Tuesday, March 8, 2011

MDID SIG and Poster Sessions

Greetings,

This is just a reminder that there will be a MDID Special Interest Group Session with a presentation entitled "MDID3: Cultivating Multimedia on Your Campus" at the VRA + ARLIS/NA conference on Thursday, March 24, from 1:00-2:00 p.m. in the Marquette II room. This informative session is open to anyone using or interested in MDID, a freely shared educational resource distributed under an Open Source license. We encourage you to add yourself as "interested" to the meeting on the conference SCHED.

Members of the project team will also be available to talk and answer questions, with our poster "MDID3: Taking the 'Repose' out of Repository," at the Poster Session on Sunday, March 27 from 8:00-9:30 a.m. in Salon D.

Looking forward to seeing you in Minneapolis!

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Taking the "Repose" Out of Repository

Presentation given at VIVA/LAC Meeting at Bridgewater College on December 10, 2010.

Monday, November 15, 2010

Teaching with Technology = Teamwork

SECAC VRA affiliate session: "United We Stand: Forging Partnerships in Support of the Digital Classroom"
Chair: Jeannine Keefer, University of Richmond

"Teaching with Technology = Teamwork"
Corinne Diop and Christina Updike, James Madison University

Teaching with technology requires tools and support from many areas on a University campus. At James Madison University support can be drawn from the Center for Instructional Technology, the Center for Faculty Innovation, and the Visual Resources Center of the School of Art and Art History. Faculty have access to a wide range of technology in support of their curriculum. The Madison Digital Image Database (MDID 3) is a system for managing digital media collections and integrating those into the teaching and learning process, the Media Viewer is the presentation tool used in Technology Classrooms, JMUtube allows posting of licensed or self-produced videos, and Blackboard is a hub for course information and communication. A team of University staff works campus-wide developing the programs, providing technical training and support, and proactively researching what will be needed in the future. This paper will discuss how a partnership with visual resources staff and faculty can build the network of support necessary to teach with technology. Features of two online courses, the History of Photography and a Screen-based Photography/Video course, will be demonstrated as successful examples of the digital classroom.

Presentation Narrative

Friday, July 30, 2010

MDID3 Status

To the MDID User Community:

Please note that the recently released version of MDID3 is a pre-production release and as such should NOT be used in a production environment. Our intention with this release is to give interested members of the MDID community a preview of how MDID3 will look and work. This version of MDID3 is not meant to replace MDID2 at this time. We are still actively developing important features; such as remote collection sharing, remote collection searching, presentation packaging, user management, streaming video, a desktop version of the ImageViewer, etc.

During the fall semester at JMU, we will run both MDID2 and MDID3, using the migration tool to periodically copy MDID2 data into MDID3. Faculty and students will experiment with MDID3 but will rely on MDID2 for course-critical work. Our plan at JMU is to have a full-featured ImageViewer (with dual screen support) in the classroom by the end of September and a production-ready version of MDID3 online by the end of this year.

In a previous message, we suggested some steps your institution can take to prepare for migration from MDID 2 to MDID 3. Administrators should document any customizations, including custom user authentication. Curators should clean up collection metadata fields and map as many fields as possible to the relevant Dublin Core fields. The MDID 3 migration tool will copy users, groups, collections, records, etc. Due to differences in data structures and permissions, the results of the migration need to be reviewed before the new system is put into production, but none of the user data stored in MDID 2 should be lost.

Thank you for your continued interest in the MDID system and your support for our development efforts.

Friday, July 2, 2010

Instructions for Installing MDID3 on Windows 2008

Instructions for installing MDID3 on Windows 2008 are now available. Also look at Upgrading from MDID2.

MDID3 is still in development. A number of features required for use in a live production environment are not yet complete.  These include remote collection sharing, remote collection searching, presentation packaging, user management, streaming video, etc.  We recommend that you continue to use (or start using) MDID2 in production until these features are completed. To make this easy, we are distributing MDID3 with a migration tool that allows you to periodically copy your MDID2 data into MDID3 (note that data cannot be copied from MDID3 to MDID2). In this way you can run both versions in parallel for the purposes of evaluating and testing MDID3.

Please report bugs in the software or problems with the installation instructions to mdid@jmu.edu.  We ask everybody to refrain from submitting new feature requests or asking about release dates for particular features at this time.  We will announce new features as they become available. Upgrading MDID3 from one version to a newer version will be easy.

Thursday, June 3, 2010

MDID 3 Status Update

We're almost there!

MDID3 went into live testing at James Madison University a couple of weeks ago, with a small number of faculty and curators making sure the migration and fundamental functionality work as expected.

Before we officially announce and encourage others to download and install a beta version, we need to fix a couple of last-minute bugs and create more detailed installation instructions for the different supported platforms.

As always the current development version is available in a Google Code repository at http://code.google.com/p/rooibos/.

Thursday, April 22, 2010

Federated Search

Several people have asked for a demo of how collections external to MDID 3 will be searched. The video below shows an example using the NASA Image eXchange (NIX) collection.


After running a search on "Titan", result counts from Flickr, ARTstor and NIX are displayed. Opening up the NIX screen, any record can be selected and immediately added to a presentation or viewed in detail. Flickr will work in the same fashion. ARTstor images can only be displayed as thumbnails until they are imported into MDID 3 manually, and of course an ARTstor subscription is required.