Message-Id: <mailto:199502081858.AA22878@wugate.wustl.edu> Date: Wed, 8 Feb 1995 10:53:24 -0800 From: Peter Rauch <mailto:peterr%VIOLET.BERKELEY.EDU@wuvmd.bitnet> Subject: Re: Cataloging Presentation slides To: Multiple recipients of list IMAGELIB
Elizabeth, If I were to create a database (more than a catalog) of a 1000 (and growing) slide presentations, I'd consider the following:- You not only have the presentations that have been given, but you have the potential of many more which can be given, simply by reorganizing the existing collection of slide images into new talks/presentations. And, you will probably be adding new images/presentations too.
- In addition to "shuffling the deck" so to speak, you probably find that many slide images do not "say" or convey only one idea (though they may be used to do so in any particular presentation); many slides can convey a number of ideas, and thus could be and are used in different presentations in a variety of ways.
- So, for me it is important to keep separate the notion of slide (i.e., its identity --e.g., creator, physical contents, date of creation, revision history or lineage [in which case, you are actually talking about new slides modified from older ones]; its semantic content (i.e., its multiple messages); and the presentations themselves (i.e., the presentational context(s) was it used and with which message(s), presentation dates, who, where, what, why, ancillary notes used, etc);
- In a collection of slides whose contents are primarily text, and even in one that has only modest amounts of text, I'd want to be able to search the images' text contents _as_ text, in addition to being able to display the images, and to searching on keywords/semantic content/etc, presentation context, etc.
Why would I want all this information in a database? I suppose that if I were truly interested in using this material again, rather than simply recording for posterity exactly which slides were used as a set, by whom, when, for what, and where, then I'd need to be able to search the database for topics, ideas, contexts, etc. I suspect that if I had a collections of no fewer than 1000 presentations, and probably many 1000's of individual slides, I wouldn't be able to do a very good job of creating new presentations from existing materials without efficient access to a computerized database --one that "cataloged" the essence of what I was interested in, namely the ideas contained in those slides and conveyed by those prior presentations.
Does such a system exist? I don't know. Is it likely that it would require some database programming, and some serious data entry? Yes. Cheers, Peter
- - - - - - - - - - - On Wed, 8 Feb 1995 17:03:00 -0500, Elizabeth Schmidt <mailto:ESCHMIDT@FHI.ORG> ("Elizabeth Schmidt"mailto:@mr.fhi.org) said, among other things:
>Does anyone have experience cataloging slide presentations in an
>image database? We're hoping to put together a company-wide image
>database of maybe 1000 presentations.
>For us, a single presentation may have 10-40 slides that are
>primarily text.
> Is it
>solely a matter of finding the right software (which has proved to
>be challenging), or are there other solutions?
>Elizabeth Schmidt mailto:eschmidt@fhi.org
>Family Health International
>North Carolina