The SCARLET team have been busy presenting sessions on SCARLET at a number of conferences and events during the course of the project. A summary of these and links to presentations are below:
October 2011
JISC Online Conference Activity Week 2011
In October 2011, SCARLET featured as part of the JISC Online Conference Activity Week. An audio presentation created to support this conference is available here.
February 2012
ELI 2012 Annual Meeting, Austin, US
I presented on SCARLET as part of an innovation showcase, after which delegates were invited to ask questions in breakout sessions and view demonstrations of the content. Slides can be downloaded here. They were very interested in learning more about the methodology from a pedagogical perspective and how they could use the toolkit to produce similar content for their institutions libraries. I was able to showcase some proof of concept ideas for other subject areas enabling them to see how applications of AR could be scalable/sustainable in the future. It was apparent from presentations on iPad evaluation that students from American institutions are using handheld technology and engaging with the environment in a big way, this will only increase with the delivery of faster 4G networks and devices that can facilitate increased CPU power.
March 2012
UKSG 2012, Glasgow, UK
On 27 & 28 March, Jo Lambert presented two breakout sessions on SCARLET on two consecutive days. The one-hour sessions provided an introduction and overview of SCARLET and project activity with an opportunity for the audience to see the applications that have been developed as part of the project. The session concluded with a group discussion about the use and value of AR within libraries, museums and education and resources were available for the audience to take away with them. A link to the presentation is here.
April 2012
Electronic Resources and Libraries, Austin, US
On 2 April, Jo Lambert presented a session on SCARLET at Electronic Resources and Libraries in Austin. A link to the presentation is here.
CNI meeting, Baltimore, US
Matt Ramirez was invited on behalf of the SCARLET project to speak at the CNI (Coalition for Networked Information) Meeting in Baltimore, April 2-3. The CNI is an organisation consisting of North American Institutions and is a joint initiative of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and EDUCAUSE, promoting the use of digital information technology to advance scholarship and education. It was interesting to get a fresh insight into exciting projects and institutional initiatives. Central to the meeting ethos is the idea of informal networking and the building of new partnerships, sharing expertise to further the learner/research experience.
One of the most fascinating project briefing sessions was retroReveal (http://retroreveal.org/), an open source tool that revealed hidden information in various media, including print, microfilm, and photographs. Using forensic-style enhancements (think CSI) uploaded images are processed using a series of complex algorithms to uncover layers of hidden information. Although previously focused on archivists, curators, and conservators, the application has spread to other subject areas such as archaeology. Emphasis is on a community approach, users can share enhance images to allow other scholars to lend their expertise interpretations. RetroReveal provides an inexpensive and accurate way of aiding quality research, not to mention that it can make a novice feel like Indiana Jones.
Matts’ SCARLET session was well attended and had some interesting feedback. A number of institutions are already thinking of using Augmented Reality in terms of library/campus tours. Those attendees representing Special Collections could see the potential value of surrounding primary materials with electronic content and using AR as a tool to surface objects that may be in storage for most of the year.
I certainly hope to keep in touch with many of the people I met at the conference, looking at ways to collaborate in the future to share ideas and lessons learned. The CNI are a very friendly community that welcome new members and the meetings are a great forum to establish partnerships sharing the common aim – to create, share, disseminate, and analyze digital content in the service of research and education.
A link to the presentation can be found here
LILAC 2012, Glasgow, UK
An Augmented Reality poster about SCARLET was created and presented at LILAC in Glasgow in April. Conference attendees had the opportunity to see members of the SCARLET team materialise from the printed page by interacting with the SCARLET AR poster. A link to the poster is available here.
IS Forum, Manchester UK
On 17 April, Andy Land and Matt Ramirez gave an overview of the project and highlighted the technical framework developed at the IS Forum, a regular event held for IT staff at the University of Manchester. Attendees at this forum included developers, infrastructure experts, project managers and members of the University’s IT Leadership team. Questions after the presentation indicated an interest in looking at the use of AR in other areas of University activity. A link to the presentation is available here.
SCARLET dissemination workshop
John Hodgson, Jo Lambert and Matt Ramirez recently hosted a workshop at the John Rylands Library to demonstrate the Scarlet augmented reality project to archivists and librarians from other institutions in the region. Delegates seemed really impressed with the whole concept of AR, and they could see lots of potential in their own situations, especially with first-year undergraduates and school groups. A link to the presentation is available here.
May 2012
m-libraries workshop, Birmingham, UK
Matt Ramirez attended the Mobile technologies in libraries: information sharing event to deliver a workshop on the SCARLET project and how libraries can benefit from the toolkit to replicate and embed this framework into their institutions.
A link to the presentation is here.
ELAG, Palma, Spain
Ciaran Talbot presented a session on SCARLET at ELAG in May and his review of the session is below:
I attended the European Library Automation Group conference in Majorca. The theme was ‘Libraries everywhere’ which certainly fits with SCARLET. The topics at the conference included open/linked data and models for handling research data.
Overall the SCARLET presentation went well and generated lots of interest (as indicated by all the tweets e.g. https://twitter.com/#!/schambers3/status/203130318050439168). I was lucky that Matt and Andy had done all the hard work on the slides. Unfortunately a couple of technical hiccups meant I couldn’t get the demo on the big screen. However I was able to demo the project on the iPad between seminars and the attendees where suitably impressed.
Some questions were raised: How easy is it to create content? Can someone who isn’t a software developer do it? I explained this is what the toolkit aims to do. It will provide a template to allow less technical people to produce their own applications.
What about linking to licensed electronic resources? I said yes this is something you need to consider when deciding which resources to link to. The students in our trials will be licensed to access the e-resources so they wouldn’t hit any barriers when using the app. If you intended to augment the same item but for members of the public, you could perhaps use a different ‘channel’ to do so linking only to publicly available resources.
Finally I found people were very impressed with the notion you can augment physical objects, such as the printing press Matt has been working on. A link to the presentation is here.
NOWAL, Manchester, UK
Matt and John Hodgson delivered a presentation on SCARLET to NOWAL members at MMU focusing on the lessons learned from initial evaluation and how the content has developed over the project lifetime taking into account user feedback.
A link to the presentation is here.