————-
Accommodation

———–
Lectures, Tutorials and Labs

———
Induction Week

————-
Campus Facilities

————-
The Glasgow Experience

————
Studying at Glasgow Caledonian

————
Academic Development Tutor

————–
Advice for New Students

The World Tonight.
Robin Lustig assesses the significance of Barack Obama’s victory for race relations in the US and asks if the world will see many changes in American foreign policy.

Up all night – US Presidential Debate: 27/09/2008
Coverage of the first debate between US presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain, live from the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi.

The Wednesday documentary – My senator, my vote: Episode 1.
Following the Democratic and Republican national conventions, we know much more about the two men fighting it out in the US presidential race, and what they would do in office – but what does the electorate itself want? In My Senator, My Vote the BBC’s Robin Lustig travels to each of the candidates’ home states to meet four ordinary Americans, and finds out what issues have determined their choices. In Part One, we go to Illinois – the state that Barack Obama represents as Senator. Two middle class residents of Chicago explain why they are on opposite sides of the political fence, and foreign policy looms large in their considerations. Should the United States deal with the rest of the world from a position of overwhelming strength, or would its people be better served by a more conciliatory approach? As Robin discovers, it’s not only a question of international strategy, but also one of national identity. Both programmes lift the lid on typical Americans’ lives, highlighting the kind of everyday hopes and fears that will help decide who goes to the White House. Each programme has a sting in the tail however – when Robin asks his subjects to sit down and debate their choices for president. Whose beliefs will best stand up to scrutiny? And will any voter change the other’s mind? Find out in My Senator, My Vote.

Panorama: what now Mr President
Barack Obama takes over as US President with a promise to dramatically change America and make it a fairer place. He is inheriting the worst economic crisis in almost a century, and a country so unequal that 23,000 people die every year because they cannot afford basic healthcare. To close the gap between rich and poor Obama will have to take on the might of the corporate world, which wields enormous influence in Washington. Can he change the world’s most powerful country, and should he?

President Obama: – The Inauguration
Live coverage of the Inauguration of President Obama, with Huw Edwards and Matt Frei in Washington.

Photo by Flickr user Shutterblog, used here under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic .

‘The BBC’s Director of Archive Content Roly Keating has made his first appointment, with former BBC Controller, Internet Tony Ageh joining his team as Controller of Archive Development.

The BBC’s Archive Content team has been set up to maximise on-demand access to the world’s largest audiovisual archive on public service and commercial platforms and through external partners.

Working with Roly and colleagues across the whole of the BBC, Tony will play a key role in developing the BBC’s archive strategy, with specific responsibility for developing ways of making the archive easily understandable and accessible to users………’

Full Press Release from the BBC

The Spoken Word has set up blogs for the each of the students in the class and has introduced them to various new media tools that are currently being used such as tagging, live updating through twitter and polling.

Today’s session of the class included a talk and question and answer session given by Kyle MacRae. Kyle is co-founder of the website Scoopt. Scoopt is an online service that allows members of the public to upload their photos on to the site in the hope that the Scoopt staff can sell the image to news agencies from around the world. The idea for the website came to Kyle after watching the aftermath of the Asian Tsunami that took place on Boxing Day 2004 and the lack of images that the media could source of the event.

It was interesting to hear about Kyle’s experiences both generally and from the point of view of the work that the Spoken Word carries out – specifically in relation to the various rights clearance issues that he has encountered.

Scoopt has now been bought over by Getty Images but despite this Kyle believes that citizen journalism still has not found its feet in the online world. It appears that there is still some way to go before public input is fully embraced by the giants of the media world.

One session chaired by David Suisman from the University of Delaware is of particular interest to the Spoken Word. It is entitled ‘What is Sound to a Historian? – Critical Perspectives on the Use of Recordings as Historical Sources’.

We thought it would be interesting both for us and for the Chairman and Panel of this session if we contacted them in order to let them know about the spectrum of historical resources that the Spoken Word project can offer to the educational community.

