Finding and Using Moving Images In Context

Visit the prototype interface for Finding and Using Moving Images in Context–we would like to hear your comments.

Entry Page: Finding and Using Moving Images in Context

Collection Page, Joan Branch Collection

Clip Page, Joan Branch Collection, The Paper Chase

Educators are invited to use and comment on the lesson plan by Carolyn Platt and Jennifer Hanson associated with the Charles Gilbert Hong Kong Shanghai and Beijing clip at Primary Source (see survey at the bottom of the lesson plan page), and to log in to the China Source Website at Harvard iSites, also accessible through Primary Source.

Distinctive to this project was the commitment to select, digitize, and offer archival moving images explicitly as unedited texts and as shorter digital learning objects, using standards-based metadata tools and attached contextual and interpretive works.

In our forthcoming white paper we express an approach we believe appropriate for treating moving images with integrity as primary source materials for the humanities.

Moving image archives, special collections, and specialty libraries have the opportunity to provide access to detailed background information gained from the donor and from other sources. This project demonstrates a work flow starting with analog objects (16mm film), creating digital representations in varied formats, selecting learning objects from the digital representations, publishing those selections as digital clips, and making related interpretive materials in hard media and electronic form.

Along the way we identify and test metadata appropriate to the originating archives and to the user community using Encoded Archival Description for top-level description of NHF Collections, PBCore for individual works and their instantiations, TEI for textual objects, and METS for unified description of the digital works.

The project was formed with two target audiences for the online products

1. Classroom teachers participating in the China history programs led by Primary Source,
2. College students in East Asia and world history classes.

Working with specific audiences in mind provides many benefits: the engagement of end-users in the development process, incorporation of relevant content, and testing of structural and content premises. Each audience was represented on the team by intermediary professionals and humanities scholars: librarians, graduate students and curriculum developers preparing materials for secondary level social studies teachers, and professors of East Asian Studies teaching college students.

From the NHF archives we selected the Charles Gilbert Collection and the Joan Branch Collection, from which we drew only China-related footage from the many thousands of original 16mm feet. Determining the relation of thematic research collections to an EAD finding aid, and useful incorporation of moving images within a large finding aid, are important challenges for repositories.

In the phases following this digital startup, we would like to engage with others developing detailed methods and rationales for video in mixed collections and in audiovisual repositories. The William S. Cohen Finding Aid at the University of Maine models methods of dealing with audiovisual materials and electronic surrogates in a traditional, if supercharged, use of the EAD standard. Paige Lilly from the William S. Cohen Papers at the Fogler Library, University of Maine, served as metadata consultant on this project.

Jennifer Hansen, Primary Source Librarian, writes on July 29,

Carolyn Platt and I are working on a lesson plan and will be meeting this afternoon. Carolyn is a retired teacher who has taken many Primary Source courses, written curriculum for us, and traveled to China with us. She is now working with us to plan our China courses for 2008-2009. She also co-led one of our China study tours in April and will co-lead another one next spring.
We will probably have something completed by August 15th.

So here we are looking down the barrel of PBCore as our new metadata schema. On July 2 we are contemplating the clip ID that appears under each thumbnail. What’s it to be? A clip title makes sense, and so does a number. In the PBCore schema that would be the element 25.25.1 formatIdentifier, which is in the container pbcoreFormatID.

A very helpful PBCore diagram.
Look to the lower right.

Discussion ensues about numbering among the staff.
David Weiss: Our numbers currently look like this
1178.0043.001
1178 is the accession number
0043 is the item in the accession (reel or tape or story on tape)
001 was usually a new preservation element like negative or answer print

I don’t see why we can’t just keep adding numbers to the last grouping to represent digital instantiations. We kicked around the notion of having a fourth set of numbers … We also considered structuring a code into the third set so you knew it was referring to a digital thing, like D01 or 501 where the D or 5 tells you it’s a digital instantiation, but that feels like a throwback to our original numbering system where WABI catalog numbers starting with 0 were negative and 1 was positive. That didn’t turn out to be very useful. My theory is that the less you ask of your number the better you are–except that it be unique identifier. Also considered making the numbers refer to specific things, like 004 is an mpeg2, 005 is mov file, but again its stupid and other fields can do that.

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In the PBCore community, Jack Brighton reports

I’m currently using a website CMS to catalog A/V media objects and express them as web pages, RSS feeds, and PBCore-compliant XML. This is done using simple html forms to create MySQL tables, then querying the tables to render the metadata in XML templates. Until recently I was extracting the metadata from standard existing fields (like Title and Subject) needed for web page display, and porting them over to corresponding PBCore elements while hard-coding other values that were always the same for the objects being cataloged. This worked fine and created shareable metadata in PBCore format. Last week Mary Miller from the Peabody Archive worked with me to create a better tool using the same website CMS. We built a pair of cataloging forms, one for the intellectual and administrative metadata, and one for the Instantiation/technical metadata which then gets related to the “Platonic record” (Mary’s term). We then created an XML template to express everything as PBCore records. We could extend this very easily to templates for Dublin Core, MODS, MARC, etc. So metadata gets entered once, and can be rendered to different formats as needed. The CMS we’re using is ExpressionEngine, but the same thing would work with Drupal and probably many others. Here’s an example record (hint: don’t use Safari to view this - I love Safari but it doesn’t know how to render PBCore).

Jack Brighton, Director of Internet Development. WILL Public Media (Urbana IL)
jackb@uiuc.edu

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