The BIODIDAC Project - Description

Objective

Copying the material, modifying and adapting it to meet the professor's needs, and subsequent distribution to students is permitted with the condition that this is noncommercial, that the supplier (BIODIDAC) of the material is acknowledged, and that its use is registered.

Why?

There is too little digital material that can be freely used for teaching. BIODIDAC aims at filling this void, at least partially.

Contents

BIODIDAC now contains 6153 items.

Organismal biology

Histology

File formats

Black and white diagrams

Black and white diagrams are scanned at a resolution that permits a good quality print on either paper or acetates. The files containing diagrams are in the GIF98a standard and have sizes between 5 and 50 kilobytes. The images are approximately 1200 x 1200 pixels.

Colour diagrams

Some of the black and white diagrams have been coloured to highlight characteristic structures or systems. Files containing coloured diagrams are in the GIF98a standard and have been reduced to 16 colours that do not included the standard windows palette. These files take up between 110 and 130% more space then the black and white versions.

Photographs

Photographs of specimens, structures, or microscope slides, have been scanned at a resolution that permits, because of their small size, their use on a computer monitor or for a print copy of moderate quality. Files with these illustrations are in the GIF89a or JPEG standard. The color palette of GIF filesfor each varies between each file because it has been is optimised for each picture and includes the 24 colours of the standard Microsoft Windows palette. These digital images are scanned at a resolution of approximately 400 x 400 pixels and take up about 100 kilobytes.

Labelled diagrams and photographs

To facilitate use and interpretation of the figures and photographs many have been annotated with additional labels identifying the principle structures, and some contain a short text description. Files that contain labelled figures are either in the CDR format of CorelDraw (generally version 5) or in the PPT format from Microsoft PowerPoint. In order to reduce the disk space for storage and to reduce the time required for transferring the files using the Internet, some of these files are compressed using the ZIP.

File names

The files contained in the media bank have 8 letter names plus an additional three letters that indicate their type. The file names use the following conventions. The first 4 letters indicate the phylum or divisionof the illustrated organism. The name then includes three numbers that increase sequentially. The final letter of the file name indicates the type of figure (b for black and white diagrams, c for coloured diagrams, and p for photographs). Files containing diagrams photographic images have the file extension gif or jpg. The files that contain labelled diagrams in the PowerPoint format are compressed and have the extension zip. The file names of the zip files do not correspond to other file names and each may contain from three to five different labelled images. Check in the short descriptions to identify which files are found in each of these zip files. Finally, Corel Draw files, that contain labelled diagrams, have the extension cdr.

For example, the file hiru012p.gif contains a figure from the Hirudinae (HIRU, for the class that includes leeches). This figure is a photograph (P).

The files olig012b.gif, olig012c.gif, olig012b.cdr are three different versions of the same diagram. The first file contains the black and white version of the file, the second has had colours added, the third is the black and white image that ha s been labelled in both French and English. For olig012c.zip the short description in the database indicates what illustrations are included in this compressed file.