Evviva Weinraub
Associate University Librarian for Digital Strategies
Northwestern University
Jon W. Dunn
Assistant Dean for Library Technologies
Indiana University
Dimitrios Latsis
CLIR-Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow; Visiting Research Fellow
Internet Archive; University of California, Santa Cruz
Mark Williams
Associate Professor, Film and Media Studies
Dartmouth College
Studying Researchers: Ethnographic Study of Media Collection Usage at Northwestern & Indiana University (Weinraub, Dunn)
With support from a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the libraries at Northwestern University and Indiana University (IU) have designed, developed and are currently conducting a study of scholarly use of audio and video collections by researchers over multiple disciplines within the humanities at both Northwestern and at IU. Our methodology for the study is seated in ethnographic inquiry and user experience modeling, and we will use these results internally to guide future feature prioritization for the Avalon Media System, an open source system for managing and providing online access to large collections of audio and video. The study is being conducted with three different kinds of data collection: 1) Environmental Observation; 2) Interviews based on observations; and 3) a Diary Study. We will present findings, themes, potential user stories, and a current assessment of our ethnographic study focusing on process, product and participation.
Presentation (Weinraub)
Unlocking Film Libraries Through Discovery and Search (Latsis, Williams)
Dartmouth College’s Media Ecology Project and the Visual Learning Group are working to apply tools already being developed for object, action, and speech recognition to a rich collection of educational films held by Dartmouth Library and the Internet Archive. Using existing algorithms that recognize speech, audio, objects, locations, and actions, we will be able to explain what is happening in a collection of one thousand educational films. We will feed the resulting tags, transcripts and other enriched metadata into our Semantic Annotation Tool (SAT), which will generate annotations (built upon W3C open annotation standards) that can be attached to each film. What was once a roll of film, indexed only by its card catalog description, will now be searchable scene-by-scene, adding immense value for library patrons, scholars and the visually impaired.
http://www.avalonmediasystem.org/
http://www.knightfoundation.org/grants/20102605/
http://www.archive.org
https://sites.dartmouth.edu/mediaecology/