MEDEV

School of Medical Sciences Education Development

Introduction

Can you remember what life was like before PowerPoint? In the space of a few years, all types of presentations - lectures, seminars and conference talks - have been transformed. Lecturers around the globe have struggled to transform their lecture courses from battered OHPs and cracked slides into shiny bright (and often garish) presentations. Conferences too have been transformed and now the laptop and data projector are essential for every presentation.

This technology allows a whole range of new possibilities in presentations; colour (of course), embedded film clips, sound files, animations and even boring lists can fly in from every direction. The problem is that you have to create the animations, find the pictures and draw the diagrams Ð and this all takes an enormous amount of time. However we noticed that some people have found that time and we found ourselves listening to talks and making a mental note to ask the speaker for that image or that film clip. It was then that the idea came to us that it would be wonderful if there were a searchable central resource, freely available for educational use, where we could collect images and animations that would drop into presentations.

Perhaps one reason why the idea appealed to us was that we work in the area of visual perception Ð the study of the visual system, its anatomy and physiology, and all aspects of our processing of visual information. Unsurprisingly pictures are particularly important in this area; pictures of the visual portions of the brain, pictures of visual stimuli used in experiments and pictures of visual effects like visual illusions. And so it was that the idea for the idea for Viperlib was born.

Getting off the ground

We realised from the outset that a successful project would need a lot of work. And work costs money. Fortunately we were successful in securing a £75k grant from HEFCE's Fund for the Development of Teaching and Learning, and our project could really take off.

The study of the visual pathways and visual perception is taught in departments of physiology, psychology, biology, medicine and even computer science. We realised that in order to be a success, our website needed academics to contribute pictures, visual effects, illusions and graphs to the project. The problem was how to encourage this altruism. Giving academics money was ruled out on two grounds. Firstly the project could not afford to pay for material, and secondly it is well- known that academics don't do things for money; that's why they're academics. The solution was, of course, a free T-shirt, emblazoned with Viperlib's snake logo. (Figure 1).

Expansion and growth

Our Viperlib team was soon busy promoting the project at conferences and via email, and quickly received a tremendous response from vision scientists around the world. The Viperlib website was launched on the unsuspecting world in August 2003.

The site grew rapidly and continues to develop and thrive: at the time of writing (August 2006) we have nearly 2,800 images with well over 3,000 registered users. Each month, the site regularly has around 2,000 unique visitors, who collectively manage to make 200,000 monthly hits. The statistics make fascinating reading. (Why is the site overwhelmingly popular in Japan one month and in Hungary the next? Why did usage suddenly leap on that Tuesday in February? HavenÕt people got anything better to do with their Sundays?) Detailed analysis of the statistics would be a rewarding project in itself.

Of all the problems we encountered in the early days perhaps the knottiest of all was the question of copyright. Many contributors kindly sent us images that they had scanned from journals and textbooks. Even if this practice is legal for your own personal use it probably isnÕt legal to put such images on a web-site like ours. Just as an example, HolbeinÕs painting of The Ambassadors is of interest to people working in visual perception because of the image of a skull hidden by distortion at the bottom of the painting. The National Gallery in London, who own the painting have a photo of it on their web-site and they hold the copyright for the photograph. I think that the painting itself is not subject to any copyright but taking your own photograph of the painting in the gallery is not allowed. The National Gallery allows personal use of their image, defining personal use as non-commercial, domestic use by an individual involving the making of only single copies of each digital image. A quick search on Google Images reveals over 330 sites displaying the picture. A similar search for the Mona Lisa finds over 31,000 sites...

We took the decision early on that we must make sure that all our images were legal. However dealing with issues of copyright, data protection, agreements, permissions, conditions of use and associated record-keeping has taken far more time than initially anticipated. Our advice to anyone undertaking a similar project would certainly be not to underestimate the thorny issues around copyright and the time and organisation needed to obtain all the necessary permission and conditions of use

How Viperlib works

Users who are looking for specific items can search for images by keyword, contributor, description, file format or filename. For those simply curious to see what's on offer, the images are categorised in subject areas to facilitate browsing through the collection. Each image is associated with metadata. Search results are presented as a series of thumbnail images (see Figure 2)which can, if the user chooses, be accompanied with a brief description. Clicking on a thumbnail produces a full downloadable view with more detailed information. For example a full acknowledgement, the description, any references, links to sources of further information and perhaps some additional related images. (see Figure 3) Users must register and accept conditions of use before gaining access to the full-size high-resolution images.

Very often the images in the collection come from individuals or organisations with their own website containing other material of interest, so we have built up a useful collection of links to associated websites, journals, organisations and conferences in the field.

Viper2go

Viperlib has quickly become a highly successful, shared international resource provided by experts for experts. However, as the project progressed, it became clear that the concept could be enhanced to create valuable eLearning materials. Viperlib images are accompanied by the briefest of details, which (while perfectly adequate for experienced vision scientists) can provide a rather sparse environment from the viewpoint of learners and nonspecialists (see Figure 4).

A small grant from the Higher Education Academy's Psychology Network has enabled us to develop the site further by constructing value-added tutorials from the raw ingredients of the Viperlib collection: complete tutorial sessions targeted at undergraduate or postgraduate level. We think of these tutorials as being akin to a fast-food outlet, somewhere to pick up a ready made meal when you don't want to cook the ingredients yourself, and so we have dubbed the new venture Viper2go, with, of course, its own Viper2go logo (Figure 5), and its own T- shirt for contributors!. We already have our first 25 tutorials and we are looking to expand Viper2go further.

The future

Although our original funding is now at an end, Viperlib is set to continue. We have just secured a generous gift from Microsoft of £25k which will allow us to correct all the mistakes that we now realise we have made in the project. Chiefly we want to simplify and rugged-ise the software underlying Viperlib. Primarily we want to reduce the day to day running costs of looking after the site, for example by allowing users to upload material more directly without any danger of destroying the site in the process. If we can reduce these running costs we can ensure the site's future.

And there's always the challenge of extending the site to cover other sensory modalities as well - we're actively looking at incorporating material on audition and the auditory pathways...

Conclusion

Visit the site at www.viperlib.com, take a look to see whatÕs available and let us know what you think. We have many plans for future development of the site but we welcome all ideas and comments, so do get in touch at info@viperlib.com. If you see anything that's wrong, we need to know about that, too!

Viperlib is a non-profit project: no payment is made for material provided, and images are held only as a collection for use as an educational resource. Reproduction or distribution of items for commercial purposes is prohibited.

We have learned many lessons that might be of value to anyone who might want to set up such a resource in other subject areas. We would be happy to pass the information on, but it'll cost you a T-shirt...