The DoITPoMS Video Library released under CC licence

A series of 115 videos has been released by the DoITPoMS at the University of Cambridge and uploaded to YouTube.  The DoITPoMS Video Library is a collection of materials science related videos intended for use in teaching and learning.

Click here to view the videos at YouTube

Resource Finder Alpha Testing

We have been alpha-testing the new Resource Finder with our consortium partners. This utility will allow users to search for our open educational resources by type (text, video, image, etc.) and by license. We are also designing in a hierarchical subject tree which will allow users to filter their search results by one or more topics.

The feedback from the partners who took part in the test has been largely very positive. They have come back with a number of useful suggestions to further improve the resource finder before it goes live. Thanks to all involved.

Flash Movies from aluMATTER

We are currently working on re-packaging a selection of interactive Flash Movies from the award-winning aluMATTER website to make them available for downloading and running from your local system. This is in response to a large number of requests over the years from users wishing to have access to the movies whilst offline. These resources will be available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Non-Derivative license. aluMATTER has been developed by the European Aluminium Association.

Software Licensing

So far, all resources in CORE-Materials have been released under Creative Commons licenses. However it has become apparent these licenses are insufficient when dealing with source code for software.

The Creative Commons website FAQ advises against their licenses for software and instead points to the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative for appropriate licenses. Licenses at these websites apply limitations as to how source code is used, redistributed and improved, it cannot be relicensed under a more restrictive license.

HD Videos on Materials for Dental Technology

A series of ten high-definition videos has been released by the School of Clinical Dentistry at the University of Sheffield and uploaded to YouTube. The videos comprise:

• Constructing a plaster model of the dentition [3 parts]
  
• Restoring a tooth (gold crown) [3 parts]
• Restoring a tooth (CAD-CAM ceramic) [4 parts]

 Click here to view the videos at YouTube

Durability of Materials from CES EduPack 2009 Released

We have just released the entire Cambridge Engineering Selector EduPack 2009 Durability package. It is available for download as a single document from Scribd or SlideShare.

The performances of materials in the following types of environment are covered:

• Water & aqueous environments
• Acids & alkalis
• Fuels, oils & solvents
• Halogens & gases
• Built environments
• Flammability
• Thermal environments

Video uploads to YouTube

We're planning to spend some time next week developing an API to allow us to batch upload video clips into YouTube.

JISC-CETIS 2009 Conference

A number of our project members attended the JISC-CETIS 2009 Conference in Birmingham. We came back with plenty of good ideas to enhance the CORE-Materials project.

There was some useful stuff from Charles Duncan at Intrallect on the automatic generation of metadata from texts, which we think can help us reduce the time it takes to manually catalogue our resources. During the session, we also met John McNaught from the National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM), who also offered sage advice on the same subject.

Chris Clarke from Talis gave a very good overview on the use of machine-readable data to build linked open courseware.

We also learned from Russell Stannard from the University of Westminster about the successful use of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to 'broadcast' the release of new OER content to followers.

Cambridge Engineering Selector

We're working with Granta Design to release the materials data and science notes from the Durability section of CES EduPack 2009. The performances of materials in the following types of environment are covered:

• Water & aqueous environments
• Acids & alkakis
• Fuels, oils & solvents
• Halogens & gases
• Built environments
• Flammability
• Thermal environments

As well as adding the content to our website, we also aim to make the material available for download as ZIP and PDF.

Over 750 micrographs added from DoITPoMS micrograph library

We've released a load of micrographs from DoITPoMs at the University of Cambridge.
They look great at Flickr and you can easily create a customised slideshow on your own site. Take a look at the one we've created on our own site.

TALAT lectures on aluminium technology now released

We have now released 149 TALAT lectures by the European Aluminium Association under a BY-NC-SA Creative Commons license.

They can be viewed on Scribd and SlideShare.

Hierarchical subject tree for Materials Science & Engineering

One of the key outputs from the CORE-Materials project is to develop a hierarchical subject tree to help users browse and filter their search results.

As an interdisciplinary discipline, developing a genuine 'taxonomy' for Materials is perhaps unrealistic, but we can develop a useful set of hierarchical 'facets' through which users from all types of background might wish to access our resources. Therefore we will enable users to search by materials types, processes, applications, scientific concepts, plus a range of other 'top-level' categories, as follows:

• Science approaches
• Materials
• Processes
• Applications
• Product Forms
• Properties
• Testing, analysis & experimentation
• Scale
• Others (Sustainability, Management, Design, Health & Safety...)
  

At the project outset, we asked our partners to contribute to the process of building our subject tree and would like to thank them for their good ideas. Naturally we have been able to incorporate some and not others, but we have now come up with a good starting point - one which we can use to classify the resources we currently have.

The subject tree is unlikely ever to be 'final' and will be able to alter it as the project progresses.

Click here to check out the current tree.

Materials images at Flickr

The project team has adapted a Flickr upload API to allow us to batch upload images and metadata to the Flickr website.

You can now view the CORE-Materials images at Flickr.