The main news this month is that the JISC New Technologies SubCommittee has approved the extension of the SIMA Initiative for a further year until July 1996. The Committee have been impressed with the quality of the reports produced to date which have been well received and timely. Congratulations to all authors and to the Multimedia Support Officer, Sue Cunningham for their efforts in ensuring the success of this part of the AGOCG work.
The pattern of work will be the same for the next year, with Sue continuing in post and a series of projects being run with associated reports and workshops.
AGOCG will be inviting bids for projects to be run during the 6-9 months from October this year. If you would like to receive a copy of the request to make a proposal, then please contact me. All sites will receive copies, but please ensure you get a copy if you want one. Proposals are expected to have to be with me by the end of August.
Some of the projects will be concerned with realising the recommendations of the successful workshop on WWW which was reported in the last newsletter. These projects will include: training materials for WWW (both authoring and using WWW); more guidance on running a service; survey of software tools for WWW. Other projects will include considerations of the use of network tools in non-scientific disciplines and are likely to include those which build on previous projects, for example image capture, video conferencing and delivery of materials across the network.
We are also intending to hold a workshop on the topic "Potential of Virtual Reality for UK Higher Education" as part of the SIMA programme in 1995/6. In order to ensure the effectiveness of the workshop we plan to fund a number of fact-finding projects prior to the workshop. This follows the approach we took at the very effective visualization workshop over 3 years ago.
Steve Larkin, our Visualization Support Officer for the last 3 years has now completed the term of his post. It was always intended that full time support for visualization would be a fixed term initiative intended to help the community to use these new tools. Steve has done an excellent job and I would like to note both mine and AGOCG's thanks to Steve. There will be ongoing support for visualization from the University of Manchester on a more limited basis. This will involve updating the course materials and supporting the community through answering questions of the CHEST-Visual mailbase list.
In the conclusions from the TILT project (http://www.elec.gla.ac.uk/TILT/TILT.html) they found that Information Technology (IT) could help provide resources for learning which are more effective, richer, available for extended hours and open to a wider range of entrants to Higher Education. Most people recognise that computer aided learning (CAL) materials can offer a lot of support, but how do you bring CAL into your curriculum?
Your first choice should always be to see what is already available elsewhere. A great deal of courseware has already been produced, particularly through the TLTP project, (http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/tltp) and while these may not be exactly what you require, it may be possible to tailor them to your needs. If, however, you decide there is nothing suitable, and you have to create your own, your next step will be to choose how you are going to create your package. Unless you are an experienced programmer, this will mean choosing an authoring system. This is by no means an easy task given the wide variety of systems available (see Authorbase, the database of authoring systems at the National Library of Medicine at http://www.etb.nlm.nih.gov/authorb/irx/index.html).
Before looking at packages, decide exactly what you require of it. Will it need to deal with large amounts of text, create graphics or animations, do you want hypertext features etc? You also need to be clear what machines the package will be developed and delivered on. Developing a package with sound and interactive video is pointless if your students have access to only very slow machines with no soundcards. The EMASHE group (http://www.elec.gla.ac.uk/EMASHE/EMASHE.html) have produced a check list of authoring software characteristics which you may find helpful (Courseware in Higher Education, Evaluation 1: Planning, Developing and Testing).
Having decided what you require and what your hardware specifications are, have a look at some packages to see which best meet your needs. It is unlikely that any package will fulfil all your requirements, so you must be prepared to compromise. At this stage you need to consider the user interface of the packages, and the experience of the person doing the developing. For example, a package which requires heavy use of a scripting language may be difficult for someone with no programming experience to use. It is also useful to find out what packages are already in use in your institution, as you may be able to draw on the experience of others when you have problems.
Developing CAL means a large investment of time and resources, and it is important you choose the right authoring package for your needs. The ITTI (http://www.hull.ac.uk/Hull/ITTI/homepage.html) booklet Choosing an Authoring Package from the Educational Technology Service at Bristol looks at the issues involved in more depth, and Fred Riley has produced a review of common hypermedia authorware packages. This review is available online(http://www.hull.ac.uk/Hull/ITTI/rvw_dnld.html)
For more details about many authoring packages including Authorware, Toolbook and Director see the authoring links page(http://info.mcc.ac.uk/CGU/SlMA/author_systems.html) on the AGOCG web server.
