Overview

HOTBED (Handing on Tradition By Electronic Dissemination) is a JISC funded project headed by staff at Glasgow's Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (RSAMD).

HOTBED staff have developed a system, placed on the World-Wide Web, that allows staff and students in the RSAMD's B.A. in Scottish Music course and staff and students at Edinburgh University's School of Scottish Studies quick and useful access to a wealth of online, digitised sound and video resources.

These resources are pooled from both tutors' performances and collections and existing archive materials. The School of Scottish Studies in Edinburgh has a unique archive of traditional Scottish sound materials. Some of these materials have been made available through HOTBED in digital formats for learning and teaching purposes.

The HOTBED system currently holds 759 items totalling over 43 hours worth of digitised materials. The materials themselves are sourced from reel-to-reel tapes, 78 rpm records, cassettes, CDs, and DV videos. Supporting materials, such as song transcriptions and hyperlinks are also included with some items.

In addition to providing a searchable, web based database for the materials, HOTBED also provides bespoke manipulation tools for musical use. Students and staff can customise any resource they find by 'marking up' the item to allow quick access to points of interest. They can then choose to loop any section within the item for practice or analysis.

Organisational tools are also provided, allowing each registered user to gather items together in groups. An intra-system email system is included that allows users to communicate easily and share harvested resources with other users on the system, thereby providing a framework for collaboration. Furthermore, staff can share collected resources with all students on the system by means of 'public lists' that they can post and dynamically update as required.

Aims

The overall aim of the project is to implement networked sound resources in a specific learning and teaching context, the RSAMD's BA in Scottish Music course, and to evaluate the results from a variety of perspectives (take-up, nature and pattern of usage of resources, added value to learning experience, effects on teaching approaches, especially in performance teaching).

The HOTBED system has been developed specifically with these aims in mind, and many developments on the system since its prototype stage have been made in direct response to the needs of its target user group.

With a reliable, fully developed system ready for use, the focus of the HOTBED project will now be on usage within the Scottish Music curriculum.

Implications

The project will report on areas of wide relevance to the JISC and the academic community at large, for example, multimedia digitisation and archiving, creation and management of networked sound resources, access to digitised archival material (especially in the area of music and ethnology), the needs of sound and moving image users (in particular performing arts users) and the role of the smaller specialist institution in the context of distributed resource provision.

Design and Standards

Throughout its development, HOTBED has used standards and guidelines as suggested by the JISC: the metadata is constructed using the Dublin Core set; open source technologies have been used for web delivery, middleware, and the database; and general development guidelines (use of stylesheets, fonts, sizes, etc) have been adhered to.

Project outputs are held on the HOTBED website (see the documents section).