Open Source Broadcasting

American Archive Pilot issues RFP

2009-04-17T17:38:00.003-04:00

From Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB):

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) created the American Archive Pilot Program in response to the growing urgency to preserve and provide access to Public Broadcasting?s audio and visual heritage at risk of deterioration. Oregon Public Broadcasting is managing and administering the Pilot Program. This RFP is open to all CPB-qualified public radio and television stations.

For full details see: http://americanmediaarchive.org/application/

Lawrence Lessig at SXSW on Open Media and Public Broadcasting

2009-03-31T16:15:00.001-04:00

(Crossposted from Pubforge.org)

My friend Kevin Reynan from the Open Media Project traveled to SXSW in Austin last week, and captured an interview with Lawrence Lessig…you know, the Stanford law professor and the guy behind Creative Commons.

(Kevin says “please thank whoever paid for the beer and food and the PBS happy hours during SXSW. I went there several times, but never met anyone who actually worked for PBS. Probably not the best use of your marketing dollars, but I appreciated it.”)

Anyway, Lessig has some semi sharp words for PBS relative to open content, or lack thereof, in public TV practice. PBS wants to protect its rights to distribute and properly monetize PBS productions, and I completely get that. But I have long argued for drawing a line between content that is expensive, heavily-produced, and highly marketable, and another class of content whose value in the public domain exceeds its private value. That line would often be fuzzy and hard to define, but I believe we have an obligation to try and draw it.

Here’s an example: Ken Burns’ new documentary, National Parks, begins airing this fall. Ken Burns and PBS are the rights holders to the documentary. They’ll use it during pledge drives, sell DVDs, and monetize it however they (and stations) can, all of which is appropriate. But doesn’t the general public have a stake in the production beyond this? Our (too small) tax contributions help pay for it, as does corporate underwriting and possible grant money. Most important, our continued investment and support of a public broadcasting system enables Ken Burns and PBS to produce and air the documentary in the first place. So how about making available lots of beautiful HD footage of national parks freely available for download? Stuff left on the cutting room floor, full-length interviews, images, whatever…all of this would be of great interest to lots of people if they could get their hands on it. This content would enrich us generally…but will probably never be released.

An objection to releasing it would be the cost of doing so. This is another argument for funding the American Archive, so important A/V materials like this can be preserved, and all citizens can benefit from a larger view of our lives and times. It’s critical that we make that happen…and that we clarify the rights to public media. My point of view is, making public media truly public should be the norm, not the exception.

Blog Tools

2009-03-26T11:07:00.001-04:00

Recently I hooked up with Twitter, and find it pretty interesting. Some of my high-tech friends are following my tweets, and even some musicians in Brighton, England. I guess because I'm a musician and my last name is Brighton, the semantics are enough for a Twitter connection.

I have now ported my Twitter updates to my Facebook wall, so now one Tweet feeds both places.

What I want to do though, is have one interface for writing that can publish to one or more places. I write for about 10 different blogs, and some of them are closely related. In some cases I might want one post to appear on three different blogs. How to do that without copying and pasting?

So I'm exploring available blog tools, including at this moment an OSX app called Ecto. We'll see how Ecto works, along with other tool options, and report back!

Using Tools for Collaboration / Updates on Infrastructure Changes

2006-10-17T13:07:00.000-04:00

Recently, I noticed a new error in our log file. It turns out the folks at WAMU changed to using feedburner for the url we had used for our feed here:

http://kjzz.org/programs/dianerehm

This is great for them, however there was some change in the feed that
caused our listing to break (or perhaps it's a combination of a change in
their feed and some incompatibility with our feed parser).

As a result, I simply opted to pull in the feed for the Diane Rehm from NPR
instead. This works great... and it doesn't break.

However, this does bring up a question is, why isn't there an email list where changes like this could be announced (or maybe even some kind of blog which we all could post to and whose resulting rss feed we could use as a means of keeping track of these kinds of changes).

On a similar note. The other day, I needed to make some changes to the FPRAZ Store, the online store we have set up for our friends organization. This is based on open source software made by Alex Koval and his team at zwarehouse.org. These folks happen to live in Kazakhstan and so, rather than call or email, we opened a jabber session using meebo, a web based jabber/instant messaging client.

