Meeting minutes

Minutes from the ALIA Media Information and Communication Technologies Group meeting held in Training Room 1, La Trobe University Library, 10:00am-12:00pm Thursday 16 December 2004

Attendence

Andrew Veal (Uni Melb), Ross Glover (Uni Melb), Maria Ammazzalorso (La Trobe), Lea Beranek (La Trobe), Domenica Chincarini (La Trobe)Ted Chrisfield (La Trobe), David Janssen (La Trobe), Tom Loncaric (VUT), Asim Aziz (VUT), Peter Bright (Deakin)

Apologies

Kate Vaux (Uni Melb), Georgina Binns (Monash), Andi Pasqualini (RMIT)

Round table

Welcome to Peter Bright from Deakin, Asim Aziz from VUT and Domenica Chincarini from La Trobe. Each institution reported on the major developments and current issues.

University of Melbourne
Ross Glover has had started organising an e-mail group of technical staff from tertiary institutions in Victoria that deal with audio, video and digital technologies. This will be pursued in early 2005. David Janssen has volunteered to join this group until La Trobe University's technical position if filled. To become part of this group please contact Ross (please remove '.nospam' from address) at University of Melbourne.

VUT
Tom Loncaric and Asim Aziz gave a demonstration on how off-air recordings can be requested from any of the campuses. Off-air recordings have been centralised and they are currently trialling for twelve months an online based system which allows users to copy their off-air programs directly online. The interface used is Learning Edge. We were shown how Learning Edge works.

User requests and sets request online.
User receives an e-mail confirmation.
Programs are recorded in 2 level quality. DVD and Streaming Window Media, MPEG2.
Programs are archived in lower quality for 28 days.
Academic staff have 28 days to burn their requested program on to a DVD. After that it gets deleted.

Any requests from the library are ftp'ed for metadata set up. The library does not hold all the off-airs that are requested.

Deakin
Peter Bright gave us a demonstration of how they are setting up a new way of doing their off-air recordings.

Peter has set a bank of VHS-DVD recorder with hard drive based units with approx 250 gig storage. Programs are captured as MPEG 2 files and then converted to Quick Time. The scheduling is set for 24 hours a day.

The unit also has four hard drives that comprise of old material. There is a search facility which enables the individual programs to be searched.

La Trobe
Domenica from the LTU Art History Department reported on the development of an image database. Database images were developed in Director which was developed by James Cook University.

ITS are happy to configure and install the 2nd version Open source which supports multi-collections.

Images are captured from the web. There is a 30 day period of making enquiries to see if image can be purchased. If no reply then image can be copied. Everything that is taken off the web, including incidentals are reported to the University copyright officer. Images are housed and accessed from the librarys image database.

Open discussion

Screen rights fees and copyright issues were discussed. Ted Chrisfield has volunteered to start a copyright discussion and answer any copyright issues.

Also it was mentioned that academic staff or students are in breach of lending agreement when they are borrowing from a video shop and showing to a class.

DVD cleaning: Uni of Melbourne and La Trobe found that is wasn't worth buying a commercial scratch remover at this stage. Probably cheaper to find a company that does the cleaning/repiar for you.

DVD vs VHS discussion. If DVD is reported not working somewhere else but works on our machines La Trobe keeps. The DVDs are only withdrawn if they dont work with our equipment.

Next meeting

Next meeting will be held at VUT around June/July 2005. Notification will be sent via e-mail.

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