We have recordings on a host of historical subjects ranging from Leonard Cheshire’s eyewitness account of the atomic bomb being dropped on Nagasaki to recordings of various parts of the trials at Nuremberg.

The following is a list of the names and conact details of the panel that will be attending the event:

Chair

• David Suisman, University of Delaware, dsuisman@udel.edu, http://www.udel.edu/History/bio/suisman_david.html

Panel

• Charles A. Hardy III, West Chester University, chardy@wcupa.edu, http://www.talkinghistory.org/hardy.html

• Elena Razlogova, Concordia University, erazlogo@alcor.concordia.ca, http://elenarazlogova.org/index.html

• Jonathan Sterne, McGill University, jonathan.sterne@mcgill.ca, http://www.mcgill.ca/ahcs/faculty/sterne/

• Emily Thompson, Princeton University, emilyt@Princeton.EDU, http://www.princeton.edu/history/people/display_person.xml?netid=emilyt

• Derek Vaillant, University of Michigan, dvail@umich.edu, http://www-personal.umich.edu/~dvail/

We will update the blog and let you know about any progress with the correspondence.

Some of the recordings include Florence Nightingale giving a speech in Aid of the Light Brigade Relief Fund, Conan Doyle speaking about Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Miller talking about being married to Norma Jean.

The article, along with a selection of the recordings, can be found here.

On the 18th August 2008 Ewan MacPhee of Spoken Word Services presented to a gathering of around forty members of the eLearning Professionals and Practitioners’ forum at a rain soaked University of Edinburgh.

The forum is designed for members of educational staff who ‘consider themselves to be either professional eLearning/Learning Technology practitioners, or those who make use of technology within their own teaching practice and would like to engage in a more substantive way with others undertaking similar activities’. It is also designed to cater more generally for those interested in unlocking the potential benefits that eLearning may hold for education.

The event on the 18th was entitled ‘Podcasts, Echoes and Tags – multimedia learning objects and activities at the University of Edinburgh’. Despite the title of the event it was not designed exclusively for those based at the University of Edinburgh. Outside groups – including the Spoken Word – were invited to give the proceedings some Glaswegian flair.

The meeting was organised by Michael Begg who is the eLearning Manager for the Learning Technology Section at the University of Edinburgh. He is also the convenor of the eLearning Professionals and Practitioners Forum. The Spoken Word was originally invited to the event by Erin Jackson, one of our collaborators who is based at the University of Edinburgh.

Ewan’s presentation began with a brief history of Spoken Word Services and then moved on to an explanation of the various stages involved in ordering, processing, digitising and presenting BBC materials to the academic community.

Despite the horrendous weather and the fact it was the Summer holiday season the number of attendees far exceeded expectations.  There was a lot of interest and questions from the audience after Ewan had finished presenting. The event seemed to be a great success.

Justice Edwin Cameron is a South African Supreme Court of Appeal Judge. He is widely noted as one of the first key South African figures to publicly announce that he is living with HIV/AIDS. After contracting the syndrome Justice Cameron has campaigned tirelessly to raise awareness of the various social reverberations that are a direct consequence of the disease. These include drug company pricing, lack of access to medication and governmental denial.

He lived privately with the knowledge of his illness for a significant period of time before allowing this information to become public. He was inspired to act after learning of the death of a young carrier of AIDS named Gugu Dlamini who was stoned and stabbed to death after admitting on a Zulu language radio that she was infected with the disease.
Justice Cameron has employed strong rhetoric throughout his campaign speeches and has compared those governments and officials who do not act on the issue of AIDS with those who did not act when Nazi Germany and Apartheid began to creep into the consciousness of the international community. He has been instrumental in the fight to bring the fight against HIV/AIDS to the forefront of International politics.

The following ‘Spoken Word: Collection Highlight’ is a personal and moving interview with one of modern history’s great campaigners. The radio programme is presented by Fergal Keane who orchestrates an interview that uncovers the motives behind the actions of a dying man.

