Little Guides from JISC Digital Media

JISC Digital Media has created a series of Little Guides in response to frequently asked questions. Perhaps of most interest to our readers is The Little Guide to Finding Digital Media Resources (PDF). This guide includes links to JISC's online tutorials on searching the Internet for images, audio resources, and video and moving images, as well as links to general sites with a focus on free-to-use and low-cost media resources.

Other JISC Little Guides address Copyright, Cloud Computing, Podcasting, and Screencasting.

In general, JISC Digital Media provides a wealth of helpful information for those in higher education anywhere, but do keep in mind that JISC is a service aimed at a UK audience. Some of the resources cited here are slanted in this direction.

Image: Ryan Thompson (Warmest Regards), consulting the guide books, 2010. Available from Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License.

VRC Bombay TV 2 Video

To illustrate some of the ways we help our faculty and students, and also to show that we do our jobs with humor while striving for excellent services and products, the VRC has created a very short and hopefully entertaining video about our scanning services. We used Bombay TV 2, a site offering a selection of clips from vintage Bollywood movies, which you can choose, arrange into a sequence, and provide subtitles to create your own movie. See the video here:

http://www.grapheine.com/bombaytv/v2/play.php?id=152979

But seriously, if you are faculty member or student in the Department of Art and Art History, please ask us how we can make your life easier. Scanning? Training? Equipment? If you are in need of a service or equipment item that we don't currently offer but which fits within our mission -- to provide and facilitate access to images, imaging, and related information resources for teaching and research -- we would like to hear about it.

Disclaimer: No faculty members, students, or Bollywood stars were harmed in the making of this video. All characters are fictional; any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidence and unintended (except the guy who gets thrown through the plate glass window -- that really happened!). The VRC welcomes discourse about the representation of American academic problems as expressed through the representation of an Other culture, namely that of upper-class 1970s Mumbai, which itself is represented here through the lens of 1970s Hindi cinema. Similarly, we invite the discussion of any post-colonial ethical issues that may be called into question by framing this presentation with humor, or questions arising from the androcentric positioning of an aggressive male protagonist who is assisted entirely by female characters -- especially if these discussions occur over lattes.

YouTube Now Lets You Search for and Assign Creative Commons Licenses

Creators and remixers now have have a great new option to share and play with content, without worrying about copyright. YouTube has introduced a feature in its Video Editor that allows users to assign a Creative Commons license (CC-BY) to their videos. To mark videos with a CC license, simply click the radio button labeled "Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed)" at the time of uploading, or go to My Videos,  select edit for the video for which you wish to assign the CC license, scroll down to Broadcasting and Sharing Options, and select the CC option.

Those wishing to find content they may use under a CC license can find it in the Video Editor by simply clicking the CC tab at the top of the page. You can conduct a keyword search, with only CC-licensed videos appearing among the search results. To add a video to your storyboard, click on the 'plus' symbol (+) and remix away!

For more information, including important details about the rights and responsibilities involved, see YouTube's page on Creative Commons. You can view the terms of the CC-BY license at the Creative Commons Web site.

Internet Archive: A Rich Source of Video, Audio, Text, and More

Have you gotten lost in the Internet Archive yet? It's non-profit "digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form," which features a huge array video, audio, text, and other items of potential interest to both artists and scholars alike. The site offers so much that it's difficult to do justice to it in a brief blog post. Its main offerings are divided into the Wayback Machine (over 150 billion archived web pages), Moving Images, Texts, Audio, and Software. You can conduct keyword and advanced searches across the entire archive, or browse by various sub-collections. Explore the reviews, spotlight items, most downloaded items, and staff picks. Below is a brief overview of each of the main Internet Archive areas.

Wayback Machine
"Browse through over 150 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago. To start surfing the Wayback, type in the web address of a site or page where you would like to start, and press enter. Then select from the archived dates available. The resulting pages point to other archived pages at as close a date as possible."

Moving Images
"This library contains thousands of digital movies uploaded by Archive users which range from classic full-length films, to daily alternative news broadcasts, to cartoons and concerts. Many of these videos are available for free download." The sub-collections are Animation & Cartoons, Arts & Music, Community Video, Computers & Technology, Cultural & Academic Films, Ephemeral Films, Movies, News & Public Affairs, Prelinger Archives, Spirituality & Religion, Sports Videos , Television, Videogame Videos, Vlogs, and Youth Media.

Texts
"Contains a wide range of fiction, popular books, children's books, historical texts and academic books." This comprises almost 3 million digitized items, including a lot of great vintage and historical texts. These can be read online or downloaded to your computer. The sub-collections are American Libraries, Canadian Libraries, Universal Library, Community Texts, Project Gutenberg, Children's Library, Biodiversity Heritage Library, and Additional Collections.