Were we to be collaborating more as a network, would it be possible to put together a "buddy list" of instant messaging addresses for web developers (and web designers and web strategists) within public broadcasting. I mean, I was able to get some great work done in one half hour session, and I see how our working together in this way would be beneficial to all.

Look forward to hearing your thoughts about this.

Following Brendan's Lead

2006-09-20T16:55:00.000-04:00

We just followed Brendan Greeley's lead as described in the section "Playing nice with bloggers" in the Current article here:

http://www.current.org/web/web0615opensource.shtml

and invited two guest bloggers to talk about Real Estate in the discussion for our locally produced edition of Here and Now.

We also followed Bill Swersey from WNYC's advice about NOT moderating the discussion prior to the show.

As a result, over the course of the show, we had an amazing 60+ posts here:

http://kjzz.org/programs/hereandnow/comments/66/

In listening to the broadcast unfold, it was great to hear how our listeners posting to the web really become a part of the show. If you would like to hear an archived version of this broadcast check out:

http://kjzz.org/news/arizona/archives/200609/realestate/

Thanks to the folks at Radio Open Source for the advice and for pioneering this format!

John T.

Call for Open Source Projects

2006-02-27T19:08:00.000-05:00

As you may have heard by now, North Country Public Radio has launched a site at www.pubforge.org to act as a repository/demo site/promotional space for open source tools oriented toward the needs of public broadcasting stations and organizations. We are actively seeking projects to recommend in the site, particularly those that are ready or can be made ready for use by others in the community immediately. PubForge is best set up to host demo versions of projects that run in an apache/php/mysql environment, but we have offers of technical support to host projects with different requirements. Projects of interest that we may not be able to host are still welcome--PubForge will provide a resource area for descriptions of other projects with links to download sites and demo areas that may exist elsewhere.

We are also seeking to build a developer/support community around these projects with a longterm aim of being the go-to site for small and underresourced stations who want to create a strong online presence using tools built and supported by those who know the needs of public broadcasting best, their colleagues in the community. If you are interested, please email dale@ncpr.org.

The on-demand media revolution

2005-08-23T15:24:00.000-04:00

Has it really been this long since someone posted to Opensourcemedia.org? I'm about to remedy that, but let's ponder for a second some of the momentous events that have occurred in the interim: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Runaway Bride story, and the release of iTunes 4.9.

OK, the Berlin Wall was fully torn down by 1990. It hasn't been that long since the last post here, but it's been long enough that this space may be absent of an audience. So I'll just go ahead and scratch a few ideas on the wall and maybe they'll get discovered by some intrepid cave explorer in the distant future.

So here is today's topic, which is a bit of prognostication: The launch of iTunes 4.9 is the tip of the tipping point of the on-demand media revolution. But it is a flawed instrument, and will not by itself finish the job.

Most denizens of Opensourcemedia.org have long been excited about RSS as a means of easily publishing fresh content. When "podcasting" came along as a simple extension of RSS feeds, many of us naturally jumped in. Traffic on my own site grew steadily in the months preceding June 2005, largely driven by MP3 downloads of our local radio programs to clients like iPodder. After June 28th, traffic grew dramatically. I mean it basically doubled, and shows no sign of growing at a merely moderate pace in the near future. I'll be paying lots more for bandwidth in the coming year, that's for sure, and be happy about it.

But I'm not just president of the Podcasting Hair Club for Men, I'm also a member. Suddenly I have found room in my more-than-busy life to become an active media consumer once again. I listen to On the Media when I go running in my favorite park; I take the show I produced for 16 years (Focus 580 on WILL-AM) with me on long trips; I consume the Gillmor Gang and laugh at Steve's grisly bear-ness at the gym. I'm becoming better-informed and -entertained as a podcast user, and it's changing my expectations about what media and media producers can do for me. As a media producer, this has changed my expectations of myself and the demands on my organization. The great part is, we can now serve people even better, reach a much larger audience, and have a global impact.