• Taking A Stand

Photo Courtesy of Ben Oswest

‘The NHS is committed to providing quality care that meets the needs of everyone, is free at the point of need, and is based on a patient’s clinical need, not their ability to pay. The NHS will not exclude people because of their health status or ability to pay.’

On Saturday the 5th of July the National Health Service will celebrate 60 years of providing citizens of the United Kingdom with free healthcare regardless of their wealth or social standing. Born out of the report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Social Insurance and Allied Services chaired by William Beveridge (better known as the Beveridge Report) the NHS was the key component of the then Labour government’s ambitious plans to create a Welfare State.

Despite various criticisms such as access controls and waiting list times the NHS has survived the first 60 years of its history relatively unscathed.
Currently the NHS faces significant challenges and scrutiny from a wide arc of society. On account of this many changes have been forecast for the NHS. The most extreme viewpoints argue that it is simply not sustainable as a service due to the increasing advancements in drugs and medical procedures. The outlook may not be this bleak but it is certain that the NHS will have to adapt in order to continuing serving the United Kingdom for the next 60 years.
The Spoken Word has a wide array of materials relating to the NHS. Such is the diversity of the collection that the following links will take the user to a selection of Spoken Word materials:

• Welfare State
• NHS
• Medicine
• William Beveridge

Stephen Fry has recently released a set of ‘podgrammes’ available from both his blog and iTunes. They have become very popular with the podcast audience and on release will typically reach a high spot within the ‘Top Podcasts’ chart on iTunes.

Thus far the subject matter of the podgrammes has revolved around Stephen’s travels around the United States, his hatred of all types of dancing and the suffering he experienced after breaking his arm whilst attempting to board a boat in the Amazon.

The fourth podgramme in the series, though still delivered with the same wit and humour, tackles an altogether more universal and profound subject matter and one that is linked with the work of the Spoken Word Project. This subject matter is the continual struggle that the BBC faces in justifying the amount of funding that they recieve.
The podgramme outlines a speech that Stephen Fry made to a collection of broadcasting officials and politicians at Millbank in London. The BBC asked Mr Fry to speak about whether or not the licence fee should be ‘top sliced’ and share some of its funding with other television channels such as channel 4 who are percieved to be in financial trouble due to lower viewing figures brought on by such things as an increase in the number of television channels available and decreased advertising revenue.

Stephen Fry is in oppostition to this top slicing of the BBC’s funding. He does want to ensure that channel four is in a stable condition but does not believe that this stability should be at the expense of the BBC. The podgramme contains an interesting discussion of the BBC’s practices and the political and social changes that have changed and transformed the corporation into the being that we are now served by today. The podgrame is clearly presented by someone for whom the BBC is ‘deeply stitched into their being’ but regardless of this it is still gets to the root of where the BBC has been and where it is going.

Story from BBC News

‘University College London, the Open University and Trinity College Dublin are putting lectures onto iTunes.

Educational content is already available in the United States through the non-charging “iTunes U” section of the music downloading service.

But European universities are now joining, providing video and audio material for students to use on iPods or computers.

The service will include recordings of lectures from leading academics.

“Our students will be able to revisit materials presented to them in lectures, so they can learn anywhere and anytime,” says Professor Peter Mobbs at University College London (UCL).

Lecture on demand

The initial offerings from UCL will include material about neuroscience, the university’s “lunch time lectures” and an audio news round-up.

The Open University is promising to make available 300 audio and video files with material from current courses.

Trinity College Dublin is promising lectures from journalist Seymour Hersh, scientist Robert Winston, author Anita Desai and politician Alex Salmond.

This will be available from iTunes U, launched by Apple computers last summer as a free education area within the iTunes online music and video store.

It is intended to make lectures available to students at the institutions and to a wider public audience.

This has been used by leading US universities to provide lectures and research news, including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, UC Berkeley and MIT.

