JISC Digital Media Blog Archive
January 2010

Using photos to enhance user experience

Posted by Zak Mensah on Friday 29 January 2010 at 11:25am
Tags: inspiration | interfaces | photographs | photography | usability | user experience

Local usability consultancy Cx partners have a thought provoking take on the power of photos to enhance your resources.

Take a few minutes to explore 10 ways you can use photos to influence the user experience

Credit: Ant Theobald

Negative thinking

Posted by Nigel Goldsmith on Wednesday 27 January 2010 at 1:27pm
Tags: digitisation | negatives | news | photographs | photography | restoration | scanning

We have just released a new advice document looking at the different materials used to make film for stills and moving images.

A lot of historic film footage was captured on stock which is highly unstable and may not be around much longer. Some collections are potentially explosive and so this document - Analogue Film Types Used for Still and Moving Images - is aimed at helping users identify older film negatives in their collection.

The iconic image of the ‘Migrant Mother’ by Dorothea Lange, 1936. Photo from The Library of Congress on Flickr: The Commons - No known copyright restrictions

This picture was initially photographed on highly unstable nitrate film.

Everything you need to know about MP3

Posted by Gavin Brockis on Wednesday 20 January 2010 at 3:37pm
Tags: audio editing | file formats | metadata | news | sound recordings

A new advice document looking at use and management of the popular MP3 audio format. From its suitability for use delivering audio in teaching and learning, to how to use ID3 tags to identify, catalogue and manage your MP3 resources, we look at all aspects of this most well known of sound file types.

If you use digital audio in any way at all, you have probably come across MP3s. Home and office computers, mobile phones, iPods, media players… even car stereos and games consoles all now offer facilities for playing back MP3 audio, as well as viewing cover art, lyrics and the myriad other tags which can accompany them. But while most people are at least familiar with what an MP3 is, many don’t know how MP3 works, and which of its many options to choose to get the best from it.

Our new User Guide to MP3 aims to explain the essentials of MP3 in an accessible way, as well as exploring its more esoteric audio options and extended capabilities for encapsulating rich metadata.

There is a huge range of tools for encoding, decoding and editing MP3, so as well as technical background we cover some common tasks and processes, and include links to resources to enable you to become an MP3 power user!

Case study - Greenhead college

Posted by Zak Mensah on Monday 18 January 2010 at 9:07am
Tags: e-learning | video | vle | moodle | workflow

Our sister service has recently released a case study detailing work that Greenhead College has done on creating a video storage system for use with Moodle.

Greenhead College provides and streams video content via its virtual learning environment (VLE) to enable concurrent viewing of content for all students and staff 24/7. By developing its own media server, to store video content and link it to its VLE, Greenhead has seen increased usage of its VLE, and has also removed the constraints of limited physical space for hard-copy collections in the library. A cross-organisational approach has brought together the ‘magic triangle’ of curriculum, learning resources and the technical team, which has resulted in seamless access to targeted, subject-based learning resources.

Taken from the case study summary

This case study will be of interest to those interested in the use of online video for teaching and learning within a VLE environment.

Visit: Greenhead College: Joining up curriculum, learning resources and the technical team. The case study was produced by JISC Regional Support Centre for Yorkshire & Humber on behalf of the Excellence Gateway.

Two new lighting documents

Posted by Nigel Goldsmith on Monday 11 January 2010 at 3:44pm
Tags: lighting | news | photography | video

We have just released two advice documents which cover lighting for stills and video production. 

The Taking Pictures under Available Light document provides a useful introduction to anyone using ambient light or other readily available light sources to illuminate a subject.

The Light Sources for Still and Moving Images document looks at a range of lighting from daylight through to specialist studio systems. It also looks at the different qualities and colour characteristics of each light type and how the light quality can be modified.

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Describing your digital resources

Posted by Antony Theobald on Friday 08 January 2010 at 10:56am
Tags: delivery | digital collections | metadata | news

We have just published our completely updated advice documents on metadata.

Photo by Fabrizio Sciami on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons licence

Metadata is essentially structured textual information that describes something about the creation, content or context of an individual file or collection of many digital files.

If you have a collection of digital resources - images, video or audio files - you and the users of those files will need metadata to describe, organise and find them.

There are eight documents in all - if you are new to metadata, we would recommend starting with An Introduction to Metadata.

• An Introduction to Metadata
• Metadata and Digital Images
• Metadata and Audio Resources
• Metadata and Digital Video
• Metadata Standards and Interoperability
• Putting Things in Order: a Directory of Metadata Schemas and Related Standards
• Controlling your Language: a Directory of Metadata Vocabularies
• Approaches to Describing Images

Latest newsletter now available

Posted by Antony Theobald on Tuesday 05 January 2010 at 2:15pm
Tags: news | newsletter

The second issue of our newsletter Intermedia is now available.

Make an e-book from an RSS feed

Posted by Zak Mensah on Tuesday 05 January 2010 at 9:00am
Tags: e-learning | workflow

Joss Winn from the University of Lincoln, nicely explains how ‘Creating a PDF or eBook from an RSS feed’ can easily be done. Image credit.