Collaborating with International Faculty to

Develop Video Resources:

The Müller/Kluge Dialogues

Danielle Mericle & Melissa KuoDigital Media Group, Digital Consulting & Production Services

Digital Library FederationFall Forum 2006

Boston, MA

Project Overview• Twenty-two interviews between Heiner Müller & Alexander

Kluge, filmed between 1988 and 1995 (pivotal historical period)

• Heiner Müller: East German writer, arguably most important European dramatist in 20th century

• Alexander Kluge: leading writer, film maker, cultural theoretician, and public intellectual in Germany

• Material to be transcribed, translated, captioned, annotated, segmented, described, and made freely available via internet

• Online portal created as part of CUL’s Faculty Grants InitiativeAdvancing e-Scholarship

Project Participants

• Rainer Stollman, leading scholar on Alexander Kluge, University of Bremen (Kluge personally donated films to Professor Stollman for project)

• David Bathrick, leading scholar on Heiner Müller, Cornell University

• Graduate students from both institutions

• Digital Media Group, Cornell University Library (3 staff members working approximately 15% of time on project)

Logistical Challenges

• Coordinating an international, academic group

• Staying in budget (cost recovery model)

• Small development team

• Lots of “R & D”

Budget Strategies

• Leverage Resources: Convinced CUL to purchase Flash server (outside of project budget) to support ongoing A/V digitization efforts

• Conduct R & D as part of multiple projects – share development costs

• Partnering Institutions’ Support– Cornell German Department funded translation/transcription

and captioning of material– University of Bremen migrated Digital Beta SP media at cost

Workflow Strategies

• Careful coordination– International group required elaborate workflow-

employed Confluence Wiki to track progresshttp://wiki.library.cornell.edu/wiki/login.action

• Monthly group meetings– Utilized “Go To Meeting” software, a web application

which enables screen sharing and conference calling

• Patience– Faculty members have multiple priorities—accept that

things are going to take longer to finish than planned

Scholarship• Professors Stollman & Bathrick leading experts in their

fields; research done to create annotations and translations contribute significantly to pedagogical value of site

• Transcriptions and translations are now the “authoritative versions”– many never before translated to English

• Upcoming conference Fall ‘07 on “Literature & Media” to be hosted at Cornell; site will be centerpiece of dialogue

Technology• What we started with:

– Videos in DigiBeta Pal (European broadcast format)

• What we wanted to end up with:– Web site

• Streaming video• English/German site• English and German captions and transcripts• Database• Google searchable• Annotations (add-on)

Challenges

• How do we convert and deliver video on the web?

• How will we convert transcriptions and translations into sub-titles?

• What metadata do we want and who will create it?

• How do we organize the video content and push it to users? (Segments, themes, search, etc.)

Options and more options…• Video - Quicktime, Real Player, Flash,

streaming technologies

• Captioning software - HiCaption, Magpie, custom application

• Database - MySQL, Filemaker

• Metadata – Basic Dublin Core with additional fields for chapter segments, themes

• Google Search tool

Basic WorkflowDigitization

• Convert material- Pal to NTSC MPEG2 (archival format)

• Create derivatives (Final Cut Pro)

• Flash movies- three versions for varying bandwidth

• AVI & MP3 files for captioning

• Stills for website

• Load Flash Files

Captioning

• Transcribe films (using "Express Scribe" software)

• Translate transcriptions- German to English

• Using Hi-Software, add captions to films (German & English)

• Save captions (with time-code) as XML

• Upload XML into database

Programming & Web Development

• Design web interface

• Create template system for web pages (Smarty/PHP)

• Set up database for metadata

• Create SMIL files for Flash code

• Deliver HTML transcripts from caption XML with XSLT

• Develop system for annotations

• Load all content into database

• Make it work!

Metadata

• Determine schema for video/chapters

• Develop Filemaker database for web access

• Work with faculty to develop “controlled vocabulary”

The site (in development)http://muller-kluge.library.cornell.edu/

What’s next?

• Ongoing maintenance of site

• Moving from “project” to “program”—investigating A/V repository model

• Working with faculty—concluding thoughts

Danielle Mericle – dkm26@cornell.eduMelissa Kuo – mhk33@cornell.edu

http://muller-kluge.library.cornell.edu/