Many universities in the UK have been making their own podcasts of lectures, but this will be the first time they have been distributed on the iconic iTunes service.

Open University vice-chancellor Brenda Gourley said it was an exciting new opportunity for anyone, anywhere in the world to gain easy access to its courses.

“Our aim is to partner our established distance learning expertise with the power of the internet to provide as mobile, flexible and personalised learning as possible, whatever your current educational level, personal circumstances or technological abilities.”

A recent market survey showed that four billion songs have been sold through the service since it launched five years ago, making it the biggest music retailer in the United States.

The iTunes service gained its dominant position in online music as the downloading service for the iPod player.

A spokesperson for University College London said that the service would appeal to “techno-literate students” and “reach new audiences around the world”. ‘

A significant degree of the current political frictions between China and Russia on the one hand and the United States on the other has arisen due to the conquest of space. NASA’s ‘Satellite Situation Report‘ estimates that there are roughly 25,000 man made objects currently orbiting our planet. Very recently both the United States and China have launched missiles into space that have subsequently destroyed satellites. Despite varying degrees of international condemnation both countries confirm that they are committed to the peaceful development of outer space.

Britain’s entrance into the furore of space politics was not without controversy. Previously Britain had relied heavily upon the American satellite system for intelligence but during the Falkland’s war Britain realised that this system was not sufficient for their needs. Consequently the country planned to launch it’s first spy satellite to intercept radio signals from Russia and Europe, codenamed Zircon. The Zircon project was eventually canceled in 1987 due to spiraling costs. However a journalist named Duncan Campbell that was working for both New Statesman Magazine and the BBC unearthed some information that the Zircon project had been hidden from Parliament, and estimated it was costing the government £100 million a year. The BBC became increasingly nervous about the content of a documentary that Campbell was producing regarding Zircon and after consultation with the government shelved the project on the grounds of national security. Despite this fact Campbell went on to publish the documentary’s findings in New Statesman and the secret Zircon project then became public knowledge.

Special Branch and the Police raided BBC offices in Glasgow and Duncan Campbell’s home. The contents of the documentary were obtained by opposition MP Robin Cook who planned to show the video to MPs in the House of Commons. The Attorney General managed to place an injunction on the showing of the video and public interest in the whole affair began to disappear. The whole debacle serves to illustrate how sensitive the issue of civil rights and space politics can be.

The Spoken Word has two programmes on the Zircon Project:

• The Nine O’Clock News – The Zircon Affair

This programme contains highlights from an intense Prime Minister’s Question Time in which Margaret Thatcher is attacked by opposition parties for her role in the Zircon Affair.

• The Zircon Affair

This is a video programme that shows the beginning of the original Zircon documentary that was banned under the Official Secrets Act on the grounds of National Security.

Photographs Courtesy of: picadillywilson and Huzhead

Scotland and specifically Glasgow has one of the worst health records in the entire Western world. Glasgow is a perfect candidate for the title ‘A Tale of Two Cities’, it is a vortex of extreme poverty and wealth that has rendered the city with an undeserved scarred and spartan reputation.

It is true that Glasgow’s health record has significantly changed for the better over recent years but much still remains to be done. Government and councils have worked towards healing Glasgow’s ailments through various different projects. One of the projects currently at the forefront of such activity is named the ‘Glasgow Centre for Population Health‘. The GCPH aims to provide a ‘focus on those issues which drive the patterns of ill-health that characterise Glasgow and the West of Scotland’. The organisation ‘provides a setting where academics, policy-makers, practitioners and local people can come together’ in order to ‘help remove the ‘sick city of Europe’ label from Glasgow’.

The Spoken Word has played a key collaborative role with the GCPH by providing a platform for the recording of their seminar series. The seminar series involves a number of public lectures designed to bring a range of input from professionals and lay people on numerous health related topics. The seminars have had various distinguished key speakers opening the discussion including the philosopher A.C. Grayling and the economist Lord Richard Layard.

