Multimedia portal could open doors to sound and moving pictures

A partnership, led by the national datacentre EDINA, and supported by the Spoken Word Project at Glasgow Caledonian University, the University of Hull and St Helen’s College Merseyside, will take the project forward and report early next year on the feasibility of such a portal. 

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 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.

 A recent report from the Jisc Images Working Group 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 interface to an 'image reservoir network.' 

Jisc programme manager Balviar Notay said: 'The main purpose of this work is to stimulate and advance thinking in this area and to develop a firm understanding of user requirements. We can then use this as a basis for specifying a range of useful portal functions. While visual and sound materials remain under-used, there is clearly much to be done to increase the accessibility and prominence of this material in education. Making the hidden more visible is one of the things a portal can certainly do.' 

For further information, please click on the following link:  VSM portal  

Balviar Notay and Catherine Grout recently co-authored an article for Ariadne about this area of work. To access this article, please go to: Ariadne article