The International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL) is a leading scientific forum on digital libraries. It brings together researchers, developers, content providers and users in the field of digital libraries.

TPDL 2013, the 17th edition of the conference, will be organized by University of Malta and it will be held in Valletta, Malta on September 22-26, 2013.

From text search in spoken words to visual search, where you can look for categories, specific places and faces. Filter your results through various metadata filters and use the date range to explore the archive.

Featured Collection: Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek

Connecting over 30.000 players in the German cultural landscape is too much of a challenge? The Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek has just launched its portal.

Images, books, music notes, videos – more than 6 Million artifacts are currently available in the “beta” version of the portal. Soon it shall become many more, both in terms of artifacts as well as partners. So far, around 2000 institutions are registered.

Besides the sheer size of the project whose assets will also be fed into the European portal Europeana, the intelligent and visually convincing search interface stands out.

Let’s make a search for the Anicent Egyptian Queen Nefertiti (in German Nofretete).

Search result page for the term Nofretete

The clearly ordered result page displays 24 hits. Initially, only the first 20 results are shown immediately, but the view can easily be changed to more or less items. Two result views are available, either the thumbnail view – as in the picture above – or the detailed view. Additionally the user can set a checkmark to only see results with thumbnails. The order of items shown is based upon relevance or alphabetical sequence.

In order to specify the results, various filters ranging from location to keywords – in this case head, sculpture, postcard, and more – can be applied. And they are fairly easy to handle and moreover they are accessible for visitors using a keyboard instead of a mouse. The numbers in brackets beside each location indicate the available hits.

Easy and accessible selection of filters

The picture above shows how the search can be limited to a certain location, in this case Berlin. Once a filter is set, the filter term appears in the bar (see picture below) and the result page is automatically adapted according to the new filter. No extra click has to be made. The process of selecting and deselecting filters has been done very well thought and is very easy to use.

Selected filter

From a user point of view, the portal seems to provide a solid base for more cultural assets and partners to come.

Still room for improvement? If you come across the portal for the first time and you want to explore the site and get started, it is not quite obvious what to look for. Users are not served with a quick guided tour or with some special exhibitions showing the treasures of the collection. This is done quite convincing by the European internet portal Europeana with its “Europeana exhibitions” or by the EU video project EUscreen with its “EUscreen exhibitions”.

Another interesting and fairly new feature which also would be highly interesting for online libraries can be seen on Google.

Google: Fact sheet for search terms

Whenever applicable, a quick fact sheet of each search term is presented. For the example of Nofretete a short description of her life and family is shown. This additional information provides new starting points for related searches and supports an explorative search.

The Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek is Germanys contribution to Europeana. It is run by the Government and its Federal States. Until 2013, it was financed by 25 Mio Euro and will be supported at least until 2015.

New Featured Collection on #Axes_EU: Easy search in the new German library tinyurl.com/d6gb2mh @sbb_news #DigitalArchives

— AXES (@AXES_EU) 3. April 2013

AXES will present papers and the AXES Demo. The International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval tackles main challenges of search and retrieval but also related issues of multimedia content management, user interaction, and communitybased management.

The venue takes place in Dallas, 16-19. April 2013.

In our online surveys amongst potential users of the AXES prototypes, a total of 1633 people responded to questions regarding their usage of online search engines and audio-visual databases.

With these surveys, we found that in general, users below the age of 45 are more confident than older users. Moreover, we found that for researchers, academics and journalists alike, searching material online usually means “Googling it”.

Progress on user studies

In preparation for the development of AXES prototypes, several user studies have been undertaken to learn how potential users will use these prototypes. One approach we took for our studies is online surveys. Three surveys were taken in end of 2011 and summer of 2012 among the home users, academics and journalists, collecting a total of 1633 responses.

AXES-HOME

The first survey, held at the end of 2011, concerned the home users of AXES, the user group for the AXES HOME prototype. A total of 970 respondents were gathered.

The results of this survey were used to gather user requirements for the AXES-HOME prototype. The report with a description of these results and user requirements can be downloaded here: D1.2 User Requirements Report V1 (PDF). Moreover, a model was developed to classify respondents by 1) experience with using audio-visual databases and 2) how goal-directed they search these databases. This model has been described in a paper presented at WIAMIS 2012, titled “Who are the users of a video search system? Classifying a heterogeneous group with a Profile Matrix” available at IEEE Xplore.

