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Hello Everyone, Thanks to Gerhard Nauta at the University of Leiden I'd like to share his latest email about their AMICO University Testbed activities. I'm happy to say that Gerhard has been convinced that there is enough for them to report, and he'll be joining us in Pittsburgh! I'm looking forward to learning more about activities in all the University Testbed locations when we meet here in Pittsburgh. Best wishes, jennifer Message from Leiden Follows: Dear Jennifer, Here in Leiden we are by now happy having access to the AMICO Library as made available through the RLG interface. Unfortunately we had some rather trivial problems in starting up our Testbed activities. Because of a change in teaching staff (august 1998) we ran out of time in preparing use of the AMICO Library for the first course envisioned in our proposal, viz. the (Fall) Theatrum Biblicum course. Sadly enough this coincided with a lost email message in which the access procedure to the library was announced. September '98 we had to postpone regular use of the library to the spring semester (which explains the non-existant hits by Leiden University computers prior to last January). By now use of the AMICO Library is well under way. In heterogenous teams of about 4 to 5 students from such diverse disciplines as Art History, Computer Science, Comparative Linguistics, Educational Technology and Psychology (Human Computer Interaction) students are browsing the library, looking for paintings that show canonical examples of formal characteristics (so they are doing a-typical, non-precošrdinated searches). Found sets of images are included in small educational "modules" which these students are building in a course on - as we labelled it - "intermittent programming". The difference with most other actual users of the AMICO Library is, I guess, that our students are using the library to learn something about multimedia production. They are not doing typical Art History assignments. We have a fairly simple course web at: http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/kennismedia/ip/ip.html where there are amongst others links to the AMICO Library. (Unfortunately, the site is mainly in Dutch.) Other activities include: a comparison of AMICO image capture and documentation procedures with actual practices in the Leiden University Print Room (a very crude interface to the current image database is at http://oasis.leidenuniv.nl:83/pkl/) and a test by the Leiden Imaging & Multimedia Group - http://www.wi.leidenuniv.nl/home/lim/ - to see how their content-based retrieval techniques work on AMICO materials. We think a positive side effect of our participation in the Testbed project is that, through our contacts in the Netherlands, the AMICO initiative is becoming better known. We understand that in circles of national policy makers the AMICO approach serves as an example of good practice. Because it took us some time to get things going, we definitely need prolongation of our licence. Actually this was foreseen at the time of writing our proposal and we passed the necessary budget item last year. We have been in two minds about whether we should be just happy with the RLG interface, OR should locally mount the library - by way of the offered tapes. Since focus in our use of the library is on how to handle art history data, and since the initial RLG interface offered the possibility of downloading both object descriptions and metadata in more or less structured form, we decided to leave it to our students to both select and store locally the necessary images, object descriptions and metadata. It follows that although the new RLG interface is in many ways superior to the first one, we do regret the missing option of downloading object descriptions. Issues of this kind of course will be worded in our evaluation report. This brings me to your encouragement to present a paper at the Unversity Testbed Meeting. We have been discussing this here in Leiden and came to the conclusion that at this point in time we did not as yet "push the discipline" sufficiently. Although the Dept. of Art History has given an undertaking to arrange the trip to Carnegie Mellon University in June, we are hesitant to take the opportunity. So far this intermediary report. I apologize if I've been too verbose. You will hear more from us soon. Best wishes, Gerhard Jan
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Gerhard Jan Nauta, Department of Art History Leiden University Doelensteeg 16 Postbus 9515 2300 RA Leiden The Netherlands tel: +31 (0)71 5272741 fax: +31 (0)71 5272615 email: nauta@rullet.leidenuniv.nl |