But the on-demand media revolution remains incomplete. "Podcasting" may actually divert us silly humans from the real pay dirt. What other really cool things could we do with RSS feeds and enclosures? As you know, RSS enclosures can be any media object. Video files sure, but let's think a bit harder about the possibilities. Why not include lesson plans and resources for learning, presenting pathways for understanding subjects in great depth? Links to additional background and source materials, included as a SMIL or Flash module? Instead of simply enclosing audio and video files, why not resurrect the idea of interactive media? We can enclose any media type whatsoever, so why not produce something truly outstanding?

So let's say we do that, and people get busy writing or updating clients to support downloading and managing different media files types and applications. We're still not finished. Because what we really want is persistence and interoperability, and these are properties of media objects that have been endowed with appropriate metadata.

This doesn't mean throwing in proprietary iTunes tags. I mean sure, we want our stuff to work in iTunes so let's do that. But what else do we want our stuff to work in? My argument would be to make it accessible to the emerging global media library. That means endowing all our media objects with library-grade metadata, like Dublin Core, PBCore, and/or the other emerging standards for exposing metadata and harvesting content in the online world.

An RSS client is basically a metadata gathering appliance, but without extended metadata it's not an intelligent client. Title, Subject, and Category are useful in a very limited sense. RSS clients could easily be built to recognize and do more interesting things with extended metadata. And extended metadata could play a very interesting role in creating intelligent media objects that update themselves in the online world.

All for now...I just updated my little iPod shuffle, which is all I could afford on my public radio salary. (Still, at $99 and a few ounces, it's got more computing cahones than Illiac ever had.) I'm going to go run and catch up my favorite shows. I guarantee none of them have anything to do with the Runaway Bride.

CPB and IMLS grant possibility

2004-09-26T16:29:00.000-04:00

Submitted for your attention:

CPB AND IMLS CREATE PARTNERSHIP FOR A NATION OF LEARNERS Partnership for a Nation of Learners, a multi-year, $3 million initiative of CPB and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), will provide resources to bring together libraries, public broadcasters, and museums to leverage community assets and create new pathways to learning, discovery, and exploration. The initiative will offer competitive grants to support existing collaborations and to create new ones, encourage professional development, and conduct project evaluations to measure effectiveness. Grant application guidelines and more information about the initiative will be available on October 31, 2004, at http://www.cpb.org/partners/.
[SOURCE: Corporation for Public Broadcasting/Institute of Museum and Library Services Press Release] http://www.cpb.org/programs/pr.php?prn=375

We'll have to see what the guidelines say, but I bet there's an opportunity for collaborations relating to online digital archives. I'd like to see a testbed involving at least three public TV/radio stations partnering with local libraries and museums to facilitate public access to collections, using the metadata standards we've been discussing, and developing the tools for XML data harvesting and a nicely-designed interface. (Oh yes, and a marketing component to make what I just said intelligible).

If you're game, let me know.

The Internet, Libraries, and the Public Record

2004-09-16T17:35:00.000-04:00

"It is both a pity and a sign of the times that the libraries do not have recordings of both conventions for the civic review," writes Andrea Antulov in the Letters to the Editor section of our local Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette. "I urge your readers to demand they ensure citizens have plentiful and easy access to historial, journalistic and civic records. After all, that was the purpose of libraries' creation, to ensure a literate, informed citizenship without regard to social class in order to protect democracy."

NPR has published RealAudio archives of the convention speeches on NPR.org, so anyone with an Internet connection (or who can visit the public library where they have a connection) can listen. Here they are:

Republican National Convention:

http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=3877883 (Day One)
http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=3882508 (Day Two)
http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=3885136 (Day Three)
http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=3887311 (Day Four)

Democratic National Convention:

http://www.npr.org/politics/convention2004/dnc_schedule.html (All four days)

This is great but...we don't know if these URLs will be valid four years from now. All audio is encoded in RealAudio streaming format, meaning that without, ahem, special tools you can't download and save the audio. It's part of the public record, but the audio files aren't in the public domain. I kind of thought they should be, so I asked Robert Spier at NPR.org what would be the reaction if someone made local copies of these speeches, solely for the purpose of public enlightenment. Here is the reply from our email correspondence:

Jack,

Here is what our Counsel's office offers in reply to your question from last week. Seems pretty clearcut.