With this user model, we found that users are quite experienced with the use of audio-visual databases; although YouTube is the only international database used, users from different countries also use national audio-visual databases (such as iPlayer and Uitzending Gemist). Many features and functionalities offered by audio-visual databases are seldom used. However, users who watched more video online generally used more functionality. Moreover, users below the age of 45 used more functionality than older users.

The presentation is available via SlideShare, the paper and the data used to create the model are available Open Access: see Paper and Data.

AXES-RESEARCH

The other two surveys, held during the summer of 2012, concerned the research users of AXES, which will lead to the AXES RESEARCH prototype. Two independent surveys were used to gather respondents amongst academic users (342 responses), and journalistic users (321 responses), with a total of 663 respondents for the research users.

The results of these surveys were used to gather user requirements for the AXES-RESEARCH prototype. Moreover, these surveys were used to gain an insight in the influence of the Internet on the research process of academics and journalists. For the academics, the results were presented at the Digital Humanities Congress 2012, titled “Mapping the use of digital sources amongst Humanities scholars in the Netherlands”. The presentation is available via SlideShare, a paper is still in the works.

For the researchers, both academic and journalistic, it was found that searching material online usually means “Googling it”. The most common search engines used are the ones by Google; Search, Images and YouTube. This also leads to high expectations towards other search engines, expected to work similarly as Google. Moreover, we found that audio-visual material is seldom used for research purposes, largely due to difficult search facilities for audio-visual material. Our goal is to improve upon this search, so that audio-visual material can more easily be incorporated in the research process.

Sorting, prioritising, and comparing user needs

In early September, the team from the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision initiated research in cooperation with the University of Twente. This consists of a concept mapping experiment (see for example Nadeem, D., Stoyanov, S., & Koper, R. (2011)). Using Concept Mapping for Needs Analysis for a Social Support System in Learning Network. International Journal of Interactive Mobile Technologies (iJIM), 5(1). doi:10.3991/ijim.v5i1.1520) where participants are asked to sort and rate a list of statements (Some example statements are: Users should be able to search for videos that have a given mood (for example, dramatic, exciting, calm etc.); The system should provide a visual indication of the active filters while the user is searching; Users should be able to view and navigate through the videos that are returned as a search result) defining user needs. The statements stem from the requirements that all the project partners assembled in various stages of the project and list a number of functionalities of a possible search system.

The experiment allows us to explore differences and similarities between home users, researchers, and professionals with respect to the requirements that they have of audio-visual search systems. Research in other fields has learned us that this methodology has brought forth interesting insights into various groups’ user needs and we hope to find out more about how are future users approach the different characteristics of a possible new search engine that is based on advanced technologies.

Next phase

With the data from these surveys, user requirements are discussed within the AXES consortium to differentiate the three AXES prototypes (PRO, RESEARCH, HOME) to be best applicable to the relevant user group.

The first prototype, AXES-PRO, is due in December 2012. User evaluation of PRO will commence in January 2013.

If you are interested in taking part in user evaluations, please contact Max Kemman.

„Die Briten habens gut, die haben den iPlayer!“ – states a German Blogger and positively envies people from Great Britain for their advanced media player.

He says: The British are well off, because they have the BBC iPlayer. Indeed, the iPlayer is well designed and can be used via a computer or smart phone. The other good news is that there has been an international version for over a year.

There is only one but an essential drawback to it if you see it through the eyes of an archivist: Most of the programme expire after a certain time period, usually after seven days. But we will come back to this later.

With several streams including programmes from other broadcasters the iPlayer is not only limited to BBC content. It is developing to a central British TV and radio hub from where several audiovisual information streams can be viewed. In March 2012 the service was being used by 40 per cent of online adults in the UK. This is a huge number, which surprised even the makers and shows the significant need of such a service.

Taster of the BBC iPlayer: Witness – Fifty years of the Beatles (show within iPlayer)

In the beginning though, not everything was gold. Back in 2005 the first version of the player was launched and immediately underwent public criticism: after four years of development, people accused, the BBC of only launching a beta version. But, over time the player improved heavily with every new version launched. Extra services were added like the recommendation features and a social makeover with various sharing features to add the social dimension. Finally apps for mobile platforms as well as special services for Xbox and WII expanded the product family of the iPlayer.

