Part of the mission of the Louis de la Parte Florida Mental Health Institute at the University of South Florida is to inform professionals of new and effective measures for treating mental illness, to foster closer links between service providers and their clientele, and to clearly represent the mental health needs of the citizens of Florida to the State legislature. In support of these aims, the de la Parte Institute established one of the first World Wide Websites in Florida in 1993. Online access to research library holdings were made available to the public in 1995. Numerous direct-submission technologies were developed at the Institute, which allowed Web browsers to place book renewal requests, register for conferences, etc., before E-commerce became a household word.
In 1998, the University of South Florida was awarded an Advanced Net- working Infrastructure and Research Grant by the National Science Foundation.
Several meritorious applications were developed by the USF Libraries, one located at the de la Parte Institute. The purpose of the Institute’s meritorious application was to develop a searchable database of on-line video archives capable of being viewed across a number of network bandwidths ranging from 56 kb/sec.
up to 1Mbit/sec. The Institute’s interest was in furthering the dissemination of knowledge about various mental illnesses and lessening the stigma associated with them. To that end, the Institute made the decision to deliver mental health information to the public in a video format that would inform the viewer and provide valuable examples of how to deal with delicate interpersonal situations involving persons with mental health problems. The target audience consisted of the general public, mental health educators and practitioners, legislators, and network re- searchers who might see, in distributed video, a way to better bring people together by using high-speed Internet technology.
As part of the Institute’s commitment to enhancing communication with the public, the Institute’s Computer Support Center and the Research Library evolved a strategy to integrate streaming video technologies into its outreach efforts. A set of goals were established early in the development schedule to ensure that the system would be:
1.) Universally accessible through low-speed data networks (e.g., modems) and Internet1;
Libraries as Publishers of Digital Video 47
2.) Capable of providing broadband high quality video if network conditions (such as Internet2 access) were available;
3.) Easily updated by a librarian using conventional tools (e.g. Procite); and 4.) Inexpensive to establish and maintain on a conventional server platform
(UNIX).
At the time of the project’s inception, a number of products were in early development for the real-time extraction of features from streaming video and audio. The indexing of these features provided a retrieval mechanism for video based upon rudimentary scene content. However, since the artificial intelligence of such systems ranked well behind the indexing capabilities of a trained professional librarian, a decision was made to support a manual categorization scheme for video archives that followed the MARC (Machine Readable Cataloging) record format used by the state university system’s libraries.
The coding and classification matrices for adding audiovisual materials to an existing library catalog are well defined (Gorman & Winkler, 1998). The processing and classification of all video materials places a heavy burden upon the librarian, who must adhere to strict guidelines while coding the information for retrieval. Important nuances in the material, which are only detectable by a trained observer, must not be overlooked. Fast-forwarding through the video material was not an option since all processing had to be done in real-time. Once the content had been correctly identified and classified, the classificatory textual material was entered into a Procite database on a personal computer for storage and mainte- nance. In addition, fields containing hypertext information regarding streaming video URLs, the location of the viewer(s) on the generated web page, and the relative size of the resulting image were embedded in the Procite database before porting the information to the UNIX (Web accessible) database for public distribution.
At the time of this project’s inception, no Web accessible interface had been developed for the use of Boolean operators to retrieve video materials either in Procite or in other database languages. PostgresSQL (Momjian, 2001) was selected as the database to contain the ported Procite library records for several reasons. First, PostgresSQL was a fully relational database capable of storing large volumes of data and large objects. Second, it supported Structured Query Language (SQL) calls. Third, it could be interfaced with web pages via the Practical Extraction and Reporting Language (PERL). Finally, it was freely available to universities.
The porting of data from Procite to the PostgresSQL database was not accomplished without modification of the original field structure. Procite has a record structure that varies, contingent upon the type of material entered.
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PostgresSQL, on the other hand, has a fixed record structure that is set up at the time the table is created and is relatively permanent. Discussions with library staff resolved the formatting issue by selecting a template for exporting the data from Procite that maintained the integrity of the information yet allowed for a fixed field template in PostgresSQL. Data transfer between the two systems (Procite and PostgresSQL) was accomplished via tab delimited ASCII (American Standard Computer Information Interchange) and included all hypertext URLs necessary to allow direct access to video resources on the robotic video-server.
