VIDEO ARCHIVINGModels and opportunities

Marshall BreedingDirector for Innovative Technology and ResearchVanderbilt University LibraryExecutive Director, Vanderbilt Television News ArchiveFounder and Publisher, Library Technology Guideshttp://www.librarytechnology.org/http://twitter.com/mbreedingEstablishing Digital Libraries in the

Maghreb region of North Africa3 February 2011

Vanderbilt Television News Archive Establish August 5, 1968 Records news broadcasts of the major

television networks ABC, CBS, NBC since 1968 CNN and FOX news added in

1995 and 2004 Core collection of evening

news broadcasts Specials collections includes

live coverage of major events

Access to our Collections

Freely available database of 950,000 news items On-site viewing for the entire collection Access to whole collection through streaming video

onsite and at the Library of Congress Loans of physical media (Service fees apply) Streaming of selected network content to colleges and

universities in the United States (Annual subscription Fee)

Copyright restrictions prevent open access to streaming content CBS Lawsuit in 1974 Exemption added to the 1976 revisions to the US copyright

law (Section 108 (f)(3)

Cycles of Technology

Recording media and technology evolves Vanderbilt TV News media:

1-inch open real Type A Ampex ¾-inch UMatic Videocassettes Digital files

MPEG-2 masters RealMedia for access

National Audiovisual Conservation Center

SAMMA robotic digitizing system

Preservation versus Access

Preservation MPEG-2 Motion JPEG-2000

(Library of Congress) Access

RealMedia (Vanderbilt) Flash – proprietary (Not supported by Apple) H.264

Some patent issues: Recent announcement that Google will not support in the future

WebM/VP8 Open source video codec

Preserving television as cultural heritage

Vanderbilt specializes in news, but many other important areas of programming

Documentaries, entertainment, sports, cinema

Challenges for Broadcast news archives

National news manageable through a centralized project

Local News Great potential resource through the

aggregation of many local stations Distributed effort required Federated system of recording and

description

International television news archiving

Involvement in systematic television archiving varies

Some countries mandate and support at least some archiving

United Kingdom / BBC Capacity varies by national libraries and

other cultural memory institutions to archive television and other video

Many informal projects Chapman Archive in New Zealand

(example)

Access to video collections

Provenance and copyright limit ability to provide open public access

Rights management can be complex Many embedded rights owners

Networks / producers Artists Music Television commercials

Challenges for Preservation

Many existing collections remain on videotape or other obsolete formats

Narrowing window of opportunity for preservation through digital reformatting Deterioration of media Decreasing availability of playback

equipment

Description and Metadata

In a digitization project, providing adequate descriptive metadata involves more time and expense than reformatting

Describing video collections

Metadata standards Dublin Core Public Broadcasting Core (PB Core) Motion Picture Experts Group: MPEG-7

Digital library standards

Adhering to international standards will ensure capacity to exchange resources with other digital libraries

Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard (METS) Standard for packaging digital objects for

interoperability among digital libraries PREMIS – preservation metadata MPEG-21 DIDL Item Declaration Language

Automated Video Description Use technology to create metadata

May be supplemented through human efforts Closed Caption – line 21

Decode cc and turn into text Speech-to-text of audio track OCR of any text that appears on-screen Term extraction Coordinate metadata through timecode data Examples: Informedia lab of Carnegie Mellon

University (http://www.informedia.cs.cmu.edu/) Specializes in multi-lingual search and retrieval on video

content

Practical advice

Vanderbilt has a forty year tradition of manually producing abstracts of news

Manual description expensive and limits the volume of material that can be affordably processed

Would recommend that new projects leverage technology to describe video and extract term

Current considerations for Video Archives

Many categories of cost have diminished High capacity Storage: once a major expense; today storage

costs have plummeted Cloud storage options: May be an option for institutions

with adequate internet bandwidth Equipment: presence of DVR and other TV recording

devices has resulted in low-cost components Metadata creation: Technologies available for automated

video description with potential for major savings for cataloging video footage.

Conclusion: better opportunities for digital video collections than ever before with lower costs and lower thresholds for technology