JISC MediaHub

Northern Ireland: The Years of Conflict

May 032012

In this blog post we want to introduce you to the vast range of resources held by JISC MediaHub which cover the period of the Irish Troubles and the peace process which followed.

The Saville Inquiry Into The Bloody Sunday Shootings Is Released: Getty (still images) 15-06-2010

JISC have just announced the launch of Chronicle, a joint project with the BUFVC and the BBC, to make BBC Northern Ireland’s television news from 1963 to 1976 available to the academic community online. Alongside this important new resource JISC MediaHub offers a wealth of images and video footage which extends coverage of the conflict in Northern Ireland through to the peace process and up to the present day. Many hours of news coverage are available from the ITV News Collection and the Channel 4 News Collection, as well as images from Getty.

H Blocks of the Maze Prison: Maze Prison Backgrounder: Channel 4 News 26-07-2000

Channel 4 News produced a fascinating background feature on the notorious Maze Prison, where paramilitary prisoners were held between 1971 and 2000. The film, made in July 2000, contains interviews with both ex-prisoners and prison staff and it is these first hand accounts of life in the Maze which make it so compelling.

US President Bill Clinton's car passes the Sinn Fein Headquarters 30-11-95 Getty (still images)

Bill Clinton was the first US President to visit Northern Ireland in November 1995. The success of this and future visits contributed to him playing a key role in the peace process.

Tony Blair announces the signing of the Good Friday Agreement: ITN 10-04-1998

Hopes for the end to conflict were pinned to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in April 1998, however only a few months later the Omagh Bombing took place.

Northern Ireland: Omagh Bomb ITV News 15-08-98

It would be nearly another nine years before a new power sharing government would be installed at Stormont.

Against all odds: Ian Paisley and Martin McGuiness share government: ITN 08-05-2007

Divided for years by sectarian hatred, Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness became political colleagues at the head of Northern Ireland’s new powersharing Government in May 2007: Northern Ireland Peace Process Has New Power-Sharing Government Sworn In: ITN 08-05-2007

These are just a few hightlights from the still images and many hours of news footage to be found on JISC MediaHub, documenting not just the key political negotiations but the testimony of ordinary people who lived through decades of terror.

Further Links:

Discover Hidden Gems from the Silent Film Era on JISC MediaHub

Mar 272012

There has been a surge of interest in the silent film genre following the huge success of The Artist at the 2012 Academy Awards. To follow up on this we thought we would take a look at some of the different types of silent film hosted by JISC Mediahub to show you some long forgotten material that still has the power to astonish and surprise.

Gaumont Graphic Newsreel was launched in 1910 and became increasingly popular with cinema audiences who flocked to see their favourite film stars of the silent era. Newsreels were shown before the main picture and originally lasted around 5 minutes, containing four or five stories from the week’s news. In the days before the advent of television this was the only way ordinary people would be able to see moving pictures of famous individuals, historic events and news of national importance.

The Coronation of George V 1911 (Gaumont Graphic)

The public’s perceptions of royalty began to change forever once they could witness important events such as George V’s coronation at their local cinema.

There was great interest in glamorous fashion icons such as French actress Mistinguett. A short clip entitled ‘Look Girls’ features her modelling some extraordinary outfits. At one time she was the best paid female entertainer in the world.

Mistinguett (Gaumont Graphic)

News of Hollywood film stars was always much sought after. The following screenshot is from a newsreel entitled ‘Last Film Glimpses of Rudolph Valentino’ taken a few days before his premature death following appendicitis in 1926.

Last Film Glimpses of Rudolph Valentino (Gaumont Graphic)

There are amazing crowd scenes to be viewed in the newsreel ‘Rudolph Valentino Lying-In-State’.

Gaumont Graphic finally ceased production in 1934 and was superceded by the production company’s sound newsreel, Gaumont British News, which is also a collection of JISC MediaHub.

