucking female mosquito
Anatomy of a Transverse Leaf Section
Aibom (New Guinea, Middle Sepik) - Painting a Sago Jar
Jorum, the free online repository service collecting and making available learning and teaching materials to UK Further and Higher Education Institutions, has some significant improvements to report as it reaches the end of its first successful year of service.
Development of the Jorum service has always been based on comments and feedback
from the user community. As a result, the Jorum web site has recently been
upgraded and redesigned.
Improved usability. Because Jorum comprises two types of service (contributing
and downloading), navigation can sometimes be confusing. Two new sections -
'An Introduction to Contributing for Beginners' and an improved 'Getting Started
with Jorum' section - should help users find the answers they are looking for
more quickly than before.
Quick statistics. Many Jorum users have requested some basic statistics such as how many resources the service holds, how many users and how many institutions have signed up to use Jorum. By December 2006 there had been 2263 downloads of 1949 resources by 1714 users at 301 institutions.
RSS feeds for materials in Jorum. Users can now set up RSS feeds in Jorum so that they are automatically notified when new resources they are interested in are contributed. Users can log into Jorum, search for resources about History, for example, and then save the search as an RSS feed. They can bookmark this feed in their web browser favourites or simply drag the RSS feed button to their RSS reader.
Improved accessibility. The site has been designed to meet at least level 2 (AA) of the W3C's Website Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Guidelines, and as far as possible to meet level 3 (AAA). In addition, each page on this website has been checked to ensure that it is XHTML-strict and also validates against its associated Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). If you have any difficulty accessing this service and require further help, or if you have any suggestions to help improve accessibility, please use the feedback form.
Following negotiations between JISC and IWF (one of the leading science film
institutes in the world), permission has been granted to allow IWF Knowledge & Media
films to be used in Jorum learning resources. UK colleges and universities
contributing resources to Jorum are now able to incorporate these films, or
parts of them, into any digital materials they intend to deposit.
The IWF films that can be used by Jorum Contributors are available from Film & Sound Online. This service, based at EDINA, hosts other collections besides IWF, but the permission to include films in Jorum resources applies only to the IWF collection.
There are currently 837 IWF films in Film & Sound Online, covering nature and technology, the biological sciences, and ethnographic customs. The Jorum Project Manager at EDINA, Moira Massey, is delighted at the news: "The IWF's decision offers the Jorum Contributor community the opportunity to use free, high quality audio-visual recordings to incorporate into learning resources."
Jorum Contributors wishing to take advantage of the IWF films can download them freely, providing that their institution subscribes to Film & Sound Online. For further information on subscriptions, please visit the link below.