At Spoken Word Services we have trialled podcasting of lectures in different subject areas here at Glasgow Caledonian University. If things had worked out differently GCU may have gone to iTunesU earlier too – still, it’s not too late …

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”. ‘

The Sound Directions project at Harvard University and Indiana University announces the publication of Sound Directions: Best Practices for Audio Preservation available to download as PDF from their web site. This 168-page publication presents the results of two years of research and development funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities in the United States. This work was carried out by project and permanent staff at both institutions in consultation with an advisory board of experts in audio engineering, audio preservation, and digital libraries.

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

A new website focusing on accent and dialect has just been launched by the British Library. The resource features 70 five minute recordings from across the UK and over 600 audio clips selected to illustrate interesting aspects of regional accent and language change. It includes interactive maps, linguistic commentaries, transcripts and suggestions for research activities as well as advice to help students investigate speech in their own communities.

BBC Audio and Music Interactive released a public version of their audio annotator yesterday, entitled ‘Find Listen Label’. The annotator is browser-based and is being launched in collaboration with Radio 4′s “All in the Mind” (listen to episodes of this programme in our archive here).

The annotator works by allowing users registered on the BBC website to attach notes to parts of an audio ‘stream’, and displays those notes in a time-based and synchronised manner along with the media itself, much like our own Project Pad media tools suite. Tristan Ferne has more information on his blog about Find Listen Label, or you can try it yourself.

Coverage from the BBC Backstage blog:

[Backstage Blog] Find Listen Label:

Audio and Music have just launched their Annotatable Audio project. Tristan Ferne has the scoop.

We’ve just launched Find Listen Label, previously known as Annotatable Audio. It’s a tool for BBC Radio listeners to segment and annotate radio programmes on the web – wiki style – creating better navigation within the programme by providing segments or chapters and enhancing the findability of the programme by annotating it with descriptions and tags about the content. We’ve launched this prototype with Radio 4′s “All In The Mind” as a partner programme and it will be up for around 4 weeks before we evaluate how well it has worked.

Have a play…

It will start to become really powerful when/if we launch it across many of our programmes and start to use the generated data in other products and sites, and we have plans to open the data up to backstage.

So what things could you build or do with the data from this project. Answers in the Prototype or Ideas section.

(Via Backstage.bbc.co.uk).

I picked up this useful little application a few weeks ago, but alas I didn’t spend much time trying it out. It’s essentially a volume normaliser with some black-hat code going on in the background to make sure your podcasts and other audio sound consistent and clear.

The aggressively-named Levelator is free for non-commercial use, and available for Mac and Windows.

MAKE magazine seems to like it:

Audio Podcasting Awesomeness – The Levelator:

Unless you are an audio-fiend who likes to spend hours tweaking your podcast, then you need the levelator. You drag your audio file into the app and it levels the whole thing.

Jake says, One of the biggest frustrations of people who record and edit audio is the amount of time it takes to fix volume level issues. If you record two people, one of them is invariably softer than the other in the mix. You might turn your head away from the microphone to look at a distraction or have the microphone pointed away from the source. This even happens to the pros on occasion. To solve this common frustration, Gigavox created The Levelator. Essentially, the software examines a WAV or AIFF file, looks for volume inconsistencies and fixes them. It’s a bit geekier than that under the hood. The Levelator handles both the gain optimization on a file and RMS normalization to make sure the volume level is consistent. The output is a new file, so you can always go back to the original if you need to. The software runs on both Windows and OS X and is free for personal non-commercial use. While The Levelator can’t do anything to make your podcast more interesting, this is the first tool I’ve ever seen that makes almost anyone sound like they hired a top-notch engineer. – Link

[Read this article] [Comment on this article]

(Via MAKE Magazine).

The BBC has an interesting article about the threat to the National Librarys music archive from time & copyright. The main issue being that the library’s Sound Archive cannot copy audio from fragile or obsolete formats for posterity until copyright runs out.

The library said a “significant” part of the collection could “decay and be unavailable for future generations”. The Sound Archive holds more than a million discs, 185,000 tapes and many other sound and video recordings.

Without the right to make copies, the UK is losing a large part of its recorded culture. It currently collects about 75% of all music released commercially in the UK and also includes plays, poetry, speeches, interviews, and wildlife sounds. Launching its intellectual property “manifesto” on Monday, the British Library called on the government to ensure recordings are not left to rot.

“Currently the law does not permit copying of sound and film items for preservation,” the manifesto said. “Without the right to make copies, the UK is losing a large part of its recorded culture. “Many original audio and film formats we hold are becoming increasingly more fragile,” the library said, and “face irretrievable decay” if not preserved.

Read the full article here.
You can also download the National Library’s Intelectual Property Manifesto here.

Today David is attending the launch of the new British Library online sound archive. The archive is freely available to the UK further and higher education community via the ATHENS authentication system.