Best.

Robert Spier
NPR Online Station Services
202.513.2448 rspier@npr.org

Love NPR? Support your local station: http://www.npr.org/stations/index.php

This would be very problematic for several reasons, including: (1) I don't think any of the speeches qualify as works of the United States government (even the speeches by public officials), and thus they probably aren't in the public domain, (2) music rights issues, (3) I think we got some audio from a "pool" so there is a question of rights in the recordings, and (4) there may be some conditions from the convention halls or RNC and DNC that I don't know about.

I like and respect Robert Spier, but I had to reply that it's clearcut in no way at all. I won't knowingly violate anyone's copyrights, which leaves me in a tough spot if I want to "ensure a literate, informed citizenship without regard to social class in order to protect democracy."

Did I mention how many people searched my web site looking for MP3s of the Barack Obama speech? I'd like to make this stuff available, and I don't care if it's on my site or yours. I think we should be in this literate informed citizenship business together, but we can't publish the goods because we don't know what the rules are. So what's a brother to do?

With the Internet we now have the technical means to create a vastly useful digital library. I understand that the CNNs of the world want to protect their proprietary work and get paid. But in the public media universe, we're not serving a private interest but a public good. If we're going to make the public broadcasting web useful for citizenship and democracy, we need to view it less as a gated community and more as a public library. And stock the shelves as best we can.

PBCore (Public Broadcasting Metadata Dictionary) Launch Imminent

2004-08-29T13:43:00.000-04:00

I received this yesterday on the dm-broad@LISTSERV.VIDE.NET listserv. Sorry for the length and the news release style, but that's what it is. Regardless, the info is pretty important:

The inaugural version of PBCore (Public Broadcasting Metadata Dictionary), a standard way to describe all public broadcasting content, has emerged from the Test Implementation phase and is being finalized for the launch of version 1.0 in September 2004. Under development since January 2002, PBCore is the result of unprecedented cross-organizational cooperation by a team of public radio and television producers and managers, archivists and information scientists.

A common metadata protocol is fundamental to public broadcasting's ability to work in collaborative environments to deliver and exchange content across new digital distribution platforms. PBCore will enable more efficient and cost-effective ways to leverage content and service partnerships to serve existing and new constituents. PBCore will facilitate new production collaborations and the ability to parse traditional programs into short segments for Web distribution or as niche content for specific community, service and institutional needs. For these applications where granular manipulation and interoperability are required, PBCore will be essential.

In May, PBCore was deployed in three test scenarios to determine:

1. its effectiveness when used as a data inter-operability/translation tool;
2. if PBCore can be used to initiate a digitizing/archiving process and
assess its ability to assist in asset or record discovery; and
3. to map PBCore to several emerging metadata standards.

Participants included public television station and national producer WGBH, public radio station and national producer Minnesota Public Radio, national public broadcasting distributors PBS and National Public Radio, local station Kentucky Educational Television, and recognized metadata expert Grace Agnew.

The tests were completed successfully and highlighted areas for further refinement. In response to consistent feedback to make metadata standards easy to use, the number of PBCore metadata elements has been reduced. Also, efforts are underway to provide more PBCore examples that are specific to television and radio.

The need for a shared descriptive language for public broadcasters was underscored in the results of the test implementations, as well as the March 2004 Request for Comments. Ninety-six percent of the RFC respondents agreed public broadcasting needs a core metadata dictionary and that PBCore meets this need. In addition, 44 percent of participants plan to implement a metadata project within the next year, and 74 percent within the next two years. Respondents indicated the use of PBCore would provide public broadcasting with a necessary tool for increasing station and network efficiencies and inter-station resource sharing. And 80 percent agreed the use of PBCore could afford new service opportunities for their organization or those with whom they work.

The PBCore is built on the foundation of the Dublin Core (ISO 15836), an international standard for resource discovery (http://dublincore.org), and has been reviewed by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Usage Board. Version 1.0 of PBCore will be published in September 2004. It is anticipated that PBCore will be available free of charge.