Audio
"Contains over two hundred thousand free digital recordings ranging from alternative news programming, to Grateful Dead concerts, to Old Time Radio shows, to book and poetry readings, to original music uploaded by our users. Many of these audios and MP3s are available for free download." The sub-collections are Audio Books & Poetry, Community Audio, Computers & Technology, The Grateful Dead, Live Music Archive, Music & Arts, Netlabels, News & Public Affairs, Non-English Audio, Radio Programs, and Spirituality & Religion.

Software
"The Software Archive is designed to preserve and provide access to all kinds of rare or difficult to find, legally downloadable software titles and background information on those titles. The collection includes a broad range of software related materials including shareware, freeware, video news releases about software titles, speed runs of actual software game play, previews and promos for software games, high-score and skill replays of various game genres, and the art of filmmaking with real-time computer game engines." The sub-collections are Game Patches, 301Works.org, DigiBarn, CD Bulletin Board Software Archive, Infochimps, Open Source Software, and Tucows Software Library.

Europeana: 15 Million Images, Videos, Audio Files, and Texts

If you have not yet visited Europeana, here's your chance to "study abroad." Europeana is a an impressive digital library of over 15 million items from 1500 museums, archives, libraries, and other organizations representing the cultural and scientific heritage of Europe. As described on their about us page, these items include:

• Images - paintings, drawings, maps, photos and pictures of museum objects
• Texts - books, newspapers, letters, diaries and archival papers
• Sounds - music and spoken word from cylinders, tapes, discs and radio broadcasts
• Videos - films, newsreels and TV broadcasts

After conducting a basic or advanced search, search results are presented as a mix of all of these object types, but you can choose from  Images, Videos, or Sounds tabs to examine those types in particular. You can also refine your search by provider, country, language, type, dates, or rights.

If you register for an account you can save your searches, save particular items, or save tags.

YouTube Offers Online Video Editor

It won't replace Final Cut Pro, but now you can perform simple edits on video clips in your YouTube account.  For more information see the announcement on YouTube's blog and the overview at the Getting Started: YouTube's Video Editor page.

As described by YouTube,  the Video Editor lets you:

• Combine multiple videos you’ve uploaded to create a new longer video
• Trim at the beginning and / or ending of your videos
• Add a soundtrack from our AudioSwap library
• Create new videos without worrying about file formats, and publish the new video to YouTube with one click (no new upload is required)

This is sure to be a popular tool and I am guessing that YouTube will eventually add more features to supplement this basic functionality.  If the comments on the blog posting are any indication, there is great demand for simplifying video production, editing, and delivery.

To dive right in and start playing around with the Video Editor, head directly over to the editor page. 

UbuWeb

Looking for avante-garde video and audio pieces?  Try UbuWeb , a "completely independent resource dedicated to all strains of the avant-garde, ethnopoetics, and outsider arts."  UbuWeb is an entity which makes its content freely available for noncommercial and educational use.  The site includes works by art-world heavy hitters and lesser known creators.  Spend a little time poking around the site and you will be rewarded with all sorts of interesting content.

The philosophy behind UbuWeb is admirable -- from the Web site: "Freed from profit-making constraints or cumbersome fabrication considerations, information can literally "be free": on UbuWeb, we give it away and have been doing so since 1996. We publish in full color for pennies. We receive submissions Monday morning and publish them Monday afternoon. UbuWeb's work never goes 'out of print.' UbuWeb is a never-ending work in progress: many hands are continually building it on many platforms.

"UbuWeb has no need for money, funding or backers. Our web space is provided by an alliance of interests sympathetic to our vision. Donors with an excess of bandwidth contribute to our cause. All labour and editorial work is voluntary; no money changes hands. Totally independent from institutional support, UbuWeb is free from academic bureaucracy and its attendant infighting, which often results in compromised solutions; we have no one to please but ourselves."

Image: Bruce Nauman, Still from Pinch Neck | Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of a Square, 1967-68.

Finding Video, Audio and Images Online: JISC Advice Document

JISC Digital Media continues providing the world with helpful information: they have recently updated their advice document, Finding Video, Audio and Images Online.  Lots of good information here about Web site databases and online collections, search tips, search engines, automatic alerts, etc. Their first piece of advice is to be clear about what you want from your search, and they've embedded this video from an adorable short film about actual requests at the Hulton Archive for images that could never exist.  I think most of us who work with image collections recognize this challenge!



JISC Digital Media is the UK service that provides advice, guidance and training to the UK's Further and Higher Education community.  Fortunately for those of us across the pond and elsewhere, they freely share their advice documents online.  They are divided into advice on still images, moving images, audio, and cross-media.  Each of these areas contains dozens of advice documents, organized into easy to navigate sections, with information about file formats, software, hardware, managing digitization (er, digitisation) projects, managing digital resources, and finding digital resources.  There is a wealth of information here.  Thank you, JISC!

