Jeesh. I was in business-y type meetings most of days 2 and 3 so I wasn't able to take in any sessions. A few comments that I did pull from
The first session on the last day was Courtney Michael, Chris Beer (WGBH Educational Foundation) speaking on Disseminating Broadcast Archives: Exposing WGBH Materials for Scholarly Use and the Open Vault project. They use PBCore for the metadata, which sounds like a good option for describing rich media. The interface was built in PHP. They have a Tab/Annotate feature which allows them to add a tag or annotation to a specific timestamp. They use a video, transcript and metadata datastreams. The video CM has 3 separate video streams (archival, proxied and streaming). The WGBH group has done a great job of modeling the while "video assets for scholars" context - well done. UPEI is working on a number of video-based projects, so we will definitely be giving Chris and Courtney a call to use their content models and applications.
David Paul Descheneau (University of Alberta) talked about Agile Fedora: AJAX, Low-cost Clustering, and Dynamic Metadata Forms for a Multicultural Website Project. Their project is an ethnomusicology study that worked with a number of cultural groups and ultimately stored 500 hours of video 500 hours of audio and 2500 images. The group found that one of the key issues for them was the workflow, with a number of concurrent independent processes. Their SAMC Media Processor back-end sounds like a must-see for the workflows associated with video/audio file formats, including the OpenPBS software that was used to create a media cluster using surplus equipment. The SAMC Cataloguing tool was VERY nice, lots of AJAX and smart screen design with live updates of the XML datastream. I liked the way they had high-quality documentary style videos for each major theme, and then they listed all the videos clips used in the piece at the end of the page. They used h.264 low/med/high Quicktime and H263 low/high Flash outputs for the video targets. They also created their own metadata schemas from the ground up to reflect the data they needed to capture for music, events and cultural expression. This was also done to provide a more sensitive context in which to engage the cultural groups and reflect their ideas about how t describe their culture.
Jon W. Dunn (Indiana University) talked about PhotoCat: Implementing a Cataloging Tool for a Live Fedora Repository. They created a photo cataloguing tool which allows things like: the creation of "bags" to run the same edit operation on a collection of images; managing a controlled vocabulary database with auto-completion.
I love this Fedora community! So many bright people making their brightness available to the larger community. Brilliant.
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