Many of the authoring packages available offer hypertext or hypermedia facilities, but what is hypermedia? It means simply that items of information are linked to and accessible from one another. A true hypermedia system will be able to provide links to any type of information, whether text, graphics, video or sound, though to provide a link to sound, some sort of visual representation will obviously be necessary. See figure 1.
Hypermedia systems can give the control to the student allowing them to learn at their own pace and in their own way. However, for below average students this may not be appropriate and a more guided approach may be needed. One system which can allow both free browsing and a guided tour is Microcosm.
Microcosm is an open hypermedia system developed at the University of Southampton (http://bedrock.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Microcosm) which allows users to view documents in their native formats and provides tools to generate and search for links between the documents. Unlike other hypermedia systems, the links are stored in separate linkbases rather than in the documents themselves, helping prevent 'dead links' and allowing different users to store their own links for the same set of documents. A site licence for Microcosm is available through CHEST.
Release 3.0 of the IRIS Explorer(TM) scientific visualization and application builder software was launched by the Numerical Algorithms Group Ltd (NAG) on 31 March 1995 on Silicon Graphics workstations. Release 3.0 is the result of a joint development program between software engineers at NAG and Silicon Graphics, Inc (SGI). NAG has taken over the development, porting, marketing, sales and support of IRIS Explorer for all future releases as it becomes decoupled from the next version of SGI's IRIX operating system. Ports of Release 3.0 to other platforms will follow, including Sun Solaris, IBM RS/6000, HP 9000/700, Cray, and 64-bit DEC Alpha OSF/1, 64bit and SGI IRIX 6.
IRIS Explorer Release 3.0 features many performance improvements and system enhancements, as well as an increased module library. The list of system enhancements include the passing of geometry via shared memory and a much improved interface for running scripts. In addition, scripting itself now has improved synchronicity providing more reproducible results, and synchronisation ports on all modules provide much better control over loops. A new visual drag and drop interface has been added, as have new widgets for module control panels, and editable groups have been introduced. There has been a revision and update of documentation with both hardcopy and on-line versions available. All Release 3.0 versions of IRIS Explorer are based on Open Inventor and OpenGL and users on non-SGI platforms will also benefit from all the additional modules and enhancements introduced at Release 2.2.
We have worked closely with SGI to bring to market a product which will extend the functional benefits of IRIS Explorer for users in all areas of scientific visualization. IRIS Explorer is arguably the best system of its kind on the market today. We are particularly pleased with the system enhancements and module library extensions especially in the area of vector data manipulation and readers for standard data file formats, said Robert Iles, Manager of the Software Environments Division at NAG. Shared memory performance improvements and the incorporation of NAG's rich legacy of graphical, numerical and statistical library routines, which has started at this Release, redefine the product's technical edge and translate into useful benefits for our customers.
New modules in Release 3.0 include NAG-based modules which use the well-known NAG numerical libraries and the NAG graphics library; new modules for displaying vector data using particle advection, streaklining and vector display; new data analysers for interpolation through 2D and 3D data and outlining regions of interest in datasets; new modules for creating and manipulating geometry; new annotation modules; new data readers (for example, PHOENICS and NTF data); new colourmap manipulators, and many more. In addition, Release 3.0 includes the source to many more modules, more interesting datasets and new example maps.
NAG has over 20 years experience in developing, porting, distributing and supporting scientific software. NAG supplies a range of compilers, tools, software libraries and associated - products for the professional programmer and for educational and industrial use. NAG Ltd is based in Oxford, UK, with subsidiary companies in Chicago, Munich and Tokyo as well as distributors worldwide.
