Image Management

SESSION 2

MANAGING IMAGE COLLECTIONS

Issues to considerRoger Mills

Coverage

Creating digital libraries and repositories

Storage and preservation: short- and long-term issues

Using images in teaching and learning: the role of the information specialist

The impact of social networking tools: salvation or hype?

Creating digital libraries and repositories

Creating & Managing the Image Collections of

Oxford University Library Services

Michael PophamOxford Digital Library

Creation – Selection

• Digitizing – for whom? • Who devises and applies the

selection criteria?• Do suitable images already exist

elsewhere?• Digitizing from originals vs existing

analogue surrogates• Business models – are there any?

Creation – Constraints

• Resources(!) – Staff – project management, other

expertise, time– Technology – capture & QA, management

& storage, delivery, preservation• IPR• Sources

– visual, textual (or combination?) – Physical constraints (access, size,

condition, handling etc.)

Creation within OULS

• OULS Imaging Services– On-site (for nearly 120 years!)– Operates on a full cost-recovery business

model– Expert staff; up-to-date equipment– Robust and proven workflows and colour

management– Continuous technological improvements– Only creates technical metadata for images– Not responsible for managing or delivering

image collections

Copy Stand

Grazer Book Cradle

Zeutschel Book Cradle

Managing – delivery

• What will you make available?– Metadata + images (detail, granularity,

quality of both)– Any constraints on access or reuse?

• How will you make images available– What resources and delivery platforms are

available?– Simple Open Source solution ↔ high-end

proprietary application

• On-going maintenance, end-user support

Managing – storage and preservation

• What will you store?– Nothing(!)↔master images only↔all

deliverables• Typical digital data preservation issues

– Do you have any applicable preservation policies

– Preservation is active not passive!– Preservation infrastructure

• What resources are available to you?• Who is responsible for carrying out which

preservation actions?

Managing within OULS

• Oxford Digital Library– Overall responsibility for the management

and delivery of digital image collections derived from OULS holdings

– Technical framework, recommendations re. standards, offers advice and consultancy

– No formal authority to require compliance• Digital Asset Management System

– OULS DAMS (= 64TB Sun Honeycomb + Fedora)

Image collections within OULS

• OULS Imaging Services – 9M+ images

• OULS libraries have 1.9M+ slides and glass plates

• c.1M+ digital images created in-house– c.600K+ publicly available

• 50K-250K+ digital images created elsewhere

Working with others

• Licensed content– Octavo – digital facsimile editions– Alexander Street Press

• Partnership– ProQuest – Electronic Ephemera– Google Books Library Program

Storage and preservation: short- and long-term

issues

General principles

• Digital images need constant care• Ignore them and they become

unreadable• Projects must include long-term

preservation plan• Temporary solutions may be needed

for initial delivery• Collaboration leads to economies of

scale

Storing masters

• Separate master and surrogate images• For master use non-commercial files

formats to best quality possible (typically uncompressed TIFF)

• Store offline and keep duplicate copies in different location

• Refresh regularly, migrating to different carrier if necessary and budget to do that

Delivering surrogates

• Typically create several copies at different sizes: thumbnail, medium, large

• Technology may allow scaling to detailed zoom

• Consider what may be freely downloaded and protect via password etc if required

• Reproduction quality copies generally supplied offline to order

Self-help

• What can we do as a subject community?

Using images in teaching and learning: the role of the information specialist

Advising teachers

Teachers may have:• Lack of training in using digital images

within computer-based resources • Lack of time to create new teaching

materials using new technology • Lack of knowledge and awareness of

existing digital image collections and how the collection or its individual images can be used

• Lack of clear copyright and usage notices

Assisting users

• Re-use of images in own work• Using technology• Quality and copyright issues• Printing• Publication

The impact of social networking tools: salvation or

hype?

What is Web 2.0? Ideas, technologies and implications for

educationby Paul Anderson

A summary of:

JISC Technology and Standards Watch, Feb 2007

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/techwatch/tsw0701b.pdf

Roger Mills

What is Web 2.0?

• Web 2.0: does it exist?• Social web – blogs, wikis, RSS feeds,

podcasts etc• According to Tim Berners-Lee, this

is what the WWW was intended to be all along – the ability for everyone to view and edit any web page

Blogs

• Term coined 1997• Blogosphere now incorporates

multimedia – photo-blogs, v(ideo) blogs, uploads from mobiles (mob-blogging)

• Facilitates syndication and linking – but blog permalinks link pages not content – may not stay same

• 13million blogs but 10million inactive

Wikis

• Have history and rollback functions to restore previous versions – blogs do not

• Self-moderation v. malicious editing

Tagging

• Social bookmarking – stored centrally and shared

• Tagged with (multiple) keywords• Also used for photos (Flickr), video

(YouTube), Odeo (podcasts [=audio blogs])

