17 December 2010
BUSINESS & COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT
Dealing with still images, moving images and audio recordings, JISC Digital Media has a remit to support the creation and use of digital media collections in learning teaching and research, and as part of this the service also supports BCE and its practitioners.
JISC Digital Media - Improving the BCE Image By Caroline Ingram
The BCE Challenge For anyone who lacks the practical expertise to deal with images, moving images or other cross media issues such as copyright, metadata and project management, JISC Digital Media offers overviews, basic guides and advanced guides. The information available has been further divided up into three sets of information, for digitisation staff, for digital media for learning, teaching and research, and for business and community engagement. The JISC Digital Media Service Manager, Jon Moore, commented that resources are usually sector wide, and no specific request for information in a BCE context has ever been received. In fact, JISC Digital Media staff have noted that there are many different job titles which may cover aspects of BCE, and many people from cultural heritage, learning and teaching, or librarians and archivists could easily have a BCE interest, without this being the main focus of their role, and all of these people approach JISC Digital Media for advice and support on a regular basis.
collections. JISC Digital Media have an impressive record of contributing to successful research funding applications and, close to home, often work with the University of Bristol’s Research, Enterprise and Development (RED) team in order to achieve this. One of RED's core aims is to attract research funding into the institution from external sources. As more and more funders become aware of the significance of issues relating to standardisation and interoperability of digital resources, academic staff are expected to address these issues in relation to their own research output within every bid. Such issues though, are often outside of the comfort zone, or knowledge, of highly specialised academics. As an advisory service JISC Digital Media are well placed to work alongside RED in meeting these challenges. The undertaking of work such as this is a growth area. Within research-active universities the expectation may be that as much as 50% of funding has to come from research-related activities. In general, application procedures are becoming increasingly competitive; any measure which can be taken to increase funding success has special value to an institution.
Facilitating Engagement JISC Digital Media supports the research community in their endeavours to build digital media
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JISC Digital Media have also contributed expertise to digitisation projects. Once digitised, academic collections become valuable resources within the institution, attracting research students from the UK and internationally, and are also increasingly licensed directly by institutions to the private sector and in some cases available to the general public. The University of Bristol Centre for Medical Education is using a number of areas of JISC Digital Media advice and support (including copyright, film production, editing, compression, and dissemination) to video operations to create reference and training material for medical students. The films they are producing and advice they are giving are concentrated in the areas of student acquaintance (providing a friendly top 10 tips of what will change in the transition between a medical student in a classroom to working on the wards), assessment (creating video materials of things such as a bedside diagnosis and allowing the students to mark it) and finally technique (videos of hand operations, editing to focus on steps rather than a verbose record all approach). Continued overleaf...
www.jisc.ac.uk/bce
BUSINESS & COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT 17 December
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materials, particularly for potential use outside of the research or education field. Some of the focus around many of the business and community engagement activities that JISC Digital Media has carried out has necessarily been in ensuring that rights for use are cleared. Promotion and support of the creation and digitisation of the materials within the community should allow for greater dissemination and larger audience use (and re-use). As a final example of the efficacy of the online resources, the chair of the Scottish Health
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The partnership has allowed JISC Digital Media to broaden its knowledge of discipline specific issues, and has allowed them to help the Centre for Medical Education become more creative in how they use video resources to disseminate best practice. The restricted times that medical staff are available, patient consent and scheduling filming have made the interaction quite challenging. Further, there are many rules regarding consent and privacy and licensing when handling medical
Information Network (SHINe), Joanne Ptolemy, openly praised the JISC Digital Media service in a newsletter posting, and recommended the use of their guidance to her network of health professionals, most of who will be working on the interface between practice and academia. She commented, “Whilst trying to extend my own knowledge and ability to use images I came across the JISC Digital Media site. Blow me down I thought, I am saved.� http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk
www.jisc.ac.uk/bce