The Graphics and Visualization Newsletter in now available on-line on both the NISS bulletin board and the World-Wide Web
.The URL from AGOCG for the newsletter is httP://www.agocg.ac.uk:8080/agocg/AGOCGdo/NewsLet.html. Back copies of the Newsletter are also on the web from issue 38 onwards. The pages are hosted at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory server at http://www.cis.uk.ac/publications/; this page also contains the on-line copies of the Engineering Computer Newsletter. The NISS bulletin board will soon have back issues of the G&V from issue 17 to the present.
In consequence, this is the last of the Graphics Newsletters that we have OCR'd from the paper copy. Somewhere in RAL or the UK academic sector, copies of the Newsletter from issue 41 to issue 63 should be available.
The 13th Annual Eurographics Conference was held at Loughborough on 29-30 March 1995, preceded by a day of tutorials. There was a strong multimedia theme in many of the papers and the tutorials.
The keynote speaker at the conference was Tom Wesley from Bradford who presented a paper entitled Graphics are Wonderful _ but what about the Blind?. This highlighted the problems the print disabled have with accessing electronic data, particularly now Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) are becoming more prevalent. Hypermedia documents can be especially difficult to access, as alternatives are necessary for graphical data and visually oriented links. He described some of the work that is being done to combat these problems by the Communication and Access to Information for People with Special Needs (CAPS) project, and particularly the usefulness of SGML in providing standardised structured documents that can be converted into a form usable by the vision impaired.
Jim Alty, Head of Computer Studies at the University of Loughborough, presented a very interesting and entertaining tutorial on Multimedia Interface Design, which placed particular emphasis on how sound could be used in novel ways. It looked at research that has been done into how to map various types of data into sound and some of the possible benefits. Good use of sound can considerably enhance a multimedia presentation. A visually complex screen can lead to cognitive overload, but since the brain is designed to receive and process information from more than one channel simultaneously, delivering some of the information by a different channel, such as sound, can help a great deal. Also delivering the same information using more than one channel can make an application easier to use, and enhance learning. A simple example is a beep when an error message occurs, or a voice reading text that is being displayed.
Overall a wide range of graphical and multimedia applications were covered at the conference from Graphic Design for Ceramic Tiles to Visualization for Prosthetic Heart Valves, providing a varied and interesting few days.
This is a summary report of some of the key issues which were discussed at the conference over the three days, divided into the three main threads, from which the conference took its structure.
The first section of the conference looked at how library services could be positioned to make the most advantage of the information age, and how the challenges associated with providing access to networked information could best be met. A number of issues were covered including managing change within organisations, transforming concepts of the provision of library services and assessing the impact of the move towards electronic libraries on staff.
Hans Geleijnse of the University of Tilburg gave an overview of the digital library project at Tilburg and the experiences and problems the organisation had encountered during the Source of the project. . After an evaluation of the services they were offering, it was found that use of the library services had increased on all levels. Direct use of the library r ad gone up dramatically, leading to overcrowding in the library at most times, and remote use of information through the desktop had also increased significantly.
He then went on to unveil a strategic plan for the service for the next three years. The key points he raised were that:
Sheila Corrall from Aston University concentrated on the management of change to both services and staffing that is likely to occur as electronic library services become more prevalent.
Sheila noted that Aston had been driven towards organisational change by a series of political, economic and technological factors. They are now in a situation where they have many new services running alongside the more traditional ones, and this has thrown up a number of issues: staff are facing an increasing need to support end users in their use of computer applications, and reference and enquiry desks in particular are feeling the burden of this increased demand for both user support and increased information on the availability of electronic sources of information.
Sheila also noted a number of changes which were taking place in the management culture at Aston. Traditional hierarchies of management are giving way to smaller team-based structures and an increase in self-managing projects; styles of management are also moving away from a controlling to a co-ordinating model.
Sheila advocated the need for skills development for library and information assistants to take some of the burden of technical processing tasks away from qualified staff. She also mentioned that Aston has set up a reception desk in response to the problems faced at enquiry desks. This acts as a first-point-of enquiry for library users and helps to screen out simple enquiries which can be dealt with by non-qualified staff from more complicated problems.
