LABoral has become the first cultural institution in Spain with its own channel on iTunes U
The Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial in Gijón provides users with multimedia content to access all of its activities from anywhere in the world
Visualization of the LABoral's channel on iTunes U. Photo: LABoral
LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial in Gijón has become the first cultural institution in Spain to have its own channel on iTunes U. Launched in May 2007 as a distribution platform for cultural and educational content for academic bodies and museums, iTunes U makes it possible to provide students and the general public with multimedia files that can be downloaded as podcasts free of charge from any computer (Mac or PC), following programme installation, and from Apple mobile devices: iPhone, iPad or iPod touch.
LABoral, which is included in the section Beyond the Campus aimed at cultural and artistic institutions, has organised its multimedia content in accordance with its line of action. As well as audiovisual information on the centre, under the heading Qué es LABoral [What is LABoral] users may gain access to archive collections of exhibitions, production, education and training. The Centre has also made available to the public its Encuentros en LABoral [Meetings at LABoral] section, which includes interviews with curators, artists and the protagonists of the creative processes, and Procesando [Processing], the part which contains a series of interviews with Asturian artists produced by the Art Centre and made by Fiumfoto. At this initial stage all users will have at their reach over one hundred audio and video archives related to the activity at LABoral.
Additionally, the Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial in Gijón will soon make available to the public at the Aple Store a free application which enables users to make virtual tours of the different exhibitions on show at LABoral by means of expanded catalogues.
LABoral is a multidisciplinary institution that produces, disseminates and encourages access to new cultural forms rooted in the creative use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). And this is the framework in which the distribution of contents on iTunes U fits. In the educational area, the Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial in Gijón serves as a space for artistic research which includes training and the spreading of knowledge with the ultimate goal of fostering areas of critical participation based around the key issues in contemporary society. And this is not only done physically from its premises, but also through the web, social networks and various platforms for content dissemination and distribution belonging to Web 2.0 which allows for the spreading of information beyond material space and for interaction with users.
At the end of February Apple announced that the iTunes U content downloads had surpassed one billion. This platform offers the world’s largest online catalogue of free education, created by leading education centres as well as prestigious libraries, museums and organisations all over the world. These include, among others, the universities of Duke, Yale, Cambridge, MIT, Oxford, Stanford and Harvard, and museums such as MoMA, Tate, ZKM Brooklyn Museum and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and, now, LABoral.
To access LABoral’s iTunes U:
iTunes U