A summary of the Test Implementation results, version 1.0 of PBCore (once published), a User Guide with an orientation to understanding PBCore elements, presentations, background articles, and resources are available at http://www.utah.edu/cpbmetadata/.

The Public Broadcasting Metadata Dictionary Project is funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and administered by WGBH/Boston.

Press contact:
Lisa Cerqueira
Senior Publicist, Interactive Marketing
WGBH Boston
lisa_cerqueira@wgbh.org
(617) 300-5334

Nations to share Earth data

2004-08-23T13:10:00.000-04:00

"Forty-nine countries have agreed to participate in a 10-year project to collect and share thousands of measurements of the Earth," reports the Associated Press (8/18/2004), "ranging from weather to streamflow to ground tremors to air pollution....'The Earth needs a full-body scan,' says Conrad Lautenbacher, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"The new system could help pinpoint coastal areas affected by erosion, report changes in ocean currents that affect the movement of fish, provide real-time updates on the potential loss in earthquake zones, monitor pollution threats to local water resources and track the change from vegetation to developed land to study the impact of urban growth. Michael Leavitt, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, says the 'benefits are limited only by our own imaginations.'

"Much of the data to be shared is already collected and the new effort will be to combine the collections systems so that the information can be easily shared among the participants and used to both understand current conditions and forecast the future. 'We have been able to make computers work together. The challenge of the 21st century is to get people to work together,' says Leavitt. 'It will not be the technology that limits is, it will be the sociology,' he adds, noting the problem will be overcoming bureaucracy, politics, and turf."

Comment: It's easy to imagine how to pull this off technically. But putting it into practice requires the same types of changes in workflow and organizational practice, not to mention buy-in by all parties, that we face in public broadcasting. I'm posting this item as an interesting parallel.

Revisions to PBCore now online.

2004-08-13T17:04:00.000-04:00

Dennis Haarsager was kind enough to point out brand-new revisions in the PBCore metadata standard. He writes "The site has just been updated with a more current (and slightly slimmed down) version. This is still not necessarily the final version, but wanted to let you know it had changed from the one I led you to since I know you've been working on an Access interface for it."

I'm glad I got too busy to work further on the Access PBCore module. Some of the revisions to PBCore are not trivial. I guess the question is when will it become stable? Meanwhile, we should probably look at the revised PBCore in a full-length mirror to see how it fits.

RSS Feeds for Election Coverage

2004-08-03T19:16:00.000-04:00

In putting together our election coverage for KJZZ, I have been looking for rss feeds to include on our site.

Here is what I have so far:

http://kjzz.org/news/specialreports/2004/elections/

It's just a start. As an example here is a list of some of the political blogs with RSS feeds (with a Democratic bent) that we have the opportunity to choose from:

http://www.conventionbloggers.com/

I wonder if there is a list of equivalent Right leaning blogs?

(As an aside, I like how this site lists only the top story from a number of blogs, as opposed to taking up a lot of real estate with a ton of text from a single blog).

Additionally, I wonder what kind of editorial guidelines one might apply in selecting which sources to include?

Is it possible that there are Election specific blogs from the BBC, Christian Science Monitor? Are there any other nationally syndicated programs which offer an RSS feed that come to mind?

Open Access vs. Paid Subscription model

2004-07-23T15:41:00.000-04:00

First, I hereby admit that my last post here was simply bizarre. I hope someone noticed.

Today I can't stop myself from commenting on the new item on the iMA's web site: a PPT file representing a "vision for Public Radio Online" by Stephen Hill. Now I like Hearts of Space as much as the next ambient guitarist, but something appalls me about the notion of charging for public radio content. I'll gladly accept invitations to argue this point at great length, but that's not my immediate point.

Agreed: we have cost/revenue issues, especially with regard to effective web development throughout the system. We need to open our minds as we brainstorm possible solutions. But, um, does a subscription model constitute an example of thinking outside the box?

Granted I'm a dreamer, but seems to me we could devise a highly-functional XML-driven shared-content system (that's a lot of hyphens) without lots of cash. The biggest challenge seems to be organizational change. We'll have to adjust our work flow to fully participate in the world of online media. Lucky for us, it's the kind of organizational restructuring we've been saying we need for the past decade: breaching the walls between TV, radio, print, and Internet. Each formerly discreet medium is now in the form of bits, and bits can be stored, transmitted, and displayed any way we choose. Here's an idea: let's set up a really efficient way to handle bits!

