Important note - this document is an out-of-date archive. Current information is kept on the Stellar Images development pages

Stellar Images

Updated by Ben Brophy November 29, 2005

The Stellar Images tool will allow faculty and students to collect images, organize and annotate, and then present them. The project was spurred by efforts at MIT, and across the world, to create image repositories for use in education. With so much media becoming available, we saw the potential for a tool in Stellar that will take advantage of them. This tool is not an image repository, but a tool that can access multiple image repositories and use those images as a teaching tool.

Contents

• User Goals
• Staged Approach
• Functionality for Stage 1
• Data requirements
• Modular design
• Course management requirements from Stellar
• Excluded functionality

User Goals

We kicked off the project by talking to faculty about how they use images in teaching. The most common method is to collect images and arrange them as a slideshow, which is used as a teaching tool while lecturing. There are several related activities:

• Making a slides available for Student review
• Using slides as "flash cards" to help students study
• Asking students to assemble their own presentations
• Recording lectures so that they can be played with the slides outside of class

Following on the use case of the slide show, we identified some steps involved in using slideshows to teach.

Gathering

Locating images to use in the slideshow.

Current Methods.

Techniques vary, but it is very common for instructors to use Google Images to locate images. People often know certain collections that can be found online - e.g the National Anthropological Archives or the U.S. Department of Energy archives. Images are saved for reuse. We saw instructors doing this by keeping copies of the images in folders on their computers, renaming the folders according the class names, and the image titles to serve a mnemonic aids.

In addition many instructors own collections of images as physical slides, and keep those slides for in class slideshows with slide projectors.

Problems to be solved

• Google images often returns poor quality results
• Google images does not return copyright information, and instructors are unclear on what is covered by fair use.
• Because of the copyright issues, OCW does not publish slideshows created using images, because the challenge in finding the image copyright owners is too great.
• Other image repositories are scattered. Many lack useful search interfaces, they all use different methods, and it is time consuming to search form images on multiple websites. Specialized knowledge is needed to find some image collections.
• It is difficult to search through images stored on a computer - and difficult to organize them consistently.
• It's hard to keep physical media organized and findable in filing cabinets. Those slides can't be easily copied and shared, and are not available for student review.

Preparation

Images need to be given context before they are presented. They are ordered, juxtaposed, and labeled during this process.

Current Methods.

• Instructors use Microsoft PowerPoint of Apple Keynote to organize images they found online.

Problems to be solved

• Using found images can be tricky in PowerPoint. Large images scaled down in PowerPoint retain their original quality, resulting in large files that cannot be easily shared.
• Powerpoint files do not keep track of the reuse rights for included images.
• Professors mentioned that PowerPoint is confusing and bulky software, and there is a steep learning curve in mastering it.

Presentation

Current Methods.

• Instructors bring their computer and a projector to a class room and use them to do a PowerPoint presentation.

Problems to be solved

• Projectors are not always available, some instructors don't want to carry their laptops to classrooms.
• There are often unexpected technical problems.
• It is not simple to share the large PowerPoint files with Students, who may not have the right software.

Staged Approach

In developing the new tool we have limited resources available, but want to show progress on the project quickly. We will adopt a staged development process. Mimicking the way we saw instructors working on slideshows, we will start by offering a tool that helps instructors gather images. The launch date for the initial release is January, 2006.

Later development work will help instructors prepare and present the images. The staged release gives us an opportunity to do further requirements gathering while on organizing and annotating images while instructors pilot the gathering functionality.

Functionality for Stage 1

The initial proof-of-concept is designed to test out the technology involved in working with multiple image repositories, while offering a tool that is helpful to instructors and students. The functionality and page flow should remain quite simple.

Page flow diagram

I've developed HTML mock-ups to guide the development of Stage 1.

Class Images

Initial view

• When an instance of the tool is opened for the first time no images will have been added. If no images have been gathered the page will contain a brief description of this tool and a link to start gathering images.

Usual View

• A table shows the images gathered for this class. on the first column of each row there is a thumbnail of the image, which can be clicked to go to the detailed view of the image.
• The details column shows the title and description if the image (both of which are user editable, but which should default to metadata supplied by the repository).
• The third column contains linked images of up and down arrows. Clicking these images rearranges the images. Ideally this can be accomplished without refreshing the page using Ajax. It may be necessary to accomplish this using page refreshing.
• A button (or link, or linked image, details t.b.d.) can be clicked to turn the titles and descriptions in the details column into editable fields. See editing view.
• A list navigator allows the user to page through large sets. Of images. This will follow the specifications set out in the sakai style guide.

