Text as a Tool for Organizing Moving Image Collections

Bibliographic reference.
M. TURNER James, HUDON Michèle, DEVIN Yves, Text as a Tool for Organizing Moving Image Collections (en ligne), CAIS 2000 (Canadian Association for Information Science) : Dimensions of a
global information science, Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference, 7 p.
Text accessible : http://www.slis.ualberta.ca/cais2000/turner.htm


D.C Title : Text as a Tool for Organizing Moving Image Collections
D.C Creator : TURNER M. James, HUDON Michèle, DEVIN Yves
D.C Subject : analysis/image collections/indexing/moving images/thesaurus

D.C Description : this text develops "common methods for shot-level and scene-level description of moving image documents, in order to foster discovery and retrieval of these resources worldwide."
D.C Publisher : CAIS 2000 (Canadian Association for Information Science) : Dimensions of a global information science, Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference. Editor: Angela Kublik
D.C Date : -
D.C Type : Text.
D.C Format : html.
D.C Identifier : http://www.slis.ualberta.ca/cais2000/turner.htm
D.C Source : http://www.slis.ualberta.ca/
D.C Language : English
D.C Relation : Actes du Colloque http://www.slis.ualberta.ca/cais2000/index.htm
D.C Coverage : Canada
D.C Rights : -


This text is an extract of the original text.

Text as a Tool for Organizing Moving Image Collections
James M. Turner, Michèle Hudon, and Yves Devin
Université de Montréal

"Abstract
In the rapidly-growing networked environment, it is critical to develop common methods for shot-level and scene-level description of moving image documents, in order to foster discovery and retrieval of these resources worldwide. In this paper, we describe the methodology used and report preliminary results obtained in a project designed to study existing tools for indexing moving images at the shot level. A number of institutions holding moving image collections were recruited as partners, and visits to them were then made to complete a questionnaire and gather other information during a structured interview. Preliminary results show that a variety of tools are used for indexing moving images, and that those institutions which have been able to invest in building good indexing tools over the years have seen the quality of those tools suffer in the wake of cutbacks in resources needed to maintain them.

1. Introduction
As we enter the new millenium, we observe that the organization of moving image collections is still characterized by ad hoc information systems. In the rapidly-growing networked environment, it is critical to develop common methods of shot-level and scene-level description, in order to foster retrieval and ultimately, to share resources worldwide. Researchers are aware of the problem, and two streams of research which complement each other address the issues involved. The first stream focuses on low-level access to images using methods from computer science and concentrates on statistical techniques for deriving characteristics of images that help promote retrieval. The second stream focuses on high-level access to images using methods from library and information science, and concentrates on the use of text to create information useful for retrieval, information which is especially valuable since it is not available from the images themselves.
The materials contained in film libraries, television libraries, and both film and television stockshot libraries is usually of a general nature. Thus managing the terminology used to index these collections involves descriptor lists and thesauri which are often constructed from scratch to reflect the particular local reality of the collection. For the researcher who looks in many collections to find material for use in film and video production, this means relying heavily on the resource persons who work with each collection and learning a number of different retrieval systems and indexing vocabularies.
It has been thought that a thesaurus for indexing everyday film and video materials would become unmanageable after a certain point because there are so many kinds of persons, objects and events to describe that it would eventually become impossible to manage the semantic relationships between them. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that term creation levels off once sufficient terminology for indexing most shots has been created. This paper describes a research project which belongs to the second or high-level research stream and which aims to study the characteristics of thesauri used for indexing moving image collections at the shot level.
What is the point at which term creation levels off? How many terms for describing moving images does a thesaurus need to contain in order to be considered complete enough to describe a general collection adequately? Are the terms similar from one thesaurus to the next, or are collections so particular that an individual tool is required for each collection? Would it be reasonable to try to construct a general thesaurus of everyday persons, objects and events that could be shared among moving image collection managers? These are the research questions our project addresses.
The general goal of the study is to reach an understanding of the organization of existing vocabulary-management tools for moving image collections. The specific objectives are:
to discover how many terms, excluding proper names, are contained in a controlled vocabulary for managing general moving images collections before term creation levels off;
to identify patterns among terms in the existing thesauri created for moving image collections;
to assess how patterns found can contribute to building a shared vocabulary useful for special collections containing general material.

2. Background
Moving image collections are largely found in movie and television production facilities, but they are also to be found in many other contexts and environments, such as corporate libraries, government agencies, documentation centres of research groups, holocaust museums, religious archives, and so on. Librarians have developed a great deal of expertise with managing print collections, but there are no generally- and widely-accepted tools available for organizing moving image collections. Visual resources librarians and researchers are working on problems related to art collections and to slide collections of works of art, but moving image and other non-art picture collections need urgent attention. This is due to the profusion of production and the consequent mushrooming of such collections in recent decades, including television news libraries and stockshot libraries. To be of help to their user base, these collections need to be catalogued and indexed at the shot level.
In the context of working groups around the planet trying to work out metadata standards for the management of all kinds of digital materials, high-level metadata standards for moving image databases have not been studied. We hope that the results of our study will make a contribution in helping establish a theoretical basis on which standards can be built." [...]