On Monday, January 5th, 2009 New York City will host the 123rd annual meeting of the American Historical Association. The programme is extremely varied and there is a multitude of sessions that concentrate on a wide variety of historical subjects.

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.

David, Iain and Ewan attended a half day conference at St. Andrews University run by SHERPA as part of their series of UK roadshows that have also called at such places as the University of Liverpool and the University of Durham.

SHERPA aims to investigate ‘issues in the future of scholarly communication’ and is currently developing open-access institutional repositories in a number of research universities to ‘facilitate the rapid and efficient worldwide dissemination of research’.

The day started for the three of us at the Powmill Milk Bar where we ate lunch while listening to David’s funny anecdotes about his numerous adventures.

Half an hour after Powmill we arrived just in time for the beginning of the conference. The first presentation was by Gareth Johnson who spoke generally about Open Access including its current and future use and the various barriers it currently experiences.

The next presentation was carried out by representatives from St. Andrews University. They spoke about their internal experiences of Open Access and the successes and opposition that they had faced and continue to face. The speakers outlined an interesting anecdote which involved one academic saying that open access repositories only existed ‘to give librarians some work to do’.

The final presentation was by Jane H. Smith who spoke about the RoMEO and Juliet services. RoMEO is a useful repository of journal publishers’ listings that is run with support form JISC and the Wellcome Trust. Juliet is a ‘complement to the RoMEO service provided by SHERPA for authors and repository administrators, which lists summaries of publishers’ copyright transfer agreements as they relate to archiving’.

The day was of most interest as it illustrated the view points on Open Access of those from a range of academic areas. The conference also almost acted as a reassurance that the barriers to Open Access are common throughout all institutions.

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.

The inaugural BarCamp Scotland goes ahead this Saturday in Edinburgh (See the Upcoming entry for details). The popular casual geekfests have become an important meet and greet event for academics, web developers, freelance podcasters and new media folks of all descriptions. They’re also an important opportunity for attendees to sample the state of the arts in areas beyond their immediate disciplinary remit.

Spoken Word will be there, represented by Aidan Johnston, Ewan MacPhee, Graeme West and Andrew Gruen.

We’ll be available to discuss the project in general; our repository; connected learning issues and methodologies; our relationship with the BBC; and of course all of the geeky details of running a service like ours. Any prior notification of desired topics would be very helpful (leave a comment).

We’re also, of course, looking forward to learning from other attendees, some of whom are friends of Spoken Word (see the attendee list on the wiki). Major topics look to include podcasting, community software, dynamic web application frameworks, mobile technology and open source projects.

If you’d like to meet with us at BarCamp, please leave a comment here (or use the Contact form) and we’ll get back to you - or simply come and find us on the day. Visit the wiki to add your name to the roster if you plan to drop by.