Alternatives Database

Videodiscovery Digital Library (VDL)

The Videodiscovery Digital Library (VDL) is an on-line collection of 30,000 images and movies with associated descriptive text, lessons and retrieval software. It represents the culmination of over 200 person/years of research and development resulting in a comprehensive treatment of biology, genetics, anatomy and physiology, chemistry, physics, geology, atmospheric science, oceanography and astronomy. The biology, oceanography and anatomy and physiology collections contain hundreds of progressive animal dissections, human cadaver dissections as well as virtual and actual physiology experiments. This unique resource offers teachers and students a comprehensive, high quality, highly organised science media collection that can improve science learning at all levels. It allows students and teachers to prepare custom presentations (‘mediashows’) using built-in authoring tools. Teachers precisely control access to the VDL, adjusting for grade level, subject focus and appropriateness. VDL is a living collection – it is continually growing and being revised to keep up-to-date. It is delivered on a dedicated server located at each site and is available to qualified institutions as a yearly subscription.

Medium: Dedicated server appliance and in some cases also CD-ROM
System requirements: The VDL is a rich media collection delivered across an institution’s high speed local area network using an innovative and cost effective system. There should be one server appliance per school subnet or when suitable bandwidth is available one or more machines can be housed in a central district network facility. Each server appliance comes completely loaded with the VDL images, videos, interface and text databases. Updates and administration can be performed remotely. VDL is accessed through a minimum Internet Explorer 5 or Netscape Navigator 4 web browser. The computer can be a Macintosh or PC with a sound card and a 200+ MHz processor, and should have a Windows Media Player 7 plug-in
Price: The VDL licence is US$2.00 per student per year based on the Full Time Equivalent (FTE) count of students in the institution. The licence fee pays for student and teacher access, and for routine service upgrades, up-to-date revisions or additions to the collection and supporting resources. Videodiscovery sells the server appliance, fully loaded with the VDL content and software for US$2,000 per machine, which will be owned by the institution and should be dedicated to the VDLNote: Although the VDL is easy to learn and use, Videodiscovery offers a variety of staff training services including phone teleconference, training-the-trainers workshops in Seattle (USA), and on-site training by Videodiscovery staff