On 20th April 2007 the British Computer Society London Office in Covent Garden was base for the 2007 ‘Intellectual Property Rights in E-Learning Workshop/Conference’. The conference was organised by the School of Computing Science at Middlesex University.

David Donald was asked to present at this event by Dr Carlisle George who had seen David present before and thought that he was a more than suitable candidate for the event. Dr Carlisle was previously a barrister and is now a senior lecturer at the School of Computing Science at Middlesex University.

The one day conference brought together several researchers from Middlesex University and other experts in Intellectual Property Rights to speak on IPR related to e-learning.

David spoke about the work done on the Spoken Word and the ‘Obstacles to Accessing the Multimedia Heritage’ that the Spoken Word holds. He spoke widely about the project’s approach to the rights and permissions it holds in partnership with the BBC and various other intellectual property issues including the Spoken Word user license agreement.

David felt that his presentation went very well. He has already received positive feedback form the conference organisers and has been asked to present at future events.

Photo Courtesy of: Markhillarry

On Friday 13th April after five hours travelling by train David, Iain and Graeme of Spoken Word arrived in Hull for the first meeting of the REMAP project.

The REMAP project is based at the University of Hull and its’ aim is to ‘investigate the use of a digital repository to support the embedding of records management and digital preservation within the context of a UK Higher Education institution’.

REMAP is a follow on from the RepoMMan Project which stands for the Repository Metadata and Management project. Repoman aimed to develop a tool that would interact with a Fedora based repository system.

The project has been funded by JISC under the latest JISC capital programme. The capital programme is additional funding from JISC of £81 million over three years to enhance the network infrastructure (SuperJANET 5), to digitise key resources for the academic community, and to support the development of e-learning; e-infrastructure; virtual research environments; users and innovation; and repositories and preservation.

The REMAP project is being led by ESIG (e-Services Integration Group) at the University of Hull. ESIG are also a part of our recently started EDINA led VSM portal project.

Although tired form the long journey David, Iain and Graeme definitely found Hull to have been a rewarding experience.

Photo Courtesy of: Helen K.

On 13th March 2007 David and Iain of the Spoken Word joined David Jordan from the BBC’s ‘Future Media and Technology’ department at the JISC Conference 2007 in Birmingham.

The JISC conference provided an excellent opportunity to showcase the Spoken Word’s work alongside the other projects involved in the digital libraries in the classroom programme including DialogPlus (University of Southampton and Penn State University), DART (London School of Economics) and DIDET (University of Strathclyde and Stanford University).

All those inviolved in the digital libraries in the classroom programme shared a stand, answered questions and handed out leaflets to others present at the conference.

The conference also provided the backdrop for a 15 minute JISC funded film promoting the work of the digital libraries in the classroom programmes that includes David and Iain of Spoken Word, Alan Hutton, Douglas Chalmers, various Caledonian University students and the Saltire Centre…by popular demand the film will appear on the Spoken Word site shortly!

The conference was also useful for meeting with people that the project had previously collaborated with. Notably David met with Chris Awre from the University of Hull who, like ourselves, is currently part of the Fedora users group. Recently we have started a new collaboration with the University of Hull in the form of the JISC REMAP project.

However the most notable meeting took place with Tom Loosemore who is project director of BBC 2.0 at JISC. He has played a key role in the BBC’s New Media strategy over the past few years and so the meeting was of great interest. The meeting took place after Tom had presented to the conference about the 15 web development principles that the BBC are currently using as a structure to develop their web services and reach out to even more users. A brief outline of his presentation can be found by clicking here. In the coming months we hope to visit the BBC to talk to staff in the Future Media and Technology department and carry out a presentation about the work of the Spoken Word project.

Photo Courtesy of: ClickCLickElectric

David Donald has been invited to share his expertise with Northwestern graduate students at the Medill School of Journalism, Sciences Po in Paris.

Sciences Po is an undergraduate and graduate education doctoral school and research centre in Paris with a library and documentation and publishing services.

David will talk with the students about various new media issues including blogging, audio, video, and interactive web applications for journalism. He will concentrate on teaching students how to use blog applications for the first time and outline the digital audio and video work done on the Spoken Word project which will be extremely useful for journalists interested in furthering their knowledge of web based broadcasting.

Photo(c): Courtesy of ‘That Ambitious Girl’

On 5^th March 2007 the Spoken Word’s Principal Investigator David Donald will travel to Brussels where he will attend a high level workshop based around the agenda of driving forward the establishment of a European e-Infrastructure for e-Science digital repositories along with other ‘professionals’ in the area of digital repositories.

The conference will revolve around various discussions of the following issues:

• What the major issues are behind the interoperability and widening of access to digital repositories across Europe.
• What are the tools that need to be encouraged in order to move infrastructures, techniques for metadata assignment, and storage management technologies forward?
• What are the key technological limitations inhibiting the growth of repositories?
• How can we reduce the domain-specific knowledge required to access and use these repositories in order to open them up to wider research?
• How can a sustainable technical framework be realised, preserved and maintained across Europe that will ensure continuing accessibility to repositories?
• How can European-level policy initiatives encourage growth and the overcoming of technological barriers?

The findings from the workshop discussions will be used in various EU-funded initiatives concerning repositories.

On 12th February David and Iain go to the DELOS Conference on Digital Libraries in Tirrenia, a beach resort near Pisa. Benito Mussolini transformed this formerly swampy city into what he called ‘The Pearl of the Mediterranean Sea’. Tirrenia is now a major Italian tourist spot and is popular with young clubbers-so David and Iain are sure to have a good time.

DELOS is a network of excellence on digital libraries and is committed to a vision that digital libraries should ‘enable any citizen to access all human knowledge any time and anywhere, in a friendly, multi-modal, efficient and effective way, by overcoming barriers of distance, language, and culture and by using multiple Internet-connected devices’.

The conference aims to present the latest research and technology in the field of digital libraries and to promote discussion and ‘exchange of ideas’ through various formal and informal satellite meetings.

Clearly this is an ideal conference for promoting and speaking about the Spoken Word, with key figures from around the global digital libraries community in attendance. The Spoken Word’s colleagues, Maureen Lister, from the Universita Di Bologna and Jerry Goldman of Northwestern University in Chicago also have plans to visit the conference, which will be beneficial to continuing and furthering our ties and work with these institutions.

This is the face that lead one attendee of the Nursing E – Learning Seminar to label David’s presentation there as ‘inspiring’.

Just Before Christmas, David Donald, Spoken Word’s aptly named ‘Principal Investigator’, unexpectedly ended up presenting to the Nursing E – Learning Seminar at Glasgow Caledonian University. Iain Wallace was originally supposed to carry out the presentation but had to step out at the last minute on account of a winter illness, although from the feedback it appears that David was a more than worthy replacement.

David spoke generally about the Spoken Word, including the background of the project and services, the work it is currently involved in and the services it provides in the environment of web 2.0.
One attendee of David’s presentation said: ‘This is exciting. I haven’t replied before as I was trying to remember where I got your address. I suddenly remembered this evening. I know because I am taking the Caledonian module in e – Learning and one of our group just heard an inspiring talk from David and put the address on our VLE’