Friday 3 August 2007

Creative Uses of a Repository

I was just walking through our lab this afternoon. The "lab" is the open plan area that the research staff and students inhabit in the Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia group. It is on the top floor of our new building, which enables me to say to visitors as they step out of the lift "Welcome to the IAM group - the highest level of abstraction in the School". (That kind of thing passes for wit in Computer Science circles.)

Back to the plot - as I was walking through the lab, I was struck by how many posters our researchers have accumulated from conference visits. They are stuck up all over the cubicle walls that separate out the different research areas. Some of these posters are looking a bit the worse for wear (they used to be up in the old building) but none the less they give a good impression of the research that this group has undertaken recently.

Now, as long as all these posters are actually stored in the repository, we could use them to provide a rotating display on a public plasma screen. There are an increasing number of these in various buildings all over the department. All it would take would be a little script that chooses a different PPT or PDF Poster Presentation from our eprints repository and displays it for 2 minutes before going on to the next poster. Each time it would choose a poster from a different author / discipline / research team. All I'd have to do is find a spare screen!

My list of things to do this summer isn't getting any shorter!

No comments:

Post a Comment