A full press release follows below:-

Breaking the sound barrier…

Massive digitisation programme by JISC and the British Library makes 3,900 hours of historic sound recordings available to students, researchers and academics

26th September, 2006.
A major new online resource available free to everyone in further and higher education will provide easy access to thousands of hours of rare and historic sound recordings. Archival Sound Recordings (ASR), launched today by the British Library in partnership with JISC, will make available to students, researchers, teachers and academics some 12,000 unique materials from the dawn of recording history to the present day.

Archival Sound Recordings breaks new ground in the delivery of digitised sound recordings for use in education and research. It features a huge range of material, including classical and popular music, radio drama, oral history, and field and location recordings of traditional music.

Highlights of the fully searchable archive include:

* Unique and previously unpublished recordings of East African and South African music and cultural activities;

* The story of six decades of jazz in the UK, its varied styles, venues and characters, as told by musicians, promoters and label owners;

* A comprehensive archive of performances of Beethoven string quartets – unique in the way it reflects changing performance styles over the past 100 years;

* Insights into the lives and concerns of painters, photographers and sculptors through interviews with artists such as Elisabeth Frink, David Bailey, Fay Godwin, Eduardo Paolozzi and Anthony Caro;

* Radio material illustrating the richness and diversity of African writing and political culture during the 1960s and 70s.

The £1m project has been made possible through JISC funding and is part of an overall £10m programme supporting the digitisation and online presentation of high-quality content including sound, moving pictures, newspapers, census data, journals and parliamentary papers for long-term use by the further and higher education communities in the UK. The ASR service is accessible to any web user, but access to the audio content will be limited to password-authenticated members of the UK FE and HE communities. The full service will also be available to users in the British Library’s reading rooms in London and Yorkshire.

The website’s interface was developed through extensive user testing to devise the best format for retrieving and playing back the recordings.Enhanced playback features will also allow users to create and edit their own playlists, and combine interdisciplinary material for their own projects, research and teaching resources. The digitisation work for ASR was carried out by Memnon Audio Archiving Services, which transferred recordings from a variety of analogue carriers to digital format, applying digital restoration techniques where appropriate.

“This was a particularly challenging and complex project,” said Michel Merten, Director of Memnon. “We worked with some very delicate collections, ranging from African field recordings on fragile magnetic tapes to Beethoven String quartets on early 78rpm discs. To handle a project of this scale, we developed innovative new techniques with the British Library, enabling us to preserve these important cultural records for future generations.” Memnon also provided technology to deliver the metadata necessary to allow full search and retrieval.

Lynne Brindley, chief executive of the British Library welcomed the launch of the Archival Sound Recordings resource: ”Sound recordings represent a massively untapped resource in the field of education. The learning possibilities across almost all subject areas are immense. The Web offers a means of widespread access to rare, historic and hugely valuable sound resources and this site demonstrates the British Library’s commitment to research and further education.”

Professor Sir Ron Cooke, Chairman of JISC, said: “The scale and scope of this archive is ambitious, groundbreaking and truly exciting. Not only will it be an important resource to a wide range of disciplines and subject areas but also, we believe, a landmark for the use of sound recordings in education and research. JISC is delighted to have worked closely with the British Library in developing and making available such an innovative resource.”

For more details see: www.bl.uk/sounds

For further information on the JISC Digitisation programme, please go to: www.jisc.ac.uk/digitisation_home.html

For further information, please contact Philip Pothen on 07887 564 006/020 7848 2935 or p.pothen@jisc.ac.uk or Ben Sanderson at the British Library Press Office: 01937 546126 email; ben.sanderson@bl.uk

The 1948 Soviet blockade of Berlin is just one of countless pivotal twentieth-century events to have been chronicled to the world by BBC correspondents.

Spoken Word Services hosts a small but significant on-line collection of some of the most important moments in the crisis, from British Secretary of State for Air Rt. Hon. Arthur Henderson’s impressions of seeing the massive airborne operation underway, to Patrick Smith’s account of Deputy Lord Mayor Dr. Friedensburg’s tense anti-Communist meeting in West Berlin at the height of the crisis, to Bevin’s speech thanking RAF and USAF pilots and crews for their efforts in supplying 2.5 million West Berliners with rations and essential equipment.

Here’s Alistair Cooke’s amazing account of the Bobby Kennedy assassination. Cooke was present at the scene of the crime, and what follows is a powerful exploration of the collective guilt felt by many in the U.S. for JFK and RFK’s deaths, and so what was to become the ‘Kennedy curse’.

The audio was requested from the BBC via our unique deposit agreement; then catalogued and uploaded into our digital media repository.

Listen now

You’ll need QuickTime 6.5 or later installed, and there’s a short registration process.

Good evening. It does not seem nearly so long ago as thirty years that the trade of the foreign correspondent caught the fancy of Hollywood producers, because Hitler was on the loose, and Europe was crackling with crises and atrocities, and some of the best American reporters of that time: John Gunther and Vincent Chien and Ed Murrow, always seem to be on hand. They came to seem like heroic stand-ins for the American people, who were fascinated and repelled at long distance by the violence of Europe. And who, I must say, indulged a good deal of self-righteousness in parotting the old American lamentation about old, sick Europe.