But of course there will be a cost to this transition. Since this is the resource problem, let's think about possible solutions. One might be Stephen Hill's online content subscription model. Another might be to follow the lead of our colleagues in allied fields, like higher education, libraries, museums, and scientific institutions, all of which are much further along than public broadcasting in the universe of online content. We might even find they want to help us.

I better quit this rant for now, but before I go and have an actual weekend off (sort of), I'll place this link on the table. It might provide at least a partial solution.

Knowledge Lost in Information

2004-07-21T17:03:00.000-04:00

What is a "good" digital collection?

2004-07-14T16:36:00.000-04:00

Digging through the online resources about digital archives and content sharing, I ran across the National Information Standards Organization's Framework of Guidance for Building Good Digital Collections. Yowza! Here in one place are most of the relevant concepts and resources for designing interoperable digital collections, and the considerations we must consider in creating a universally-accessible public broadcasting online archive.

The Framework notes that the meaning of "good" practice has changed rapidly with the evolution of practices: "In today's digital environment, the context of content is a vast international network of digital materials and services. Objects, metadata and collections should be viewed not only within the context of the projects that created them but as building blocks that others can reuse, repackage, and build services upon. Indicators of goodness correspondingly must now also emphasize factors contributing to interoperability, reusability, persistence, verification and documentation."

If you didn't have gainful employment you could work full-time just reading the material available on this subject. This document would be a great place to get grounded, then branch off to the topics and resources you need.

A final thought for the day...it has become clear that we in public broadcasting are way behind in creating a searchable, usable, accessible digital collection, as compared with our colleages in the nation's libraries, museums, and cultural, academic, and scientific institutions. We need to catch up!

Metadata on the table

2004-07-06T17:42:00.000-04:00

Dennis Haarsager, who maintains the excellently useful site Technology360.org, moderated the panel on technology at the Public Radio Leadership Forum held on May 10th, 2004. I just became aware of his notes from the session available here in PDF format.

A summary from the 2004 IMA conference was presented, including the idea (being pushed by Mark Fuerst) of a public radio supersite like CBC.ca or Knight Ridder Digital. I'm not smart or arrogant enough to rule anything out, but I don't see NPR stations abandoning their local station sites in favor of one big national public radio portal. The CBC and BBC web sites are outstanding, but they don't have pesky local stations like mine that serve local audiences in unique ways. And my rhetoric radar hits Orange Alert when I hear we need a big supersite so we can "put the user first." (For the record I'm in favor of putting the user first, along with a strong America, good jobs, and family values.)

James Paluzzi, General Managerof Boise State Radio, noted the need to 'think metadata.' "With multiple distribution platforms using both real- and non-real-time access quickly developing," writes Dennis, "public broadcasters will need to employ digital asset management techniques utilizing a common metadata standard."

The meaning of the word 'metadata' remains sketchy for most people in public broadcasting, including GMs, but at least it's on the table. We need to find a way to agree on that common standard, and develop tools powerful enough to be useful, and easy enough to be used. In the weeks ahead I hope we can turn this site into a place where we can make that happen.

Promos for Station Home Pages

2004-06-21T23:24:00.000-04:00

Scott Williams, our program director, asked that one of our part-time announcers write on-air promos for our web site announcing content that comes to us from NPR, PI, and our own news team.

In trying to get around the confusion of writing into the promo, "visit the Arts and Culture section of KJZZ.org where you can click on the link for Games and then find the Morning Edition Challenge" (What?!?) While there's probably more issues here, like how deep does your site architecture really need to go, I took home a concept from San Diego that I thought might help.

While we were at the beach, the folks at WNYC, showed me a thing called "touts" that they use for their home page. As I understand it, "touts" are an ordered series of listings for WNYC.org's home page "touting" things that are happening on the site as well as on the air. These touts are prioritized and expire based on a date range. Upon getting back from our conference, I put my mind to the idea that I would put something similar together for the KJZZ home page as well.