The Imperial War Museum (films) Collection holds much fascinating silent footage of World War One. ‘The Battle of the Somme’ is the only British official film to have a major impact on the perception of the war, both at the time and in historical terms. Also the only official film of the war with a claim to be regarded as great art in its own right.

The Battle of the Somme (Imperial War Museum)

Watch history in action through the ETV Collection which contains silent footage of the ‘Battle of Cable Street‘. On 4 October 1936 Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists attempted to march through the Jewish area of Cable Street in the East End of London but was prevented by a combination of anti-fascist groups.

The Battle of Cable Street (ETV)

Why not explore these collections for more fascinating footage from the past. Gaumont Graphic Newsreel can be searched by date via our NewsFilm Online Service where you can also find a short history of British Cinema Newsreels.

Further Information:

Visit BFI InView to find out more about silent film and social issues (to be found under ‘Early Film’ from the drop down menu under ‘Collections’)

Learn more about the study of Newsreel at the BUFVC

Visit TurnipNet for an overview of British Newsreels

Find out what is available on JISC MediaHub by visiting the Explore by Collection pages

Royal Mail Film Classics

Feb 082012

EDINA is delighted to announce that, after encountering some unexpected licensing issues, the Royal Mail Film Classics collection is now available in JISC MediaHub. As you may remember, the collection was previously part of Film & Sound Online and includes world-famous documentaries such as ‘Night Mail‘ and cinematic experiments such as ‘A Colour Box‘. The GPO Film Unit , which opened in the 1930′s, showcased an array of artistic talent and provided a training ground for bright new British documentary film-makers.

Still from "A Colour Box"

Read more about the Royal Mail Film Classics collection at http://jiscmediahub.ac.uk/about/inside and also on our blog.

There are over 60 titles to explore. Don’t forget to let us know which is your favourite film from this collection.

War Horse Highlights on JISC MediaHub

Feb 012012

Now that JISC MediaHub has been live for some time we thought it would be useful to highlight some of the best collections and materials that you can find and access in the service. To kick off this series of posts we thought we’d take inspiration from the recently released BAFTA and Academy Award nominated film ‘War Horse’ and use JISC MediaHub explore further how horses have been used in war.

‘War Horse’ has gained six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, and was inspired by the original book by Michael Morpurgo and the acclaimed National Theatre stage show .

Take a look at the following images which show the stark reality of life for horses on the battlefront during the First World War:

Grand carnival in aid of sick and wounded horses (Imperial War Museum)

Around 6 million horses served in World War One and a huge number of them died as a result.

In 1914 the RSPCA set up a fund for sick and wounded war horses to help alleviate suffering on the front line. 725,000 horses were treated in France alone.

Horse railway ambulance transport (Wellcome Library, London)

Horses were used to perform essential tasks such as pulling ambulances and field guns, as well as carrying supplies and ammunition.

The use of horses at the front was vital as they could cope with the deep mud far more effectively than vehicles.

General Scenes on the Western Front during the First World War: Battle of Ypres, 1917 (The First World War Poetry Digital Archive)

The ‘Animals in War’ memorial in London, dedicated in 2004, is inscribed:

Animals In War. This monument is dedicated to all the animals that served and died alongside British and allied forces in wars and campaigns throughout time. They had no choice.

Watch ITN news footage of this event at: http://jiscmediahub.ac.uk/record/display/037-00008934

To find out more just type ‘War Horse’ into the search box and browse through the results which contain material from the Imperial War Museum, the First World War Poetry Archive, Wellcome Images and many other collections.

New features in December

Dec 132011

As part of the ongoing development of JISC MediaHub, we have added some new features.

