The Education Media OnLine

This is a JISC-funded set of collections of film and video, hosted by EDINA and cleared and digitised through the JISC's Managing Agent and Advisory Service (MAAS), who are also producing associated metadata. The work is ongoing, and will result in hundreds of hours of material becoming available. The films are of high quality, and are fully downloadable, either in full or as segments, and can be used freely in learning, teaching and research.

Do you comply with any ISO standards?

Not as regards storage for the bulk of our service delivery. The ISO standards for storage media of which we are aware (ISO 9660 and more recently ISO 13346) are relevant to mountable media such as CD, CD-R, CD-RW, DVD.

Do you have to comply with any external legalisation?

No, we are not aware of any.

What quality assurance methods are in place for the various different media types used?

The disk arrays have inbuilt software for automatic performance monitoring and fault reporting.

Do you use any standard, manufacturers, tools for assessing quality of stored media?

See above

Have you developed any tools for assessing the quality of stored media?

In the main we use proprietary tools. We also run a simple script that compares file sizes between similar bits of media. The procedure is as follows: 1. Our third party encoders upload digitised bits of media to their servers using an MPEG-7 based naming convention; 2. Each month a script runs that check file sizes for comparable media, based on known bit rates; 3. Any discrepancies are output to a text file; 4. The text file is sent back to the third party encoders and they are asked to run manual checks; 5. Any corrected files are uploaded. Although the checks are very basic, they have the advantage of triggering manual quality control without requiring additional manpower from us.

What are the long-term plans for the archive and is there a migration plan?

EDINA is currently contracted by JISC to host the EDUCATION MEDIA ONLINE service until 31 July 2005 and may be granted a two-year extension until 2007. We know that the EDUCATION MEDIA ONLINE content is licensed by JISC through HEFCE from the rights owners either for ten years or in perpetuity and we assume that JISC and its Moving Pictures and Sound Working Group are responsible for the long-term plans for EDUCATION MEDIA ONLINE, including any migration plan. Unfortunately, we have no details of these plans.