Technical notes

• Images are kept locally when possible, or kept in their source repositories when copying the image to our server is not allowed.
• Title, description and other metadata are saved locally, never sent back to the repository.

Possible Issues

• If used Ajax Javascript must be accessible.

Image Details

Initial view

• n/a this page can only be accessed in reference to a specific image.

Usual View

• The image is shown at a medium size (approx. 500 pixels wide).
• The 'View full size' link opens the image in the web browser, with no HTML. The dimensions of the full size image are shown in parentheses
• Metadata available is shown. this display will variable based on the which repository is offering the image.
• The description shows information from the repository if available. Instructors can enter their own text descriptions of images on the class images page.
• Links to edit title and description are present on the page. (this is only partially shown in the mockup0

Gather Images

Initial view

• Only the single search field is shown. The options are hidden. Search results title does not appear until search is made.

Usual View

• There is a text box of entering searches (following the simple approach popular with Google users).
• An options link reveals additional options (via javascript, not page refresh).
• Collection drop-down allows users to specify selections. Defaults to all collections. One option is "This class website" which allows the images saved in the class resources be searched.
• License allows searches to be limited to a type of license. We should try simplify the list for the user (e.g. copyrighted - class only, public domain, and some restrictions apply)
• Search within results is a way to search within the the current set. E.g. if a search for "dog" returned 20,000 results the user could then search for "cat" with in the results' returning images that include both "dog" and "cat."
• List navigator behaves as in the 'class images' view.
• The first column in the table of images shows a thumbnail of the image. Click the image to preview (opens a page with the image in a larger format with all available metadata).
• The details column shows the title, collection, license and quality.

Possible Issues

• Response time is important. If it becomes difficult to default search against all repositories, we may need to start with a default set.
• Javascript must be accessible.

Image Preview

Initial view

• n/a this page can only be accessed in reference to a specific image.

Usual View

• The image is shown at a medium size (approx. 500 pixels wide).
• 'Add image to Class Images' link saves the information about selected image. The image is then included on the class images list.
• Metadata available is shown. This display will variable based on the which repository is offering the image.

Data requirements

Draft metadata spec for Stellar Images.

Class Images

Data required for the images pulled from searches and used through the class images page. Data in user editable fields is initially the data from the repository - i.e. the image title comes from the repository, but the instructor can change it.

• Image files (100px thumbnail, 500px medium, and full sized)
• Sort order (user editable)
• Image title (user editable)
• Image description (user editable)
• Date added (locally generated - used for default sort order)
• Reuse rights (limited vocabulary)
• Image license (from repository)
• Source (from repository)
• Image creation date (optional - from repository)
• Attribution (optional - from repository)
• Keywords (optional - from repository)

Modular design

• Stellar Images will be it's own WebApp separate from Stellar.
• It will get authorization, course management and image metadata from stellar
• Could act as a stand alone application, or with another CMS
• The proof of concept will pull images from 2 sources
1. Rotch Visual Collection via DSpace
2. Visualizing Cultures

Relationship between Stellar Images, CMS and repository

Course management requirements from Stellar

Two things are needed, information about the class the tool is associated with, and information about role of the person using the tool.

Information about the class

Class Title, Number and Semester Not currently used, but will likely be needed to add metadata to presentations created by the tool.

Class or Project? Not in the current UI , but it is likely they will be treated differently.

Active or inactive? Important for some copy right settings. Inactive classes (which do not equal classes who's semesters are over) have different access rights for copyrighted materials for studetns under fair use.

Access level (Public, MIT or Class list only) Key to access decisions.

Information about the person

Name and user ID Used in metadata about who added the photo to the site.

MIT community member? Used in access decisions for some images.

What's their role? (Instructor, TA, Participant, Librian, OCW staff, Guest) Used in access permissions, and decisions about whether they can add images to the class site.

Excluded functionality

• We will not be developing image repository software to support this tool. We plan to access existing repositories using OKI OSIDs, notably MIT's DSpace.
• We will not include a method for instructors to add images from their hard drives or from Stellar class sites to Stellar images. We will seek out repositories they can add these images to (possibly Harvest Road or MMedia)