The help/support section now has an Interactive Guided Tour.
The new Explore by Learning Materials section currently includes Reviews, and we plan to extend it to cover case studies, trails and any entirely new materials we may wish to include in future.
The Full Record page has been upgraded. It now displays additional metadata, in particular the fields relating to newsfilm for the ITN collections that were in NewsFilm Online.
Records with geographic information show the locations plotted on a map.
Another useful improvement is that the frame-grabs now include timings, so you can see where the frame is within the video.
The Brief Records page has also been improved. The “mark record” and “quick view” functions are now icons beneath each thumbnail image, which corrects difficulties selecting the correct link in some browsers, as well as being a visual improvement. Certain page navigation links have also been restyled for greater consistency.
Notifications (eg, confirmation of new preferences) have been improved. Rather than a pop-up box in the screen centre, which interrupts your work until you close it, there are now more subtle boxes towards the bottom right. These are less intrusive, and and will clear automatically when you carry on working.

The JISC MediaHub team.

User satisfaction survey

Oct 132011

There’s now a new survey in JISC MediaHub. If possible, please take the time to fill it in, as your comments and feedback are much appreciated. Thanks very much.
The JISC MediaHub team.

More features in JISC MediaHub

Oct 042011

As part of the ongoing development of JISC MediaHub, we have added some new features.

Personal preferences in My MediaHub

MediaHub has options for searching and displaying records. You may prefer searches to be restricted to a particular media type, such as video only, or you may like to see only the records “inside MediaHub”; when the records are displayed, you may prefer too see more (or fewer) on each page.

These options are now all available in My MediaHub. We intend to add more options soon.

Combine and re-run previous searches in My MediaHub

The Search History section of My MediaHub lists the searches you have run, and allows you to re-run them. Now you can also combine them. For example, if you have already run a search for equine, and another for horse, you can now combine these to search for equine OR horse (which will give you the sum two previous searches), or alternatively for equine AND horse (which will give you the intersection of the previous two, i.e. just the records that occur in both of them).

This feature comes into its own when you have several complex searches, each of which has many search terms.

“Show all” similar and recently viewed items

Full records in MediaHub (the page which displays all the information about a record) include a list of the top five similar items, which can help you to find other records that cover related topics. Now this list includes a show all link that will display all similar items that can be found in MediaHub.

The five records you have most recently viewed are also listed on the full record page. This can be helpful if you are searching and browsing, and wish to return to something you were looking at a minute ago (without having to re-run a search and maybe page through lots of results to find it again). This list also now has a show all link, which takes you to the full list of recently viewed records in My MediaHub.

Searches now match any one or more words

MediaHub will now include a record in your results if it matches any one or more words that you enter, rather than including only the records that match all of the words (in technical terms, we are now applying the Boolean operator OR instead of AND).

We have made this change because we think it matches our users’ expectations. For example, if someone is interested in animal health, they may enter a search like veterinary animal medicine, since each of those words is relevant, and some useful records will be catalogued under veterinary medicine whilst others are under animal medicine.

This strategy is sensible, and works well in most search engines, but until now it would have given a poor result in MediaHub, which would have displayed only records that had all of the words. A record catalogued as veterinary medicine would have been excluded in the results, because MediaHub required the word animal as well.

Now, MediaHub will return any record that contains veterinary, or animal, or medicine.

This means that result sets can be much larger, but MediaHub sorts records according to relevance, so records that match all (or most) of the words you type will appear first. For expert users, total control of the operators used is possible on the Advanced Search page.

Help guides

Two help guides have been added: MediaHub Essentials is a two-page reference to the most important features, and MediaHub Help which is a full guide to the service. These are PDF files, suitable for printing as well as reading online.

These can be found using the Help link in the menu bar, or in the Support section if you are browsing the About pages.

JISC MediaHub full release

Aug 032011

Following the development period over the last few months, we are pleased to announce the full release of JISC MediaHub. Features previously unavailable in the interface have now been enabled including Advanced Search, Most Popular and My MediaHub. The full record page has also been enhanced. Other features will be added over the coming months, the Roadmap detailing these has been updated.

We are also working on help pages and guides which will be added to the interface shortly.

Access

Basic access to JISC MediaHub is free and open, including, for NewsFilm
Online subscribers, access to that content too.