• CiteULike – store, organise and share academic papers

RSS

• Lists updates to websites, blogs or podcasts

• Collected and piped to users by syndication

• Several versions of RSS• New syndication system developed -

2003: Atom• Open standards

Newer Web 2.0 services

• Social networking• Aggregation services• Data ‘mash-ups’• Tracking and filtering content• Collaborating• Replicate office-style software in browser• Source ideas or work from the crowd

6 Key ideas

1. Individual production and User Generated Content

2. Harness the power of the crowd3. Data on an epic scale4. Architecture of Participation5. Network effects6. Openness

1. User Generated Content

• Self-publishing growth similar to that engendered by laser printing and dtp

• Cheap, fairly high quality video equipment allows media to use users submissions eg news from ‘citizen journalists’

• Motives monetary at one end, reputation at the other

• End of editorial control – eg structure and authority of edited newspaper

2. Harnessing the power of the crowd

• Intelligence or information?• Cloudmark – collective spam

filtering – works better than machine analysis

• Crowdsourcing: intermediary sites which make UGC available for re-use

• Threatens market for professionals

Folksonomy

• A collection of tags for individual use – not collaborative

• Allows links between individuals or sites with similar interests

• Repetition of tags indicate merging trends of interest

3. Data on an epic scale

• Ever-increasing amounts of data leading to ‘datafication’

• Google, Amazon, E-Bay rely on massive amounts of data generated by ordinary browsing to provide targeted services through learning

• Who owns this data? Re-purposing, reformatting, re-using - sinister implications?

4. Architecture of participation

• System utilises user interactions to improve itself

• Service improves the more people use it

5. Network effects

• Service increases in value to existing users as others start using it

• Can result in lock-in to technology eg MS Office

• Or adoption of inferior technology eg VHS over Betamax

• Niche areas become significant

6. Openness

• Power not in data itself but control of access to that data

• Aggregation and republishing obscure rights

Pedagogical implications

• Techno-centric assumptions obscure motivation

• Not all learners find self-production compelling

• Students entrenched in peer and mentoring communities may challenge accepted ideas of hierarchy and production/authentication of knowledge

• Privacy and plagiarism• Shared authorship and assessment

Whither VLEs?

• Students prefer Facebook for discussion of lecture materials downloaded from VLEs

• Develop Personalised Learnimg Environments – PLEs?

Scholarly Research

• Use of folksonomies in developing formal ontologies

• Cannot replace indexing/KM efforts using controlled vocabularies

• Can develop alongside to develop ‘collabularies’

• Private blogging for peer debate• Often anonymous• Collective blogs for peer and public

communication

Scholarly publishing

• First stage publishing may become web-only

• Only best and most durable info published conventionally

• Data mashing requires open access to data

• Open peer review

Libraries, repositories and archiving

• Library 2.0 services not necessarily product of Web 2.0 technologies

• Eg ILL comparable to Amazon delivery• People who borrowed this also borrowed…• Ethos of he long tail: everything has a value

beyond how many times it is requested• Tagging=indexing, blog

trackbacking=citation analysis, blog-rolling=chaining, RSS= alerting

• Web 2.0 can help understanding of user behaviour

Archiving

• Part of cultural memory• UK Web Archiving Consortium (UKWAC)• Many legal problems• Many technical problems• Web is transient• Depends on linked objects, in varying

formats all of which must be migrated• Graphical look and feel – do we need it?

Preserving Web 2.0 content

• Often held in databases, so part of hidden web

• Pages created dynamically – little technology to preserve developed yet

• APIs proprietary and in perpetual beta• Much data stored on servers owned by

American companies• Aggregated data as gathered e.g. by

Google of great historical interest

Web 2.0 archiving characteristics

• Link rot severe in blog archives• Users consider media-sharing services

archives already. But if company closes?

• Personal catalogues and collections – who is responsible for archiving?

• Web 2.0 not conducive to traditional archiving approaches

• Can we devise new ones?

Looking ahead

• Major IPR impact• Information overload• Anxiety if not ‘fully connected’• Personal catalogues = manifestations of

person’s persona• A person’s path through the information

space defines their lives• Who owns this information?• New ways of human interaction?

Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web

• Shift from documents to data on which machines act

• Not realised yet• Ontologies (costly) v. folksonomies

(free)• Semantic wikis and blogs –

annotated by machine• Trust, security and social networks

Technology Bubble 2.0?

• Unwise to invest too much time, resources and data in new and untested applications

• Proceed with caution!

And Web 3.0?

• High-powered graphics• Visualisation• 3-D social networking• 3-D Internet – merging web and

virtual world environments• Or a backlash to Web 2.0: software

that erases your digital path

Consequences of Web 2.0 for education

• Power of the crowd – new communities and groups

• Growth in self-generated content challenges exiting hierarchies

• Profound intellectual property debates

• Watch this space!