OxCLIC case studies and user requirements

The following are theoretical user requirement needs for the workflow, cataloguing and repository of educational images for teaching and research.

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 Since University slide-making facilities were withdrawn, further development has been in digital form (mainly scans from publications, but increasingly digital photographs).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:

The resources for a course taught by lecturers who come from across and outside the University and bring with them their own personal slides have been assembled in a single location. The department has a consolidated list of the images that are being used to teach the course. Students have access to the images outside the class. The foundations have been laid for a core image collection that is demand-led, and therefore cost effective. 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.