Content Release form

One of the documents that the Bloomsbury Media Cloud team has worked on during the project has been a content release form, which we ask contributors to sign when either providing brand new content or allowing us to re-purpose existing content. The document protects the project and provides appropriate safeguards that mean the project cannot be held accountable if any individuals offer us content that they shouldn’t i.e. copyrighted material. It also allows the project to use content without infringing the contributor's copyright.

You can see the form here and re-purpose it for your own use.

Media Services in the Cloud

Today, in the education sector, we are seeing increasing use of Cloud Services to deliver institutional services in innovative ways such as delivery of multimedia content. What value are such developments seeking to provide? And how can the benefits be measured in order to ensure that, at a time of reductions in funding, investment in such developments is worthwhile?

Sarah Sherman, the Bloomsbury Media Cloud's project manager has been invited to present and answer these questions at a UKOLN workshop on 7th December at Birkbeck. "Institutional and Social Web Services: Evidence for Their Value" is a one-day event based around "Evidence, Impact, Metrics". The workshop will aim to explore ways in which evidence can be collated in order to demonstrate the impact of online services and the metrics which can be used to support such evidence.

For more information about the event, including the full programme, visit:
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/eim-2010-12/

Bloomsbury Media Cloud Project Activity Reports

Greetings!

Recently, the Bloomsbury Media Cloud Project team members took some time to reflect on the work we have done over the past 6 months. We are excited about far we have come and how our experiences can inform those who are doing similar work. As Neal reported earlier, we recently found out that ITunesU will not be a workable platform for us as a shared service, given its preference for single institutions. Despite this setback, our technical adviser Rob Mertling-Blake has gained valuable knowledge about shared services over the past few months. Rob spent a considerable amont of time participating in workshops with the JISC funded Steeple Project, and got the chance to hear insight from other university shared service projects as well as contributing to the dialogue as well. As the year continues, Rob will be focusing his energies on identifying the best repository and storage facility for the media content. Meanwhile, the media team has been hard at work producing content as well as performing an audit of all existing content. One of the first and most critical tasks of the media team was undertaken by media adviser, Carlos Chirinos, who spent much of the beginning months of the project researching and developing a common media licensing framework. After consulting with other institutions who have pursued similar projects, Carlos suggested that we use a Creative Commons license for online content. This license allows our content to be downloaded and shared but it will always link back to our website, and the material cannot be used commercially. In support of this, Carlos has developed a contributor release form that all media contributors will sign. The media team, which consists of Carlos and media officers, Neal MacInnes and Alexandra Jacobs, have spent the majority of their time working on the audit of existing content in the Bloomsbury community as well as overseeing all content production. The team discovered a wealth of content among the colleges and are now tackling the project of identifying the hosts of this content and the best way to access it for the Cloud Project. The team is proud to announce the production of the following content:

• Six interviews with the Heads of Bloomsbury Colleges
• Six keynote presentations by LIDC and Bloomsbury Scholars
• Nine 'infomercial' podcasts from International Development Distance Courses
• Several repurposed podcasts such as 'Development Matters' from SOAS and LIDC

Over the next few months the media team will be focusing on dissemination and especially on increasing student involvement in media content production. The media officers have drafted publicity literature to be shared throughout the Bloomsbury community, and Carlos has recently presented the Cloud Project to a group of interested research students.

The team is excited for the months ahead and how our project will continue to unfold. Keep watching this space!

Autumn Update

After a busy summer investigating the numerous options for our media portal and continuing to source content it is coming down to the wire. Recently we were made aware that an iTunes U page would be an unrealistic outcome at this point. While this was indeed a blow dealt to our long term thinking in the short run it doesn't have much bearing on the contet we ahve produced so far. We have been using an Open Source Media Portal based on the Mediacore back end as a proof of concept and in terms of delivery of the relatively small batch of content we have it has some very credible features.

Some other developments in the works are moving the backend platform and the production workflow to a cloud based service to fully integrate the notion of a shared service structure within the cloud concept. A number of options have been investigated in this regard including, Amazon S3 but for the scale of this project a more locally served option based out of the ULCC is more pertinent.

Check back soon for further updates.