A Taste of Turing and other archives

Kirk Martinez, Jessie Hey, Gareth Hughes

IAM, Electronics and Computer Science, Southampton University

7.3.2000

Group Background

• Creating a hypermedia version of the Mountbatten archive began in 1988

• Microcosm Open Hypermedia System

• Wellington, Churchill, V&A Museum…

Intelligence Agents Multimedia

One of 50,000 photos in the Mountbatten Archive

The Mountbatten Archive

• 250,000 text documents

• 50,000 photographs

• Recorded speeches

• Large collection of film and video

• Spans entire lifetime (1900-1978)

How we started

• Mountbatten in India (1947-48)

• On-going catalogue work by Archives produced ASCII files of text (in STATUS)

• 200 photos put onto laser videodisc – catalogue in Superbase

• Links authored using first prototype of Microcosm

Alan Turing Archive

• One of the current projects

• King’s College Cambridge

• 3 way funded pilot. IEE, BCS, ECS Soton

• To scan 1/3 of items

• Design Web site about the archive for 3 types of users

• Technology to be re-used for other archives

Database Design Issues

• Create database fields from catalogue etc.

• Copyright clearance. Majority is cleared

• Pay experts such as Andrew Hodges and Jonathan Swinton to contribute analysis

• Multiple versions/formats of each image for different applications

• OCR images where possible

Scanning Facts and Figures

• A3 scanner purchased (Epson GT10000)

• 780 images scanned at 300dpi, 24bit colour

• Compressed Tiff format

• 13Gb files produced

• PC and scanner taken to Archive, King’s

• 6 days work

JREI Server Project

• Joint Research Equipment Initiative

• For storing and processing multimedia data for a variety of projects

• 2 Sun servers each with 4 processors and 2GB memory

• Approximately 200Gb disk space

Turing Web Site Software

• IBM DB2 to manage the multimedia data

• Apache Web server

• PHP (HTML embedded scripting language) for dynamic pages that query the database

• Cross-platform design with free Web tools

• Integrates with our Agent Framework

Browse database for Items

List of Folders in the Item (A.1)

List of Files in the Folder

High Quality Image Browser

• Research started in the Viseum and ACOHIR European projects

• Image capture, calibration, compression, serving and scanning

• Image server provides image tiles to a Web browser

• Quickly view very large images (up to 2Gb)

Sample Photo

K7.8

AMT running, inscribed on back, ‘National Physical Lab. 2nd in 3 miles’

26 Dec. 1946

Copyright: Photographer unknown (possibly a newspaper)

Image ViewerK.2Précis of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. [c. 1927]. AMS notes putting the argument of The Theory of Relativity by Albert Einstein in simple form, taking the book chapter by chapter, with directions on how to read it.

Links

• Alan Turing www.turing.org.uk (Hodges)• IAM www.iam.ecs.soton.ac.uk• Image Browser

www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~km/projs/webimage/• Php uk.php.net• DB2

www.software.ibm.com/data/highered/• Contact Kirk Martinez km@ecs.soton.ac.uk