In June 1983 the Department of Social Anthropology at Cambridge and the Audio-Visual Aids Unit of the University of London collaborated to produce one of the first academic videodiscs. Some members of the Department helped to assemble 10,000 still frames of an anthropological and academic nature which were re-photographed and transferred to the disc. Since then the interest in the potentials of videodisc has increased greatly. A group in the Department of Social Anthropology in association with the Cambridge University Audio-Visual Aids Unit, directed by Martin Gienke, has decided to make an experimental disc of limited size to explore the potentials of videodisc in teaching and research. For those not familiar with the technology, a videodisc is an object like a gramophone record.
Information is engraved on the surfaces which are then coated with plastic.
The information can be read by a laser beam. This provides a stable and enduring store for a very large quantity of materials of different kinds. A standard Philips Laservision disc can store film which will play for 36 minutes, or hold 54,000 separate pictures per side. In practical terms this means that one could store the whole of the Encyclopedia Britannica, pictures and words, on about two thirds of one side of a videodisc. Recent discs can hold both analogue and digital material, the latter making it possible to to input data directly from a computer.