VIDEO ARCHIVING Models and opportunities Marshall Breeding Director for Innovative Technology and Research Vanderbilt University Library Executive Director, Vanderbilt Television News Archive Founder and Publisher, Library Technology Guides Establishing Digital Libraries in the Maghreb region of North Africa 3 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 (  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