Home LITA Events & Programs LITA National Forum 2003, Norfolk, VA Programs News from the Wild Frontier Digital Video in the Library

DIGITAL VIDEO IN THE LIBRARY

DESCRIPTIVE ABSTRACT: We live now in a world flooded with video and audio information, much of it digital. In an academic setting this information is only truly useful if it can be properly managed, stored, delivered, and made part of the everyday experience of teaching and learning. Technical developments in this area, however, are driven by forces outside the walls of academia: libraries must continuously reorient themselves to rapidly changing technologies and commercial models. Despite this lack of stability - or perhaps even because of it - libraries need to do with digital video what they do best: collect, preserve, and provide access to rich information resources.

The challenges confronting media librarians and digital media technologists in the building of a digital video collection are many and varied. At the Robertson Media Center in the University of Virginia Library, we are exploring issues of selection and creation, description, management, storage, delivery and use. These explorations are taking place on a body of digital video that can be divided into four distinct categories;

1. Licensed or purchased digital video content;
2. Unique film or tape footage, including institutional documentation, from our own holdings;
3. Unique footage of cultural heritage information, created by faculty as part of their scholarly work;
4. Clips from a wide variety of sources, including feature films, created as part of the "electronic reserves" for a particular course.

All of our work is done within the context of the system architecture of our Digital Library, still very much under development. Thus we are faced with the challenge of creating content that must be delivered today but yet must fit into the system of tomorrow. Our examinations have led us to a series of general conclusions that have informed our approaches - however experimental - to technical decision-making and the creation of nascent workflows. In this presentation we will review the technical environment, examine the critical issues, and discuss our approaches to problem-solving as we face the challenge of building digital video collections and delivering that content to our users.

This presentation will be documented at http://www.lib.virginia.edu/clemons/RMC/LITA-03/