Newsline from EDINA
December 2006: Volume 11, Issue 4
The JISC development team has given EDINA the go-ahead to lead a project that will build a demonstrator portal for accessing moving and still image collections within the JISC Information Environment. With input from our collaborative institutions, St Helen’s College in Merseyside and Glasgow Caledonian University in Glasgow, we will build and test a demonstrator portal that both facilitates discovery of multimedia content and links users to tools for manipulating that content.
By November 2007, the project is scheduled to deliver the portal interacting with a cross-section of collections, along with a set of supporting policies. It will also report on the development process and make recommendations for future development of a service-scale portal.
EDINA secured agreement-in-principle to participate from a range of relevant content providers during the scoping phase for this project. We now seek to agree the detail of our technical and legal relationships in order to provide a sufficient range of content and media types to demonstrate the functionality of a VSM portal.
Multimedia collections that might be accessible through the demonstrator portal include the British Library, the JISC multimedia services Film & Sound Online and Education Image Gallery, Scran, AHDS- Visual Arts and the British Pathé newsreel archive.
During this project, we will seek to embed the portal demonstrator within the information environments of the collaborative institutions. We expect this to help us generate recommendations on addressing cultural and institutional variation in the JISC community.
The demonstrator portal will be based on the scoping phase report delivered in May 2006.