Bridgeman Education will take part in a £1.9 million e-learning initiative, Project SILVER, supported by the U.K. government's Technology Strategy Board.
Geared to teachers, tutors and students, Bridgeman Education is a subscription service that provides online access to museums represented by the Bridgeman Art Library. Through its stock-licensing business, the London-based library has generated as much as £1.5 million per year for the museums it represents. Bridgeman Education is a separate service that is designed to stimulate e-learning and offers images from the library's vast collection, copyright-cleared for educational use.
Project SILVER provides next-generation Web 2.0 and artificial intelligence technologies to schools, universities and the corporate sector. Bridgeman will work alongside the Open University's Knowledge Media Institute and education-product provider Lexara on developing learning digital learning software. The software will facilitate collecting, organizing, experimenting and interacting with multimedia assets, such as photographs, texts and video.
David Evans, chief executive of the Technology Strategy Board, says the U.K. government is keen to focus on fast-growing creative industries. "That's why we're supporting this project, which aims to deliver a new approach to the use of multimedia assets in schools, Further and Higher Education and in the workplace," he adds.