Although, since we have a three column format, where I'm constrained by a width of 240 pixels per column, and where the page is already way too long, my approach was bit different. To get around this issue, I thought I would try using an iframe along with some dynamic scripting to navigate through this set of announcements.

View this new addition to the site, tenatively called: "What we're talking about"

A similar treatment can be found at the bottom of this article in Slate magazine (although, I believe this uses the overflow:auto property of a div, as opposed to an iframe).

Does something like this look like it would be useful for what you're doing at your station site? What solutions are you currently using on your site?

Putting PBCore to the test

2004-06-17T20:16:00.000-04:00

OK so I just spent a little time with PBCore, seeing if the shoe fits so to speak. This is the metadata standard likely to be pushed by CPB and others who have spent a lot of time on it. At first glance, it might work.

But you be the judge. To facilitate, I created a nice little Access database called PBCoreTest. You can access this database in my Netfiles Opensourcebroadcasting folder. You should be able to click to download it.

If you do that, you'll find a bunch of tables, and one form. The form is for inputting your metadata into the master PBCore table. All the other tables are basically lookup tables for fields in the master table. You will quickly note that there's a bunch of crap in there you will never use, in the lookup tables, and even in the fields of the master PBCore table. The point of this exercise is you get to change 'em to suit your purpose. Delete what you don't need or will never use. Look and you'll see what I mean.

You could alter this table to fit your own content/metadata scenario, chop down the verbiage in the lookup tables, delete some of the fields entirely, and then save that into a form you can use to input your own stuff.

Best to not delete those fields PBCore says are manditory. But hey, I'm not the PBCore police.

But Jack, I hear someone shout, why are you so lame as to do this using Microsoft Access? Doesn't that violate our opensource principles? Actually yes it does, but this is just a quick little experiment and I happen to kind of know Access sorta well. If someone wants to build this using whatever, that'd be even better. Also, I didn't really do this the way it should be done for real, but the purpose is to get a feel for PBCore and how it fits with your content.

If you have any problems accessing the access, questions, or etc, just let me know.

UK's Digital Aquifer

2004-06-15T15:40:00.000-04:00

Here we have a cooperative project among several British agencies to develop a usable content-sharing framework for "Memory Institutions," e.g. universities, museums, the BBC, and other sources of public information. It's called the Common Information Environment, or perhaps the metaphorical name Digital Aquifer, and you can peruse the details here.

The CIE is not a new search engine or portal to all knowledge, says CIE director Paul Miller: "Rather, it is collaborative work towards a culture in which existing and future organizations presume the need to be joined up to be part of the digital aquifer of national interest information from the outset, and work for that, rather than continuing the trend of building multitudinous silos of data, each fronted by a different Web interface, and each ignorant of related data in neighboring silos." (Ariadne Apr 2004) ShelfLife, No. 159 (June 3 2004) http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/miller/

Seems like a good idea to me.

The journal this appears in is also worth exploring/bookmarking. Check out Ariadne, published quarterly by the Council for Museums, Archives, and Libraries in the UK...and maybe tell me how to pronounce it.

Metadata Online Resources

2004-06-02T18:09:00.000-04:00

I started to compile a list of online resources on metadata and other fun topics. This is a work in progress, and I'll probably update it by editing this post. Also, here's a link to a more complete Word document with more annotations and hyperlinks on additional worthy topics like examples of Digital Asset Management systems, conference archives, and a growing list of related stuff.

Here's a bit of what's in my evolving "resource document":

Open Source Public Broadcasting Online Resources

The case for shared metadata standards
FAQs for those of us who don't know what that means
In case you haven't followed recent developments in metadata (few have!) and didn't read Steven Vedro's article "Why metadata matters" in Current last September, you may feel as if you've missed a meeting on the subject. Consider this a make-up class. The article was commissioned by CPB.
Originally published in Current, May 13, 2002
By Mary Jane McKinven
http://www.current.org/tech/tech0209metadata.html

Why metadata matters: it greases digital wheels
Originally published in Current, Sept. 10, 2001
By Steven Vedro
http://www.current.org/dtv/dtv0116meta.html