Joan Day, from the Department of Information Studies at the University of Northumbria, has been involved in research into the impact of electronic libraries on library staff in UK academic institutions, and she gave a summary of the research findings.
The research (conducted over six UK academic institutions) has found that library staff are increasingly finding themselves needing to teach computing skills at the point of need. Many library staff have found that IT seems to bring more work for them but no reduction in existing tasks. The research also highlighted the need for more para-professional staff who can take the strain of some administrative and technical tasks away from qualified staff.
A number of staff training and developmental needs also emerged from the research:
It was announced by Clive Hemingway from Blackwells that FIGIT has just agreed to support a joint proposal for an electronic document delivery system known as INFOBIKE. This proposal has been put together by a consortium consisting of BIDS, Blackwells and the Universities of Keele, North Staffordshire, Kent and Manchester.
The system architecture was proposed as follows: INFOBIKE will consist of a bibliographic database which can be searched by a user. If an item is located and requested a holdings file can be checked to locate the document on any of a number of document servers held around the country. The document server will then retrieve a requested document and send it on-line to the user.
Document servers should be maintained by publishers, who will thus be able to maintain control over electronic copies of articles, and monitor their usage. There will also be the possibility of other sites being licensed to mount documents on their own servers.
Clive Hemingway proposed that access to the system shall be free at point of use; a charging mechanism will be set up by the development of national licensing models for institutions who want to gain access to the system, or hold copies of electronic documents on their own servers.
Adobe Acrobat will be used to store submissions, and this should allow for expansion to include multimedia components.
Chris Rusbridge, Director of the Electronic Libraries Programme, concentrated on the area of electronic journals. He stated that he felt it was unlikely that electronic journals would come to replace completely printed versions, and also questioned whether institutions would find that the availability of electronic journals would bring any cost savings for journal budgets.
Chris Rusbridge also covered the issue of charging for access to electronic journals and he described three possible charging models which included subscriptions for individual journals, licensing agreements, or free distribution of journals achieved by giving subsidies towards their creation. It seems likely that the third model would require substantial investment from universities to go into the actual creation of electronic journals, and this represents a shift of responsibility for publishing from the publishers to the universities. He emphasised the need for some form of model agreement between publishers and institutions in order to increase the development of electronic versions of existing printed journals.
Nicky Ferguson spoke about the SOSIG project at University of Bristol. This is a subject-based guide to UK social science resources available through the worldwide web, which aims to provide a consistent approach to cataloguing and evaluating networked resources, and an information gateway for social science researchers and academics. He raised a number of issues surrounding the design of subject-based information gateways; in particular the potential for implementing a level of quality control over networked resources. Resources can be evaluated for their usefulness, consistency and relevance before being included in a gateway, and this 'seal of approval' can be included as an integral part of the document description. SOSIG currently records the URL, keywords, resource type, login info and description of all the resources it indexes into the gateway.
(Resource Organisation and Discovery across Subject-based services)
This is a further project to extend the work of SOSIG across other subject areas by encouraging various centres of excellence to produce their own approaches to subject-based information gateways. This will result in a distributed resource discovery service based on rich descriptions and a quality controlled approach organised around subject centres of excellence.
Nicky also mentioned that UKOLN, Loughborough University and SOSIG are working on a collaborative bid for EU funding on a project to improve search tools, and standards setting.
This area threw up a number of difficult questions and few real answers:
Margaret Hedstrom, New York State Archives, suggested that we need to make it easier for document authors to keep their own records and archives, by setting standards for the level of documentation we wish to have retained and the indexing strategies to be used. She said that archiving should increasingly become a function carried out as a distributed task, and the place where it is carried out will become less important.
Margaret also raised the issue of current software and hardware becoming outmoded. She . recommended the creation of repositories of outmoded hardware and software to ensure that we can still obtain access to material; and said that this approach should be rigorously backed up by a commitment to converting old material over to the new technology as it emerges.
Bendik Rugaas, National Library of Norway, suggested it should be the task of National Libraries to generate strategies for the legal deposit of electronic material.
