The Open Video Digital Library: A Möbius strip of research and practice

Abstract

The Open Video Digital Library (OVDL) provides digital video files to the education and research community and is distinguished by an innovative user interface that offers multiple kinds of visual surrogates to people searching for video content. The OVDL is used by several thousand people around the world each month and part of this success is due to its user interface. This article examines the interplay between research and practice in the development of this particular digital library with an eye toward lessons for all digital libraries. We argue that theoretical and research goals blur into practical goals and practical goals raise new research questions as research and development progress-this process is akin to walking along a Möbius strip in which a locally two-sided surface is actually part of a globally one-sided world. We consider the gulf between the theories that guide current digital library research and current practice in operational digital libraries, provide a developmental history of the OVDL and the research frameworks that drove its development, illustrate how user studies informed its implementation and revision, and conclude with reflections and recommendations on the interplay between research and practice.

Find What You Need, Understand What You Find

“…These results were incorporated into an operational system (Open Video Project; http://open-video.org). The results of these studies are reported in more than a dozen papers in the HCI and IR literature (see Marchionini, Wildemuth, & Geisler, 2006, for a summary). Assessments were made for different variations of single keyframes (poster frames), storyboards (arrays of keyframes), slide shows, and fast forwards for a series of recognition and gist determination tasks, using task accuracy, time, and a battery of affective measures.…”

User variance and its impact on video retrieval benchmarking

“…This though would require significant effort and is unlikely to happen in the near future. Other possibilities include the reporting of additional evaluation metrics [12], the move away from analyst-oriented deep information seeking tasks, or the change to more generalized corpora which are less dependent on "shots".…”

“…However, the Open Video Digital Library (OVDL) has provided a repository of digital content, and an open interface for browsing and searching the data [12]. Despite the lack of shared interaction data from TRECVID evaluations, the common collections and benchmarking resources provided by this initiative have facilitated a great deal of research into both interactive retrieval and its associated human factors.…”

On the use of hierarchical prediction structures for efficient summary generation of H.264/AVC bitstreams

“…The algorithms were tested with the sequence SunEarth Connection, a video downloaded from the Open Video repository [25] in MPEG-2 format, and transcoded to H.264/AVC using the JM 12.4 reference implementation. The sequence has 11,593 frames of 720 Â 480 pixels at 30 frames per second.…”