PBCore: WELCOME TO THE PBCore Metadata Dictionary
The Public Broadcasting Metadata Dictionary Project is a cross-organizational, multi-disciplined effort to establish a standard for all public broadcasting content (radio and television), in order that metadata might be more easily exchanged between colleagues, software systems, institutions, community partners, individual citizens, etc. The Project will be a “touchstone,” a single, streamlined standard to which other database structures, including those of PBS, NPR, major producing stations, and other asset/content management systems will be “mapped.” It can also be used as a guide for the onset of an archival or asset management process at an individual station or institution.
http://www.utah.edu/cpbmetadata/PBCore/index.html

NewsML: The International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC)
The IPTC was established in 1965 by a group of news organisations including the Alliance Européenne des Agences de Presse, ANPA (now NAA), FIEJ (now WAN) and the North American News Agencies (a joint committee of Associated Press, Canadian Press and United Press International) to safeguard the telecommunications interests of the World's Press. Since the late 1970's IPTC's activities have primarily focussed on developing and publishing Industry Standards for the interchange of news data.

This site describes NewsML, “designed to provide a media-independent, structural framework for multi-media news.”
http://www.iptc.org/pages/index.php

Dublin Core
The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative is an open forum engaged in the development of interoperable online metadata standards that support a broad range of purposes and business models. DCMI's activities include consensus-driven working groups, global conferences and workshops, standards liaison, and educational efforts to promote widespread acceptance of metadata standards and practices.
http://dublincore.org/

Would this work?

2004-05-11T16:13:00.000-04:00

Any Blogger member (it's free to join) can create a new post here or leave a comment on an existing post. And there isn't much to administer beyond just keeping a blogroll on the side so we have a list of current members of the discussion - I'm happy to maintain that, if this seems like a forum that could keep things moving forward.

I'm still reeling with ideas and possibilities here, and I hate to see us lose momentum!

In other news, spring has finally arrived in northern Vermont. The last pile of snert has faded from the edge of the woods.

Stefanie

IMA discussion notes from Jack

2004-05-11T15:25:00.000-04:00

Hi Gang,

It's been a week since we adjourned, so before any more time flies by I better get you my notes from our discussion. Please regard this as a starting point. Hopefully I captured the essence, but if I missed or mis-stated something please point out my errors.

I hope we can keep the discussion going, and actually get something done. I'm pretty darn certain I won't give up. Here goes:

Suggested Agenda: (What we started with over dinner)
1) Initiate discussion of methods for nationwide content sharing
2) Metadata standards
3) Open Source principles
4) Interface design to get at content
5) Methods of ongoing collaboration

Open Content Management System: (The big project we began to outline)
A digital media collaboration system for sharing content throughout public broadcasting.

Purpose:
To facilitate sharing of produced content and content elements between local and national producers for online publishing.

Principles:
Open source design.
Creative Commons-like licensing. (see http://creativecommons.org)
Ground-up organizational model.

Means:
Sharing is based on a universal metadata standard for describing content.
Content can be stored anywhere, just like the Internet.
Interface design allows producer access to whole features, or feature elements.
Extension of interface to user public would allow for "power searches" of public broadcasting content.

OK, a little discussion. I deliberately left it sparse and simple, hopefully even clear. But one might wonder what the heck "ground-up organization model" means. It doesn't mean we turn ourselves into hamburger, but that we build the pieces of this system at the local level. If we can be consistent about how we describe our bits as we create them, they can then interact coherently on a larger scale. Then we don't need a big expensive (and proprietary) CMS or a national command structure.

We do need a common metadata language, and a shared understanding of how to use basic tools like a local CMS.

Another feature of our discussion is Bill and Dale's content management system at North Country Public Radio, and their work to share it as an open source solution. (Note to Bill: Please sign me up.)

And probably the most essential immediate thing is to set up a space for online collaboration. Email is great but we need something with less noise. I believe Bill agreed to establish some webboards on a server he's got. (Hey Bill, while you're doing all this work, can you redesign my site for free?)

I'll leave it there for now, except to say, was anyone else totally astonished that the conference wrap-up featured so many of the ideas we talked about? Almost spooky...

Cheers,
Jack Brighton
WILL AM-FM-TV