[soc.history] Multimedia database required

johnh@macadam.mqcs.mq.oz.au (John Haddy) (03/14/91)

A friend of mine in the Ancient History department has asked for my advice 
regarding a computer system for the Teaching Collection.

The Ancient History Teaching Collection at Macquarie is one of the biggest in
this country. The curator wishes to catalogue all the artefacts and papyri into
an on-line research database. To this end, he needs information about software
and the hardware platforms under them.

The software required basically falls into two categories:

a)	A relational database with the facility to access and display images
	from a variety of sources e.g. scanned documents, captured video (still
	frame) etc.
	
b)	Image capture and enhancement software. The researchers need to be able
	to capture images from video as well as via scanning, and then
	experiment with enhancement techniques. The database mentioned above
	would reference both the original and enhanced images.
	
The software selected needs to be easy to use, since the average archaeologist
isn't usually too computer literate.

Can anyone out there in Netland offer advice/opinion? Maybe someone is already
doing this type of thing. Do standards exist? The History department would like
to make its resources available to whomever wishes access, so they'd like a
system which allows information transfer in some form over the net.

If you can help, please email direct to me.

Thanks in advance,

		John Haddy
		
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