Getting to the downside – the majority of the programme expires after seven days and that has massive effects on the availability and usability of the content. Sharing and embedding items in social items for instance only makes sense if users are quick. After the expiration the programme is not viewable any more. So, the clear focus of the iPlayer is to distribute recently broadcast audio-visual content, not to store it.

This brings us to the question where to find all the brilliant documentaries and entertaining programmes of the BBC?

Radio and images are also available outside UK; Here an example of an interview with Agatha Christie from the BBC Archive (cannot be embedded, show within BBC Archive)

Where to find interviews with famous British artists such as Franics Bacon, or the unforgettable Agatha Christie? Here the sprawling BBC Archive comes into play. It stores almost a million hours of audio and video as well as a huge collection of documents and photographs as far back as the 1930s. The BBC has a catalogue that links it programmes and related content together. It is possible to search by subject, person or broadcast date.

For obvious legal reasons not every item can go directly into the archive, but for those which can, wouldn’t it be nice to have a marriage between the iPlayer and the archive? So that every item broadcast goes directly into the BBC Archive, and through the same interface as the iPlayer offer the viewer and listener a broader experience of current and archived programmes?

Anyway, the BBC has announced that it plans to place online the history of its broadcast output by publishing the schedule information for radio and television. It is called the GENOME project, and over 88 years of programme titles, broadcast date and contributors will be made available. When published online, this information could push open the doors of that great archive a little more!

Several AXES partners are contributing to a tutorial on feature detectors and descriptors at ECCV 2012 in Florence, Italy. The European Conference on Computer Vision is one of the top international conferences on computer vision research.

The tutorial introduces local feature detectors and descriptors as foundational tools in a variety of state-of-the-art computer vision applications.

Speakers from AXES: Andrea Vedaldi (U Oxford), Tinne Tuytelaars (U Leuven), Cordelia Schmid (INRIA) and Andrew Zisserman (U Oxford).

For AXES the two partners INRIA + FHG participated in the TrecVid MED challenge and finished first and second. Congratulations!

The Multimedia Event Detection (MED) evaluation track is part of the TRECVID Evaluation. The goal of MED is to assemble core detection technologies into a system that can search multimedia recordings for user-defined events based on pre-computed metadata.

Do you enjoy travelling back in time? Seeing what your own homepage looked like ten years ago? Listening to a great concert you visited? Reading an old, sold out book? Here comes what you are looking for!

The Internet Archive is the largest web archiving organization based on a crawling approach and a long-term project initiated by Brewster Kahle. The idea is to make a copy of the web and archive all content that is freely available including websites, books and software, recordings and movies. Recently, the archive has begun to offer services related to the information access needs of people who do not read print.

One of its most famous services is the Wayback Machine which documents the evolution of the web from 1996 on. It shows old versions of websites including images and currently comprises of more than 150 billion pages. It is easy to use and a great pleasure to browse the digital past. If you want to see what the BBC presented on May 20th 1998 in comparison to today, this is it:

:: Screenshot BBC Website from May 20th 1998, via Wayback Machine watch online

A side project of the Internet Archive is the open library project. It aims to create a website for every single book published until now. So far more than one million books are available and even fully searchable through an OCR layer (optical character recognition).

Parts of the books can only be borrowed physically but many can be read online, such as Mark Twain’s Adventures of Hucklberry Finn or Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Besides publishing houses and archives also users are addressed to enrich the collection with descriptions and metadata.

In addition to this, the Internet Archive maintains huge collections of audiovisual media in the public domain or under a license that allows redistribution. The collections are organized into sub-collections by various criteria and range from movies and featurettes to newsreels and cartoons as well as pro- and anti-war content. Along with specific collections covering various events, users can find material on the US election (2004/2008) as well as the terror attacks on September 11th.

The selected video below shows a silent movie from 1921, starring Buster Keaton.

:: Buster Keation (Hard Luck)

The Internet Archive is a non-profit initiative with an annual budget of 10 million dollars and is located in San Francisco, California. Its archive currently has the gigantic size of more than six petabytes of data. This is roughly the equivalent of 1.5 billion text bibles. A mirror of the archive ensuring stability and endurability is situated at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt.

Internal note:
The European Project ARCOMEM – Deutsche Welle is part of the consortium – is currently investigating how the heritage of social media such as Twitter tweets, YouTube and Facebook content can be archived, exploited and memorized.

AXES was presented in the META-exhibition poster sessions attracting visitors from the research and industry communities.

AXES is a member of META, the network of excellence forging the multilingual Europe Technology Alliance.