Full access, ie to all the hosted as well as external collections,
requires subscription to the JISC eCollections service. For those
institutions who have not yet subscribed, details are available at
http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/Catalogue/Overview/index/1012

The Education Image Gallery and Film & Sound Online services have now been retired. Their service pages have been updated and include an explanatory message and link to JISC MediaHub. Deep links to individual records will still work and redirect to the same content via JISC MediaHub.

For service continuity the z39.50 targets to those databases are still
available for those institutions with ongoing access to the content.

The NewsFilm Online z-target is also still being offered, as is the user
interface at http://www.nfo.ac.uk/, although all NewsFilm Online content is also available through JISC MediaHub.

There is an SRU interface for JISC MediaHub, details of which are available on request.

We are still keen to receive feedback on JISC MediaHub via the links within the interface or directly to us at edina@ed.ac.uk

Additionally, don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions you may have.

Development Roadmap

Aug 032011

The following is a summary of the active and continuous development of JISC MediaHub. We’ll do our best to update this roadmap as our engineers continue their work. Things in grey haven’t been implemented yet; things in black are live on the website.

Already released

Search, including: Stem-searching; Filter by: media type; collection type; collection name; subject; date; Relevance ranking; Sort order of search results; Number-per-page option of search results
Useful Links
Contribute
Feedback
About
Terms of Service
FAQ
Exposure to search engines
Video streaming and download

Explore by Subject
Explore by Collection
Explore by Time

Advanced Search: title/description, subject, media type, collection and collection type indexes
Most Popular: Items, searches
My MediaHub: search history, recently viewed items, marked items
Sharing and social networking via external services such as Twitter
Machine-to-machine interface: SRU

2011-10-04

Personal preferences in My MediaHub
Combine and re-run previous searches in My MediaHub
“Show all” similar and recently viewed items
Searches now match any one or more words
Help guides

2011-12-12

Explore by Learning Materials: Reviews
Help: Interactive Guided Tour
Full Record Page: Additional new metadata; improved display
Brief Records Page: Improved Display

In development

These features are actively under development, or scheduled to begin shortly. We hope to release most of them within about six months.

Advanced Search: time/date, place, people and organisations, medically restricted, events/periods, duration, monochrome/colour, size
COUNTER reporting
Explore by Place
Explore by Learning Materials: Case Studies, Trails
Explore by Newsfilm
Grapevine service in My MediaHub:
Bookmarking; Commenting; Rating, Group-working
iPhone and Android apps
Most Popular: More features derived from usage stats
New usage reports for site representatives
Repository for self-deposit of user-contributed content
Simpler classification of collection types
Simpler download options

To be scheduled

Context-related search

JISC MediaHub: First release

Apr 262011

Following a successful preview period, EDINA is pleased to announce the first release of the JISC MediaHub interface to a wider audience at http://jiscmediahub.ac.uk, available via the UK Access Management Federation or direct IP.

Access to the resource has been enabled for all institutions subscribing to Education Image Gallery, Film & Sound Online or NewsFilm Online. In addition, access to each of those individual services continues in parallel via their respective login pages until August.

Feedback
We would like to thank those who submitted comments during the JISC MediaHub preview phase. We have corrected some bugs as a result and will continue to consider other suggestions for future development. Please submit your comments via the online survey available via the Feedback link on the homepage or the Contact Us link at the bottom of each page.

Content
Licensing arrangements with some collection-owners are still to be concluded, for a few collections both inside and outside JISC MediaHub. We will make these collections available individually as soon as the licensing for each collection is agreed.

Features
Service development will continue incrementally until availability of the full service this August. We will provide progress updates here over the coming months.

Subscription
As JISC Collections announced in March, [http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/News/NFO-update/ or http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/News/EIG-update/ or http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/News/FASO-update/] this August JISC MediaHub will become part of a new service, managed by JISC Collections in partnership with EDINA and Mimas, that will consist of three new content platforms (one of which is JISC MediaHub). There will be a service fee to cover all three content platforms, the details of which are available from JISC Collections, www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/jiscecollections.

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