Figure 1: Sample Catalog Record with Embedded Viewer
Libraries as Publishers of Digital Video 49
The robotic video-server chosen was Microsoft’s NetShow MPEG4 stream- ing media server. This product provided the following options. Video data could be encoded one time in a format capable of using as much bandwidth as was available to the user but could decrease to as little as was available (e.g., 56 Kb/
sec. at 15 frames/sec.) if needed. The video stream supported fast-forward, rewind, pause, and an internal reference table that allowed the viewer to select points in the presentation (skip ahead or backwards) without having to view the entire presentation. The MPEG4 format supported random access within a given video stream, allowing a completely new video stream to be made up of fragments created by splicing together the randomly accessed specific locations within other video files. These fragments could be displayed as a single video and archived with a unique MARC record entry if so desired. It was also possible to begin the display of any video file anywhere within its duration. Closed captioning was available for ADA compliance. Active Agent capabilities permitted linked Web-accessible materials to be brought up during the video presentation to enhance the viewing experience of the audience.
The resulting amalgamation of the UNIX and Microsoft systems is very robust (see http://videodb.fmhi.usf.edu). While PostgresSQL is not exceptionally fast database, it is reliable and since all queries are done on sub-string matches (and/or/
not) across eight different fields (including Author, Title, Abstract, Collection, Call Number, Extent, Notes, or Descriptors in clusters of as many as three fields), it is possible to be very precise in the use of recall terms. Queries, once submitted, return to the viewer in what appears to be card catalog entries, with a viewer window containing controls for fast-forwarding, pause, play, stop, rewind, a drop down list of topics within the video, and a mute button for the audio. The viewer could play a single video or multiple videos if he or she so desired, although multiple videos consumed significant bandwidth resources (one stream per video) and produced an audio output that was the compilation of several audio streams yielding a cacophony.
CONCLUSION
This project demonstrated that a Web-accessible Unix database supporting structured query language (SQL) calls could return large amounts of high quality video to networked workstations located on the campus network or on other Internet2 university networks. Low bandwidth versions of the video were made available through the Internet as a function of either the deliberate choice by the viewer or through an MPEG4 encoding format that supported multiple bit-rates.
This product has been in use continuously since 1999 and was demonstrated
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nationally at the March 2000 Annual Member Meeting of Internet2 in Washington, D.C. (see http://apps.internet2.edu/demos2000/march00summary.htm for de- tails).
FUTURE TRENDS
Streaming media holds great promise as a way to communicate more effectively over large distances and epochs with an ever-increasing audience. The technology permits encoding based upon numerous factors, including the quality of the network connection and the figure/ground relationship of the subject matter.
Further advances in intelligent processing of the video stream will allow for encoding more sophisticated metadata and interactive components into the stream. The cost for network bandwidth will continue to decline in the interim, making access to library video resources ubiquitous.
REFERENCES
Agnew, G. (1999). Digital Video for the next millennium. Video Development Initiative (VIDE). [Electronic Resource]. Retrieved 9/11/2001 from http://
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Corporation for Research and Educational Networking (CREN) (2000). Net- worked digital video with guest experts Joel Mambretti and Bob Taylor.
[Electronic Resource]. Retrieved 10/11/2001 from http://www.cren.net/
know/techtalk/events/netdigvideo.html.
Furr, G. (2001). The educational applications of streaming audio: Accessible, do- it-yourself multimedia. The Technology Source, January/February 2001.
[Electronic Resource]. Retrieved 1/11/2001 from http://ts.mivu.org/
default.asp?show=article&id=826.
Gorman, M. & Winkler, P.W. (Eds). (1998). Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (2nd ed.). Chicago: American Library Association.
Hanss, T. (2001). Digital video: Internet2 killer application or Dilbert’s nightmare?
Educause Review Articles. [Electronic Resource]. Retrieved 11/11/2001 from http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0130t.pdf.
Michelich, V. (2002). Streaming media to enhance teaching and improve learning.
The Technology Source, January/February. [Electronic Resource]. Re- trieved 9/11/2001 from http://ts.mivu.org/default.asp?show=article&id=941 Momjian, B. (2001). The history of PostgresSQL development. [Electronic Resource]. Retrieved 9/11/2001 from http://www.ca.postgresql.org/docs/
devhistory.html.
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Netterfield, T. (1999). The Building of a Virtual Lecture Hall: Netcasting at the University of South Florida. CAUSE/EFFECT, 22(2): 27-29, 33-39. . [Electronic Resource]. Retrieved 9/11/2001 from http://www.educause.edu/
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