A haystack full of needles: Scholarly access challenges in museum video archives

摘要

Editor's Summary Museums are increasingly turning to video as an easy and inexpensive method of documentation and of developing valuable primary resources, but numerous barriers interfere with scholars' use of the materials. While technical difficulties are diminishing and attitudes and traditions are shifting, issues of intellectual property rights and information retrieval remain. Publishing video content online first demands a comprehensive rights assessment and clearing. Even more challenging is dealing with information retrieval in timea??based and visuala??aural resources, which makes finding a specific bit of data in mounds of footage a daunting task. Transcription enables free text search but is costly, time consuming and not entirely effective, delivering only the verbal aspect of original content. Descriptive metadata can be tied to time codes, adding broad or granular indexing to support navigation and retrieval, but the same drawbacks apply. Possible solutions include crowdsourcing, software tools and collaborative initiatives, applying metadata standards yet to be established and adopted.