OxCLIC is an ongoing image management project concerned with the practical use of digital images in teaching within the University of Oxford, focusing on slide collections held by the Department of the History of Art and the faculties of Classics, Archaeology and Oriental Studies.

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Introduction

Academics in all disciplines make extensive use of images in their teaching and research, typically this has been through the use of extensive slide collections that have been built up over many years. However, emerging technologies has brought about a gradual decline in the primacy of slide-based teaching in favour of digital resources. The Department of the History of Art houses one of the largest of Oxford's slide collections - approximately 170,000 35mm slides - which is further used by a multitude of departments and faculties across the University. The faculties of Classics, Archaeology and Oriental Studies have assorted collections that amount to a similar size.

As the Association of Art Historians asserts, many academics and institutions are forced to explore the possibilities of digitising their slide collections to enable their delivery through digital media rather than increasingly marginalised analogue counterparts. The OxCLIC project seeks to identify a working system that promotes the use of digital images in education. The project will explore components of a system for the digitisation (scanning analogue slides to create digital images), management (of images and accompanying metadata), search and retrieval across multiple collections, presentation in the classroom and submission and storage of digital images and metadata in a number of implementations distributed across departments.

A shorter and concise overview of the project is available for download (Adobe Acrobat PDF) [:Media:OxCLIC_intro.pdf:here].

Project Goals

The project aims to enrich the visual resources available within the teaching process by promoting the conversion of existing teaching slide collections to digital form and making them available to the widest constituency within the University, and, potentially, outside the University.

The pilot project will seek to:

Portfolio Cataloguing System

See the [:OxCLIC_portfolio: OxCLIC Portfolio page] for notes on how to use and set-up the application for cataloguing, and to download a Portfolio template file with base metadata.

A 30-day trial (OS X or Win) of the cataloguing system, Extensis Portfolio 8, is available here - http://www.extensis.com/en/products/asset_management/

MDID Image Management Server

MDID is the pilot online image server application.

See ["OxCLIC_MDID"] for further resources and tutorials on using MDID with the OxCLIC project.

The online manual for the Madison Digital Image Database (MDID) server is available here - http://mdid.org/mdidwiki/index.php

Scanner Shoot-out

I have posted samples at http://www.csad.ox.ac.uk/varia/scanning/ for information. It is encouraging that both scanners (Nikon Coolscan film scanner and Epson 4990 flatbed) produced very usable images from indifferent originals. [CC]

Theoretical Case Studies

Constructing a collection

This post holder Prof X uses c. 2,000 slides in current lecture courses, classes, seminars and research papers. Digitisation of this visual material would provide a starting point for a core digital collection for the subject. Slide collections up to now have worked well on daily local need-driven organisation. If there is to be a consolidated distributed management system, it is important for this to be compatible with individual needs to store, use, access, and add to collections that are used on a daily level for teaching. A key requirement in digitising and cataloguing is that the end user must devise and oversee the labelling and taxonomical indexing of individual images and collections if there is to be any hope of recovering material quickly and intelligibly.

Managing individual collections

This post holder Prof Y has a large personal collection of slides (c. 18,000), a proportion of which (c. 2,000) exist in digital form; all new material will be captured digitally. Basic metadata annotations for most of the collection and all of the digitised material are available in an Access database. Storage, management, manipulation and sharing of already digitised material at an individual level are now becoming problematic; the difficulties will only increase as more digital material is created.

Adapting a collection for digital delivery

The post holder Prof Z has a collection of c. 10,000 slides that are drawn on for lectures, seminars, and research papers. The large majority of these are catalogued in a FileMaker database. Since University slide-making facilities were withdrawn, further development has been in digital form (mainly scans from publications, but increasingly digital photographs). This material, which is used for the same basic purposes as the slides, is not yet catalogued. Without a suitable system for combining the two collections, the material will become increasingly difficult to use.

The original images among the slides (all so identified in the database) need to be transferred to digital format with their metadata and integrated with the new digital material. Slides taken from books should be progressively replaced with newly scanned images.

Departmental needs for an image server

Department A has a very large slide collection used by departments and faculties across the university. The department has been running, initially on a trial basis, a system of scanning slides from one of its core undergraduate courses. This trial has served a number of key aims:

There is now a pressing need for an image management system for this growing collection which would allow images to be searched and retrieved and access rights to be controlled where copyright of material is an issue. If various departments maintained image collections that were searchable in a federated fashion the time, cost and effort involved in assembling collections such as this could be substantially reduced.

Project Resources and documentation

=== Metadata Schemes===

Software systems

Extensis Portfolio Cataloguing software

MDID Image Server