Radio Oranje: Enhanced Access to a Historical Spoken Word Collection

Access to historical audio collections is typically very restricted:\ud content is often only available on physical (analog) media and the\ud metadata is usually limited to keywords, giving access at the level\ud of relatively large fragments, e.g., an entire tape. Many spoken\ud word heritage collections are now being digitized, which allows the\ud introduction of more advanced search technology. This paper presents\ud an approach that supports online access and search for recordings of\ud historical speeches. A demonstrator has been built, based on the\ud so-called Radio Oranje collection, which contains radio speeches by\ud the Dutch Queen Wilhelmina that were broadcast during World War II.\ud The audio has been aligned with its original 1940s manual\ud transcriptions to create a time-stamped index that enables the speeches to be\ud searched at the word level. Results are presented together with\ud related photos from an external database

Evaluation of spoken document retrieval for historic speech collections

The re-use of spoken word audio collections maintained by audiovisual archives is severely hindered by their generally limited access. The CHoral project, which is part of the CATCH program funded by the Dutch Research Council, aims to provide users of speech archives with online, instead of on-location, access to relevant fragments, instead of full documents. To meet this goal, a spoken document retrieval framework is being developed. In this paper the evaluation efforts undertaken so far to assess and improve various aspects of the framework are presented. These efforts include (i) evaluation of the automatically generated textual representations of the spoken word documents that enable word-based search, (ii) the development of measures to estimate the quality of the textual representations for use in information retrieval, and (iii) studies to establish the potential user groups of the to-be-developed technology, and the first versions of the user interface supporting online access to spoken word collections

“Her Own Version of History”: A Case Study of the Guerrilla Girls Oral Histories at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

Broaching issues related to archives' ethical obligations to participants, transcripts as derivative documents, and web publication of archival materials, this case study explores the development of web access policies in oral history archives by examining the complications that emerged during the Archives of American Arts' (AAA) transcript review and web publication of a set of oral history interviews conducted in 2007-2008 with the Guerrilla Girls. Using program documentation and interview and questionnaire data from current and former Archives staff members as well as from a user of the Guerrilla Girls material, this study compares the AAA’s standard processes for oral history collection to the process of collecting the Guerrilla Girls interviews. Study participants discussed lessons learned from decisions made regarding web access to those interviews. Findings from this study bear a potentially transferrable relationship to policy review for oral history collections, archives’ donor/patron relations, and web access to oral histories.Master of Science in Information Scienc

Event Based Retrieval From Digital Libraries Containing Data Streams

The objective of this research is to study the issues involved in building a digital library that contains data streams and allows event-based retrieval. “Digital Libraries are storehouses of information available through the Internet that provide ways to collect, store, and organize data and make it accessible for search, retrieval, and processing” [29]. Data streams are sources of information for applications such as news-on-demand, weather services, and scientific research, to name a few. A data stream is a sequence of data units produced over a period of time. Examples of data streams are video streams, audio stream, and sensor readings. Saving data streams in digital libraries is advantageous because of the services provided by digital libraries such as archiving, preservation, administration, and access control. Events are noteworthy occurrences that happen during data streams. Events are easier to remember than specific time instances at which they occur; hence using them for retrieval is more commensurate with human behavior and can be more efficient via direct accessing instead of scanning. The focus of this research is not only on storing data streams in a digital library and using event-based retrieval, but also on relating streams and playing them back at the same time, possibly in a synchronized manner, to facilitate better understanding in research or other working situations. Our approach for this research starts by considering digital libraries for: stock market, news streams, census bureau statistics, weather, sports games, and the educational environment. For each of these applications, we form categories of possible users and the basic requirements for each of them. As a result, we identify a list of design goals that we take into consideration in developing the architecture of the library. To illustrate and validate our approach we implement a medical digital library containing actual Computed Tomography (CT) scan streams. It also contains sample medical text and audio streams to show the heterogeneity of the library. Streams are displayed in a concise, yet complete, way that makes it unproblematic for users to decide whether or not to playback a stream and to set playback options. The playback interface itself is organized in a way that accommodates synchronous and asynchronous streams and enables users to control the playback of these streams. We study the performance of the specialized search and retrieval processes in comparison to traditional search and retrieval processes. We conclude with a discussion on how to adapt the library to additional stream types in addition to suggesting other future efforts in this area

Query processing for an MPEG-7 compliant video database

Ankara : The Department of Computer Engineering and the Institute of Engineering and Science of Bilkent University, 2008.Thesis (Master's) -- Bilkent University, 2008.Includes bibliographical references leaves 66-68.Based on the recent advancements in multimedia, communication, and storage technologies, the amount of audio-visual content stored is increased dramatically. The need to organize and access the growing multimedia content led researchers to develop multimedia database management systems. However, each system has its own way of describing the multimedia content that disables interoperability among other systems. To overcome this problem and to be able to standardize the description of audio-visual content stored in those databases, MPEG-7 standard has been developed by MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group). In this thesis, a query language and a query processor for an MPEG-7 compliant video database system is proposed. The query processor consists of three main modules: query parsing module, query execution module, and result fusion module. The query parsing module parses the XML based query and divides it into subqueries. Each sub-query is then executed with related query execution module and the final result is obtained by fusing the results of the sub-queries according to user defined weights. The prototype video database system BilVideo v2.0, which is formed as a result of this thesis work, supports spatio-temporal and low level feature queries that contain any weighted combination of keyword, temporal, spatial, trajectory, and low level visual feature (color, shape and texture) queries. Compatibility with MPEG-7, low-level visual query support, and weighted result fusion feature are the major factors that highly differentiate between BilVideo v2.0 and its predecessor, BilVideo.Çam, HayatiM.S

CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research

CURATION AND MANAGEMENT OF CULTURAL HERITAGE THROUGH LIBRARIES

Libraries, museums and archives hold valuable collections in a variety of media, presenting a vast body of knowledge rooted in the history of human civilisation. These form the repository of the wisdom of great works by thinkers of past and the present. The holdings of these institutions are priceless heritage of the mankind as they preserve documents, ideas, and the oral and written records. To value the cultural heritage and to care for it as a treasure bequeathed to us by our ancestors is the major responsibility of libraries. The past records constitute a natural resource and are indispensable to the present generation as well as to the generations to come. Libraries preserve the documentary heritage resources for which they are primarily responsible. Any loss of such materials is simply irreplaceable. Therefore, preserving this intellectual, cultural heritage becomes not only the academic commitment but also the moral responsibility of the librarians/information scientists, who are in charge of these repositories. The high quality of the papers and the discussion represent the thinking and experience of experts in their particular fields. The contributed papers also relate to the methodology used in libraries in Asia to provide access to manuscripts and cultural heritage. The volume discusses best practices in Knowledge preservation and how to collaborate and preserve the culture. The book also deals with manuscript and archives issues in the digital era. The approach of this book is concise, comprehensively, covering all major aspects of preservation and conservation through libraries. The readership of the book is not just limited to library and information science professionals, but also for those involved in conservation, preservation, restoration or other related disciplines. The book will be useful for librarians, archivists and conservators. We thank the Sunan Kalijaga University, Special Libraries Association- Asian Chapter for their trust and their constant support, all the contributors for their submissions, the members of the Local and International Committee for their reviewing effort for making this publication possible