Digital Images for Education

EDINA is playing a key role in building a JISC Collections "archive" containing over 500 hours of film and 56,000 photos documenting modern history, all copyright-cleared for use in education.

The process began early this year, when, with £2.5m funding from JISC, an expert panel of e-learning advisors, librarians, academics and image specialists chose 11 collections from 10 suppliers to form an archive for students and academics, which is scheduled to be available from July 2010.

Between now and February 2010, batches of content should be delivered each month by the suppliers to a "holding bay" that EDINA is building as a tool for a team of evaluators.

Each still and moving image has to be checked for quality, and extensive metadata tagging is required for searching and browsing.

Lorraine Estelle, CEO of JISC Collections, said:

"The new images purchased as part of the Digital Images for Education initiative bring to life our history and capture, in particular, the key events of the past 25 years – from the death of Princess Diana to the election of Barack Obama. The images will complement our existing and highly popular collections – NewsFilm Online, Film & Sound Online and the Education Image Gallery [all hosted at EDINA] – to provide the UK education community with a world-class library of still and moving images covering the last 150 years."