Computer Lab seminar archive — beta release

The Ring provides access to recordings of the technical seminars that take place most weeks during term time. It's a great way to keep in touch with the latest developments and an invaluable library of technical material.

This service is in beta — see notes below. Please send any comments to jan.samols@cam.ac.uk as your feedback is vital to help us improve the service.

How to use the archive

The archive contains video recordings of seminars which are approximately an hour long. They are delivered using Flash video (like YouTube), which works on most platforms, although you may need to update the Flash plug-in for your browser.

To find seminars, you can look through the list which is shown with the most recent seminar first. You can type text into the search box, which will search the titles and abstracts of the seminars. You can click on one of the tags in the "tag cloud", which represents visually the tags or key words associated with the seminars. More common tags are shown more prominently.

Whichever method you use to find a seminar, click on its title in the list to view the seminar page. This shows an abstract, details of the speaker and the video. To watch the video, click on the play button. You can move around in the video by dragging the marker in the progress bar — so, for example, if you watch part of a seminar you can come back later and pick it up where you left off.

On the right-hand side of the seminar page are a rating box and a comment box. You can click on a rating to give your opinion of the quality of this seminar to help others. The mean rating given is displayed as a number of stars in the list of seminars. You can also comment on the seminar. Comments are displayed below the abstract. Please use the drop-down box to give a type for your comment if possible as it helps to classify feedback.

As new seminars are published they appear in the RSS feed available on the list page.

Encouraging new members

Seminar recordings are only available to Ring members and current members of the Computer Lab. However, non-members are free to browse the list and look at individual seminar pages: instead of the full seminar information they are presented only with the abstract and information about joining the Ring.

Feel free to pass on links to individual seminars (use the "permalink" link for a friendly URL) to friends and colleagues who might find them useful and be interested in joining.

Notes on the beta release

This service is currently in beta. We are very interested to hear any feedback — positive or negative — about your experiences with it.

Limitations/work in progress on this beta release include:

• Work is in progress digitising the videotape library of over 100 seminars. If you have a particular requirement for one, let us know.
  
• Work is also in progress to connect the current all-digital recording system to this archive so that new seminars will appear very soon after they have been given.
  
• There may be errors in abstracts. If you notice any, please let us know.
  
• Some recordings have technical problems, such as partially missing sound or poor focusing. Where possible, we have noted these (they appear under the abstract as "recording notes"). If you find noteworthy issues that have gone unrecorded, please let us know.
  
• We have used estimates to plan appropriate server capacity and bandwidth for this service. Experience will show whether those estimates have been accurate: please let us know if you have difficulty viewing the videos.
  
• We have encoded the videos at a medium resolution and a modest bit rate (300kbps). If there is demand we can increase both the resolution and the quality. We may publish a page of samples of help with selection — please let us know if you are interested in helping with this process by commenting on the samples.
  

If you are reporting technical difficulties, please tell us as much about your environment as possible — eg, operating system, browser, connection method to the Internet, location.