New Clip Art Library Installed

 

Our Hard Copy Centre proudly presents the installation of a clip art library on both student and staff LANs. A clip art library is a collection of artworks stored electronically as graphic pictures and drawing files. They are usually grouped into categories of interest for ease of location and selection. You may use clip art to decorate your Web pages (pages to be put up on Web servers for providing information to users through the Internet) or add flavour in presentation materials to increase effectiveness of communication.

Our Collection

The clip art library we provide is a collection of up to 10,000 unique pictures collected from various sources. The pictures are grouped into around 20 categories such as "Science" , "Business" , "Transport" , "Computer" , ... etc.. The pictures collected are converted to MS Windows standard bitmap format (WMF) such that they can be easily retrieved under MS Windows. This format is recognized by almost all Windows applications.

Using the Clip Art Library

The library can be accessed through MS Windows. On staff LAN, you need to properly set up the environment for calling up the library. On student LAN, you can simply start Windows 3.1 with selective software. To allow easy access and retrieval, a clip art library browser has been developed to assist fast and visual browsing and selection. The clip art library icon will be shown after Windows is started. Double-clicking the icon will fire up the browsing engine. At any time, users can press <F1> to obtain help on using the browser.

Thanks to the help of modern presentation packages under Windows environment and graphics standards, inclusion of clip art prepared for working with Windows is straightforward and simple. No special conversion is required to use these clip art under Windows :

• A page/pages of presented materials is/are prepared with presentation packages such as Microsoft Powerpoint, MS Word or WordPerfect.
• Clip art can then be selected (which will be shown page by page, with 6 icons per page) and copied from another window and pasted to the desired area of the presentation material for retouching or illustration.
• Since the included clip art is usually treated as individual graphics objects, you can visually move them around to anywhere within the presentation package any time to obtain the best effect; or even extract them and store them on local disk which may be edited with graphics software for later use. For example, the saved picture can be converted to a 'gif' format (which is the commonly used graphics format used by internet users) and included in Web pages.

An option is available for staff who want to build their personal clip art libraries. They can classify the clip art according to their needs and preferences. Clip art from other sources may be incorporated into the library. Upon invocation of the library, the browser will browse through the personal as well as the network clip art library. Currently, all personal clip art must either be stored in bitmap (BMF) or Windows metafile (WMF) format.

Users who want to share their own prepared pictures and clip art with academic values, or who want to suggest adding a pointer of a particular picture to a category are welcome to contact us. We are more than happy to include them or add the pointers in the library.

More information

To help you understand the use of the clip art library, a "small talk" session has been arranged to share the experience of access, selection and inclusion of graphics images in presentation visuals. Details are as follows :

Topic	:	Ways of preparing attractive presentation visuals
Date	:	13 March 1996
Time	:	4 p.m. - 5 p.m
Venue	:	Room Neptune, the Computing Services Centre
Prerequisite	:	Adequate knowledge of at least one presentation package

For Web page preparation, users can choose from this clip art library or they can retrieve directly from internet sites. There are many on-line clip art libraries on the internet. Good starting points can be found in the following web sites:

http://www.cityu.edu.hk/webimage/webimage.htm
http://www.monash.edu.au/alst6/com/nate/WWW/corelclipart.html
http://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/gwp/dtp/clipart.html
http://www.yahoo.com/Computers/Multimedia/Pictures
http://leviathan.tamu.edu:70/0h/clipart/about_clipart.all.html
etc.

To understand more about graphics and their use, please visit our site about graphics technology :

http://cctpwww.cityu.edu.hk/public/graphics/index.html

Where to Get Help

For any problem in using the library, please contact our hotline at x7658 or email to our hotline account SOS.

Computing Services Centre City University of Hong Kong ccnetcom@cityu.edu.hk