Well, I was saying that the foreign correspondent was in vogue, and soon Hollywood created a romantic stereotype of him. First, in the Boy Scout version of Joel McCray, and then the subtler variation of Bogart in a trenchcoat – who seemed so tough – as tricky as Goebbels. But who, for all his smokers’ cough and his cynical appraisal of passing females, was secretly on the side of all good men and truth. This attractive stereotype was not only larger than life, but luckier than any journalist living or dead. He followed, unerringly, in the tracks of dictators and foreign ministers – he was behind the curtain when a king signed the instrument of abdication. He knew the man who shot the Prime Minister. He decoded the vital message that gave the date of an invasion. He was always where the action was.

In life, it’s not like that. Only by the wildest freak is a reporter, after many years on the hop, actually present at a single, accidental convulsion of history. Mostly we write the coroner’s inquest; the account of the funeral; the trial of the spy. Not the hatching of the plot.

Last Tuesday night, for the first time in thirty years, I found myself by one casual chance in a thousand, on hand. In a small, narrow serving pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles – the place that, I suppose, will never be wiped out of my memory as a sinister alley, a Roman circus run amuck, and a charnel house.

It would be quite false to say, as I should truly like to say, that I’m sorry I was there. It’s more complicated than that. Nothing so simple as a conflict between professional pride and human revulsion; between having the feelings and then having to sit down and write them. Yet because I saw it not for once as an event to comment on, but as a thunderbolt assault on the senses, my view of this catastrophic episode is probably strange, and I ought not to ascribe to anybody else the shape and colour of the opinions that floated up later from my muddled sensations.

Lee Knifton, )Senior Health Promotion Officer, Mental Health Partnership, NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde,
Dalian House, G3 8YU,
0141 2014790) sent us this interesting piece of information…

NHS GREATER GLASGOW HOSPITALS USE VOICEMAP™ TO PILOT UK TRAINING FIRST

Hospitals in NHS Greater Glasgow are leading the way for the UK in using audio technology to train staff. Glasgow Royal Infirmary and the Princess Royal Maternity are the first hospitals in the UK to implement a new system using a mobile audio system to train new recruits.

Voicemap™ is expected to improve safety and reduce risk for staff and patients. It is now being adopted by hospitals elsewhere in the UK and Europe, following the lead of NHS Greater Glasgow. Each new member of staff is given an audio induction via an audio player and follows a customised tour, which describes the geographical layout of their workplace, and identifies safety issues involving potential risk to staff and patients.

The system is currently up and running in operating theatres in Glasgow Royal Infirmary, in the labour ward and the Neonatal Unit at the Princess Royal Maternity Hospital, and will be introduced shortly at the Western Infirmary’s Accident and Emergency department.

Alastair Kirk, an NHS Greater Glasgow Training and Development manager, believes it will have a direct effect on patient safety: “Using technology means we can make sure all new staff are trained to exactly the same standard, and it’s inevitable that that’s a big improvement on a system that relies on other staff and can therefore be vulnerable to human error.

“What’s fantastic about this is that, as well as working to the same standards, it can also be ‘personalised’ to each department. That means that in the Princess Royal, new workers are given specialist training in security – so they can keep babies safe and protected. At the Western’s A&E the training staff already get in how to cope with violence and aggression will be enhanced. Operating theatre staff have to know about how to apply proper infection control in a certain way, for example, and that’s exactly what this lets us do.”

Key issues such as Healthcare Associated Infections, needlestick injuries, medicine administration, moving and handling of patients are all covered on the audio tour, which is followed by a knowledge test. Alastair Kirk believes being able to prove the programme’s worth is an asset: “Staff find this a very enjoyable way to train and they start their job with more confidence. It’s early days yet, but we’re very pleased with the start we’ve made.

“Voicemap is an Australian system and certainly, over there, it’s shown an improvement in both occupational safety and improved patient care. We hope to see similar results once we have more people going through the system; it saves time and provides a more comprehensive induction than the traditional forms.”

Dr Maggie Haertsch (PhD), the developer of Voicemap™, says: “The willingness of Greater Glasgow to lead the way by embracing this Australian innovation in the UK will see benefits in many areas of health care. Voicemap supports NHS initiatives to improve patient care and system efficiencies. It is the triple AAA of training. It is auditable, advanced and uses auditory messages to help people learn more quickly while enjoying the process”.

The expected benefits to patients include improved safety and less exposure to clinical risk, and the individual systems have been designed with this in mind. Another significant benefit is that the system builds on teamwork and encourages professionals from different disciplines to work together:

“Everyone is getting the same information and learning about each other’s roles. This in turn should lead to improved productivity and consistency in care pathways.”

ENDS

Notes for Editors

Voicemap™ is a product of Voicemap International Ltd and is based in Australia with an office in London. Contact Dr Maggie Haertsch (PhD – Behavioural Science) on 07836 563 346 for interviews. Images are also available on request. www.voicemap.net

Lee Knifton
Senior Health Promotion Officer
Mental Health Partnership
NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde
Dalian House, G3 8YU
0141 2014790