VideoSurf: New Tools in Video Search Technology

Who hasn't been frustrated from time to time by searching for videos on sites like YouTube, then having to repeat those fruitless searches on other sites?  Text tags are often insufficient for locating the material you seek.   There are frequently duplicate results, not to mention increasing amounts of spam to wade through.  Video searching is a challenge that a number of start-up companies have been attempting to solve.  One exciting example is VideoSurf, which is a metasearch engine that lets you find videos with a single query from a variety of sources (YouTube, Hulu, Metacafe, Yahoo! Video, Fancast, Comedy Central,  and many more).  Still in beta, it's VideoSurf's ability to see inside videos which is its most promising feature.  It can see clips frame by frame, and with its facial recognition technology VideoSurf can return results that a text search alone wouldn't find.  When you conduct a search in VideoSurf, each result is displayed with a sequence of thumbnails from the clip.  You can select a thumbnail to start the video at that point.  It also minimizes duplicate results by recognizing and grouping them, and has the ability to detect spam videos.

JISC Posts New Guides to Moving Images

JISC has just shared three new video guides: the Basic Guide to Videoing Interviews, the Basic Guide to Videoing Lectures, and the Basic Guide to the Flip. These supplement the materials JISC already provides in its Advice on Moving Images page. Here you will find a wealth of information on creating, managing, finding, and using moving image resources. These include the Basic Guide to Shooting Video and many other sections on topics such as digital video file types, animated graphics, metadata, transcoding, digitization workflow, and online delivery options.

Image: Mika Hiironniemi, Video Shoot, 2008. From Flickr, some rights reserved under a Creative Commons license.

ArtBabble: Online Videos About Art

If you are looking for online video content about art, be sure to check out ArtBabble. Launched earlier this spring by the Indianapolis Museum of Art, ArtBabble is "intended to showcase video art content in high quality format from a variety of sources and perspectives."

Now partnering with IMA is Art21, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the New York Public Library. IMA intends to continue adding content from these and other institutions, hoping that it will become an online destination for videos about art.

Videos on the Web site may be found by keyword searching or by browsing different categories. The "Series" tab includes Shaping the New Century: An International Design Symposium, Behind the Scenes at MoMA, Art21--Exclusive, NYPL: Design by the Book, Roman Art from the Louvre Webisodes, and more. The "Channels" tab contains alphabetically arranged keywords for finding content on the site, each of which is accompanied by the number of relevant videos in parentheses. Examples include Ancient Art (17), Ceramics (4), Contemporary Art (93), Exhibitions (51), Film (5), Painting (10), Talks (23), and Video Art (4). The "Artists" tab contains a list of over 150 artists currently represented by videos on the site. This includes contemporary artists, such as Lita Albuquerque, Dawoud Bey, Chuck Close, Ann Hamilton, Jenny Holzer, Alex Katz, William Kentridge, Kerry James Marshall, Pipilotti Rist, Jessica Stockholder, and Richard Tuttle. It also includes some historical figures, such as Georges Braque, Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Gauguin, and Piet Mondrian. The "Partners" tab enables browsing by the project partners listed above.

30+ Places To Find Creative Commons Media

Have you ever created a video for which you have needed sound effects or soundtrack music? Do you want to find free images that you can use on your Web site? Over at SitePoint, Sean P. Aune has just posted 30+ Places to Find Creative Commons Media. This very useful compilation includes links to CC resources that include audio, images, texts, and videos.

A sign of the times: one of the resources cited is the Usage Rights feature of Google's Advanced Search, which enables Google searches for CC content.

A reminder about Creative Commons: works offered under CC licenses are meant for sharing free of charge. However, there are several varieties of licenses from which creators may choose, each with its own conditions (such as required attribution, noncommercial use, or no derivatives). Don't forget to check out the CC link for these resources if you plan to use them in any way-- part of the brilliance of Creative Commons licenses is that the terms of use are uniformly simple and easy to understand.

Link via Ellyssa Kroski at iLibrarian

Image: The Temple of Heaven, Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests. From www.photoeverywhere.co.uk, some rights reserved under a Creative Commons license.

Library of Congress: "YouTube, and Now We Do Too"

Following the success of its Flickr project, the Library of Congress has launched a YouTube channel. Matt Raymond's LOC blog post describes current content and future plans. Now featuring over 70 videos, including the first moving image ever made (Thomas Edison's sneezing man), LOC plans to continue adding files to its YouTube channel over time. As the world's largest repository of audiovisual materials (over 6 million films, broadcasts, and sound recordings), they have plenty of material to share. Raymond reminds us that the American Memory collection provides these and hundreds more videos, of which there are many higher resolution versions available for viewing online.