Janet Temos
Director, Education Technologies Center
OIT Academic Services
Princeton University
Serge J. Goldstein
Director of Academic Services
Princeton University
Almagest is a relational database for the storage, cataloging and display of images, text, video, sound, and many other file types. The database is the result of more than a decade of development and has been used as a tool for teaching and scholarship at Princeton University for the past nine years. Lecture Builder is an editing tool within Almagest that can be used to organize and display data stored in the database. It is most commonly used as a display tool for images and multimedia objects (film clips or sound files), and as such, creates both online and offline virtual slide presentations that can be viewed in the classroom with a digital projector, or seen from any computer in the campus network. Lecture Builder has various display options that are suited for lectures, quizzes, and self-directed study. Viewers can thus have customized access to information within the database, and explore any of the other items that are related to the data contained in the lecture. Lectures are saved in the database, and can be reused, edited, or updated, by the project’s editor(s) at any time.
We currently are working to offer the Almagest and Lecture Builder software as an open source product to other educational institutions. Additionally, we propose to open part of the database to scholars and researchers, as an open exchange for images, learning objects, and other media where copyright resides with an individual willing to share his or her files with the larger scholarly community.
This session will provide an overview of Almagest, and the opportunity for CNI members to provide input towards its further development.