The New Zealand Film Archive
"Established in 1981, the Film Archive is an independent charitable trust overseen by a Board of Trustees representing film, archival, Maori and community interests. The Film Archive's constitution and kaupapa express a commitment to collect, protect and connect New Zealand's film and television history.
When an item is in the care of the Archive, it is considered the property of the depositor. Subsequently the copyright for the material remains with the legal rights holders.
The collections of predominantly New Zealand film, video and television date from 1895 to the present day. Every genre of filmmaking - feature films, documentaries, short films, home movies, newsreels, television programmes and film and television advertisements - is represented. There is also a significant documentation collection which includes publicity materials, stills, posters, production records, props, costumes and equipment housed in Wellington.
As there is no statutory deposit legislation for film in New Zealand, material is deposited voluntarily - and without cost to the depositor. Maintaining a kaitiaki role over the collections the Film Archive's guardianship ensures ownership of the original item remains with the depositor and copyright is maintained by the appropriate parties. In the case of material with Maori content, the Film Archive actively maintains relationships with whanau/hapu/iwi to ensure appropriate long term care and access."
(New Zealand Film Archive)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
VADS Fine Art Project Digital Capture Pilot Study: Case Study for the pragmatic direct digital capture of artworks from the Surrey Institute of Art and Design
"The VADS Fine Art Project aims to bring together, through a distributed digitisation model, artworks from across Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) that can serve to exemplify the history and achievement of fine art education and practice in this country since its inception in the 1850s.
In the initial stages of the project, a survey was sent out to all the Higher Education Institutions in the UK that taught fine art, in order to elicit whether or not student and staff work had been kept or documented. From this survey it was found that many colleges failed or had ceased to collect artworks due to the cost implications of purchasing, storing and insuring the works, leading to the output of many art colleges remaining undocumented.
As the Fine Art Project progressed, protocols for the digital capture, documentation and copyright clearance of work were established. These were then used to collect works from around the country to be included in the National Fine Art Education Digital Collection. However, given their inherent useable and easily applicable nature, it was thought the same protocols could be just as useful to digitally capture, document and rights-clear works within HEIs as and when they were being produced. This would make it far easier and affordable for colleges to capture and maintain collections of their present and past work, as well as offering additional benefits such as making them widely available on the Internet or for other publishing requirements."
(Ed Bremner, 1 September 2003 [last modified: 28th March 2006], Institute for Learning and Research Technology)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Scientific illustrations depict scientifically important features
"As a scientific illustrator, one must be able to convey a detailed, clear and accurate depiction of a specimen. Scientific illustrations are an important part of the documentation that makes a specimen museum-quality - along with field and research notes, accession records, photographs, and correspondence about the specimen. A scientific illustration captures information about a plant or animal, information that is often missing from the museum specimen. Scientific illustrations depict the scientifically important features of the organism being studied. They often also describe that organism's natural environment."
(National Museum of American History)
Fig.1 George Venable (1992). Drawing of a Carabid beetle from South America, created for the research of Dr. Terry L. Erwin of the Department of Entomology, courtesy of the Entomology Illustration Archive, NMNH
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
The rapidly changing demands for communication design
"One indication of the rate of change being experienced by professionals who design communication is how quickly our work and our work contexts become obsolete. Thus, only ten years ago, Zachry [71] observed that, 'In this time, countless professionals have devoted themselves to developing manuals, reference sheets, guidebooks, keyboard templates, online help systems, etc. that - to varying degrees - have been used and abandoned as technologies change' (p.22). In less than thirty years, communication designers have gone from documenting Fortran compilers [42], through cognitive analyses of documentation users’ tasks with minimalist manuals [10, 29] through SGML markup challenges [26] to DITA [2], Wikis [23], and visual representations of the activities of communication designers themselves [32]."
(Brad Mehlenbacher, p.59)
Fig.1 Alan Kitching (September 1975). 'The Antics computer animation system', Interactive Systems Conference
2). Mehlenbacher, B. (2009). Multidisciplinarity and 21st century communication design. SIGDOC'09: The 27th ACM International Conference on Design of Communication Proceedings. Bloomington, IN: ACM, 59-65.
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
Oracle database server: transaction management
"A transaction is a logical unit of work that contains one or more SQL statements. A transaction is an atomic unit. The effects of all the SQL statements in a transaction can be either all committed (applied to the database) or all rolled back (undone from the database).
A transaction begins with the first executable SQL statement. A transaction ends when it is committed or rolled back, either explicitly with a COMMIT or ROLLBACK statement or implicitly when a DDL statement is issued.
To illustrate the concept of a transaction, consider a banking database. When a bank customer transfers money from a savings account to a chequing account, the transaction can consist of three separate operations: decrement the savings account; increment the chequing account; record the transaction in the transaction journal.
Oracle must allow for two situations. If all three SQL statements can be performed to maintain the accounts in proper balance, the effects of the transaction can be applied to the database. However, if a problem such as insufficient funds, invalid account number, or a hardware failure prevents one or two of the statements in the transaction from completing, the entire transaction must be rolled back so that the balance of all accounts is correct."
(Richard Strohm, 2011)
Fig.1 a banking transaction example
2) .Richard Strohm (January 2011). 'Oracle Database Concepts'
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
