Spoken Word Services is based at Glasgow Caledonian University. Our core aim is to enhance and transform educational experience through the integration of digitised spoken word audio and video into learning and teaching.

Spoken Word Services has strong foundations as a project funded as part of the JISC/NSF Digital Libraries in the Classroom Programme (DLIC). The project runs from 2003 - 2008.

- In the USA:
Michigan State University: MATRIX
Northwestern University: Academic Technologies & OYEZ
- In the UK:
Glasgow Caledonian University
With the BBC (Information and Archives)

1. Augmenting student competence to write on, and for, the Internet
2. Enhancing digital libraries through a focus on learning
3. Improving student learning and retention
4. Developing aural literacy in our students

We offer access to content, tools and added-value services. We believe these services have considerable wider utility for scholarship, scholarly communication and research.

We have a partnership agreement with the BBC which allows us to make audio and video from their archives available for educational use.

The archives are a unique repository of UK history & culture, stretching back to 1937. There are over 1million items in the archives, ranging from Leonard Cheshire’s eyewitness account of the Nagasaki atomic bomb to Boy George’s frank discussion of his own heroin addiction. Up to now the archives have been largely inaccessible, but this is changing.

Our focus is on bringing spoken word audio and video into the classroom for learning and teaching.
Teachers in our community of practice build collections based on their teaching and research interests. We currently have several hundred hours of audio/video available for educational use.

We have an increasing amount of non-BBC content available, including audio recordings from the Glasgow Centre for Population Health events and Glasgow Caledonian University Archives Witness Seminars.

- click on ‘Find Audio & Video‘
- sign up for an educational user account
- start searching!

We have details of our local, national and international teaching collaborations on our web site.

We are developing subject-based resource lists of audio, video and other associated materials to aid learners, teachers and researchers. Recognised and respected subject experts in each field select and evaluate the materials in each collection. Learning scenarios are being developed around Spoken Word resources, and re-usable learning objects will soon be made available.

Absolutely - we believe that library methods are essential for effective scholarly communication. Our repository is fully searchable online and uses metadata standards such as Dublin Core.

Using our web search tool, Padova, you can view a catalogue record and listen/watch to audio/video at the same time. You can link to a stable web address or download a copy for individual educational use.

We provide access to a suite of collaboration, collection and annotation tools for images, audio and video. These tools, Project Pad and MediaMatrix, have been developed in collaboration with our US partners.

We provide a range of related services for teachers, including audio recording and advice, blog services, rights awareness, advice on open standards, and funding opportunities.

We hope that having easy access to Spoken Word ‘authentic voices’ will offer excellent alternatives to traditional text based resources, and be of direct benefit in teaching and research.

We are always looking at ways to improve our services. We hope that you would join our informal Community of Practice and provide valuable feedback on your use of our content, tools and services.

We are directly addressing the national policy framework:-

‘… to develop innovative applications of digital technologies that will contribute to making education and lifelong learning more personalised, inclusive, flexible, and productive’

By bringing content to our users in a variety of flexible ways - to the web browser, to their mobile phone, to their iPod - we hope to directly address the socio-technological world of the modern student, and make it easy to engage with previously inaccessible content.

Please visit our contact page.