Jumpcut cut

It looks like Yahoo is winding down its JumpCut online video editing service. I'm a little disappointed because someone just showed me some cool narrated slideshow projects done on JumpCut at a recent NITLE workshop. I was also going to write a post about how JumpCut, which had the ability to pull photos and video from Flickr, is an example of a web applications working elegantly with a digital asset management system.

Perhaps this is a sign that the recession is weeding out some of the free cloud computing applications out there.

It's not like cloud applications are doomed if they are not free, however. I happily pay $25/year for my Flickr pro account. Our library ponies up $50 a month for Basecamp.

architecture images in academia: moving into the cloud

The Society of Architectual Historians just received a Mellon grant to build "a dynamic online library of architectural and landscape images for research and teaching."

One thing that's notable in the description of the project is that it aspires to move visual resource collections away from building separate collections at each institution (as has been the case with slides, and initially with digital images) to collaborative creation of a shared collection:

It is the expectation that SAH AVRN will change the way Visual Resources and Art/Architecture Librarians at those institutions conduct their work. Instead of developing separate, independent collections of architectural images for each institution, librarians will contribute images and metadata to SAH AVRN, a shared resource that will be widely available. Initially images will be contributed to SAH AVRN by scholars at the same three institutions who have agreed to share thousands of their own images that were taken for research and pedagogical purposes.

Another intriguing aspect of the proposal is its mention of the development of new technology that will allow the contribution of images by front line people.

Building upon the existing ARTstor platform for storage, retrieval, viewing and presentation of images, ARTstor is going to develop two new tools to be used in conjunction with SAH AVRN. The first is a tool that will enable scholars, practitioners, librarians and others to contribute images to the shared resource of SAH AVRN. The second set of tools will be a content management system that will enable sophisticated processing and management of those images.

Is this the 'academic Flickr' that we've been waiting for?

Flickr ideas forum

I just posted something in the Flickr ideas forum:

I work in a liberal arts college library that is building an institutional collection of digital images (primarily of art and architecture) to support teaching. Many other colleges and universities are doing the same thing.

The problem is, the digital asset management systems that we're using (MDID, ContentDM) aren't that great. They don't have the elegance and functionality of Flickr's web interface or image management tools. This is really a drawback, especially when we're trying to get faculty to build their own personal image collections online and share them with the institutional collection.

The other drawback of using these digital asset management systems is that they are isolated systems--they must be maintained locally and they don't share data nicely in a Web 2.0 sort of fashion like Flickr.

If Flickr had organization-level capabilities, it could potentially revolutionize digital asset management in this arena. The main things missing now are:

1. an organizational account designed for larger scale use, in which several users could administer images (different than current groups capability)
2. capability to authorize a large body of users without flickr accounts to see certain photos through IP recognition, LDAP authentication, etc. (necessary because some of the images we manage have copyright restrictions)

I realize that opening up the Flickr platform to organizations could alter the flavor of the community. But perhaps it could be done in a way that preserved the spirit of Flickr. Perhaps only organizational collections that fit certain criteria would be elgible for inclusion in the broader body of Flickr work.

Opening up Flickr in this way could enrich it.

Mark Dahl
Lewis & Clark College