Organising music for movies

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to examine and discuss the classification of commercial popular music when large digital collections are organised for use in films. Design/methodology/approach - A range of systems are investigated and their organization is discussed, focusing on an analysis of the metadata used by the systems and choices given to the end-user to construct a query. The indexing of the music is compared to a checklist of music facets which has been derived from recent musicological literature on semiotic analysis of popular music. These facets include aspects of communication, cultural and musical expression, codes and competences. Findings -In addition to bibliographic detail, descriptive metadata is used to organise music in these systems. Genre, subject and mood are used widely; some musical facets also appear. The extent to which attempts are being made to reflect these facets in the organization of these systems is discussed. A number of recommendations are made which may help to improve this process. Originality/value - This paper discusses an area of creative music search which has not previously been investigated in any depth and makes recommendations based on findings and the literature which may be used in the development of commercial systems as well as making a contribution to the literature

CHORUS Deliverable 4.5: Report of the 3rd CHORUS Conference

The third and last CHORUS conference on Multimedia Search Engines took place from the 26th to the 27th of May 2009 in Brussels, Belgium. About 100 participants from 15 European countries, the US, Japan and Australia learned about the latest developments in the domain. An exhibition of 13 stands presented 16 research projects currently ongoing around the world

Towards the disintermediation of creative music search: Analysing queries to determine important facets

Purpose: Creative professionals search for music to accompany moving images in films, advertising, television. Some larger music rights holders (record companies and music publishers) organise their catalogues to allow online searching. These digital libraries are organised by various subjective musical facets as well as by artist and title metadata. The purpose of this paper is to present an analysis of written queries relating to creative music search, contextualised and discussed within the findings of text analyses of a larger research project whose aim is to investigate meaning making in this search process. Method: A facet analysis of a collection of written music queries is discussed in relation to the organisation of the music in a selection of bespoke search engines. Results: Subjective facets, in particular Mood, are found to be highly important in query formation. Unusually, detailed Music Structural aspects are also key. Conclusions: These findings are discussed in relation to disintermediation of this process. It is suggested that there are barriers to this, both in terms of classification and also commercial / legal factors

Simplifying resource discovery and access in academic libraries : implementing and evaluating Summon at Huddersfield and Northumbria Universities

Facilitating information discovery and maximising value for money from library materials is a key driver for academic libraries, which spend substantial sums of money on journal, database and book purchasing. Users are confused by the complexity of our collections and the multiple platforms to access them and are reluctant to spend time learning about individual resources and how to use them - comparing this unfavourably to popular and intuitive search engines like Google. As a consequence the library may be seen as too complicated and time consuming and many of our most valuable resources remain undiscovered and underused. Federated search tools were the first commercial products to address this problem. They work by using a single search box to interrogate multiple databases (including Library catalogues) and journal platforms. While going some way to address the problem, many users complained that they were still relatively slow, clunky and complicated to use compared to Google or Google Scholar. The emergence of web-scale discovery services in 2009 promised to deal with some of these problems. By harvesting and indexing metadata direct from publishers and local library collections into a single index they facilitate resource discovery and access to multiple library collections (whether in print or electronic form) via a single search box. Users no longer have to negotiate a number of separate platforms to find different types of information and because the data is held in a single unified index searching is fast and easy. In 2009 both Huddersfield and Northumbria Universities purchased Serials Solutions Summon. This case study report describes the selection, implementation and testing of Summon at both Universities drawing out common themes as well as differences; there are suggestions for those who intend to implement Summon in the future and some suggestions for future development

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

CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges

From Keyword Search to Exploration: How Result Visualization Aids Discovery on the Web

A key to the Web's success is the power of search. The elegant way in which search results are returned is usually remarkably effective. However, for exploratory search in which users need to learn, discover, and understand novel or complex topics, there is substantial room for improvement. Human computer interaction researchers and web browser designers have developed novel strategies to improve Web search by enabling users to conveniently visualize, manipulate, and organize their Web search results. This monograph offers fresh ways to think about search-related cognitive processes and describes innovative design approaches to browsers and related tools. For instance, while key word search presents users with results for specific information (e.g., what is the capitol of Peru), other methods may let users see and explore the contexts of their requests for information (related or previous work, conflicting information), or the properties that associate groups of information assets (group legal decisions by lead attorney). We also consider the both traditional and novel ways in which these strategies have been evaluated. From our review of cognitive processes, browser design, and evaluations, we reflect on the future opportunities and new paradigms for exploring and interacting with Web search results

Analysing Creative Image Search Information Needs

Creative professionals in advertising, marketing, design and journalism search for images to visually represent a concept for their project. The main purpose of this paper is to present search facets derived from an analysis of documents known as briefs, which are widely used in creative industries as requirement documents describing information needs. The briefs specify the type of image required, such as the content and context of use for the image and represent the topic from which the searcher builds an image query. We take three main sources—user image search behaviour, briefs, and image search engine search facets to examine the search facets for image searching in order to examine the following research question—are search facet schemes for image search engines sufficient for user needs, or is revision needed? We found that there are three main classes of user search facet, which include business, contextual and image related information. The key argument in the paper is that the facet “keyword/tag” is ambiguous and does not support user needs for more generic descriptions to broaden search or specific descriptions to narrow their search — we suggest that a more detailed search facet scheme would be appropriate