Library News and Notes

Newsletter of the Boston University Alumni Medical Librar

Searching the Físchlár-NEWS archive on a mobile device

The Físchlár-NEWS system provides web-based access to an archive of digitally recorded TV News broadcasts over several months, and has been operational for over a year. Users can browse keyframes, search teletext and have streamed video playback of segments of news broadcasts to their desktops. This paper reports on the development of mFíschlár-NEWS, a version of Físchlár-NEWS which operates on a mobile PDA over a wireless LAN connection. In the design and development of mFíschlár-NEWS we have realised that mobile access to a digital library of video materials is more than just the desktop system on a smaller screen, and the functionality and role that information retrieval techniques play in the mFíschlár-NEWS system are very different to what is present in the desktop system. The paper describes the design, interface, functionality and operational status of this mobile access to a video library