All of the GCPH seminar series can be found through i-Tunes or directly through our repository by clicking on the image below:

Picture Courtesy Of: bicameral

The RMS Queen Elizabeth 2 recently visited the River Clyde for the last time to celebrate her 40th birthday. The QE 2 was built by the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders in the John Brown Shipyard in Clydebank. Her keel was laid down on July 5th 1965 and she was launched on September 20th 1967 by Queen Elizabeth II. Her final voyage will take place on 11th November 2008 when she will sail from Southampton to Dubai where she shall remain, probably indefinitely. The QE 2 has been bought by the United Arab Emirate’s government for $50.5 million. The United Kingdom’s most famous ship will end its’ life as a luxury floating hotel, retail centre, museum and entertainment destination in the Middle East.

In 2002 the Spoken Word took part in the Glasgow Caledonian University Witness Seminar Series. One of these seminars was based around the story of the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders in order to celebrate the 30th anniversary of their industrial action against the closing of the shipyards. The industrial action did not involve the traditional ‘strike’ but instead protests took the form of a ‘work-in’ that centred around the completion of the orders that the shipyards already had in place.

The witness seminar series is not just a regular slice of Spoken Word media. This is an historical record of memories and thoughts of those that were directly involved in the action. It can be argued that without the protests of the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders then perhaps no shipyards would exist in Glasgow today.

Sound Directions: Best Practices for Audio Preservation establishes best practices in many areas where they did not previously exist. This work also explores the testing and use of existing and emerging standards. It includes chapters on personnel and equipment for preservation transfer, digital files, metadata, storage, preservation packages and interchange, and audio preservation systems and workflows. Each chapter is divided into two major parts: a preservation overview that summarizes key concepts for collection managers and curators, followed by a section that presents recommended technical practices for audio engineers, digital librarians, and other technical staff. This latter section includes a detailed look at the inner workings of the audio preservation systems at both Harvard and Indiana.

This first phase of the Sound Directions project produced four key results: the publication of findings and best practices, the development of much needed software tools for audio preservation, the creation or further development of audio preservation systems at each institution, and the preservation of a large number of critically endangered and highly valuable recordings. All of these are detailed in this publication, which provides solid grounding for institutions pursuing audio preservation either in-house or in collaboration with an outside vendor.

For further information on the Sound Directions project: soundir@indiana.edu

Merry Christmas everyone from the Spoken Word! Our repository is sprinkled with various Christmas themed programmes that are of both educational and festive value. These programmes include:

• Empire Exchange

This is a radio programme originally broadcast in 1934 that depicts Christmas celebrations throughout the Commonwealth. It is of particular note as it includes a Christmas message from King George V.

• Scotland on Film: Christmas and Hogmanay

This is a fascinating television programme from 2002. It highlights the traditional Christmas and Hogmanay celebrations that have taken place in Scotland. It includes some brilliant archive footage of Scots celebrating the festive period throughout the ages.

• Around Scotland – Behind the Scenes at Pantomime

This television programme from 1986 offers a behind the scenes look at the traditional Christmas pantomime.

The dangers may be different but the challenges involved in digital preservation are similarly about trying to predict the unexpected, calculate risk and always having a contingency plan.

Over a period of two years, around 100,000 books from the British Library’s nineteenth century literature collection will be made available on its online catalogue and Microsoft’s Live Search Books.

Approximately 30 terabytes of storage will be required to accommodate the project’s output.

The first 25 million pages are expected to take two years to complete. Texts which are hard to get hold of will particularly benefit from the digitisation. For example, authors who were only ever published outside the great centres of literary life have tended not to remain in print and have often been forgotten.

Now, these authors will have a second chance to reach a readership.

“By digitising the whole collection, we give access to the books without the filter of later judgments, whether based on taste or on the economics of printing and publishing,” Dr Jensen said.

Read the full article here.