Jon W. Dunn
Assistant Dean for Library Technologies
Indiana University
Chris Lacinak
President
AVP
In recent years, concern over the longevity of physical audio and video (AV) formats due to media degradation and obsolescence, combined with decreasing cost of digital storage, have led libraries and archives to embark on projects to digitize recordings for purposes of long-term preservation and improved access. Beyond digitization, in order to facilitate discovery and research use, AV materials must also be described, but many items and collections lack sufficient metadata. In 2015, with the support of consulting firm AVP, the Indiana University Libraries conducted a planning project to research, analyze, and report on technologies, workflows, staffing, timeline and budgets to address the challenge of quickly and efficiently creating large quantities of metadata for mass-digitized AV collections. One of the outcomes of this planning project was identification of a need for a technology platform to support the incremental application of both automated and human-based processes to create and augment metadata. With support from a Mellon Foundation planning grant, Indiana University has partnered with experts from the University of Texas at Austin School of Information and AVP to explore the design of a software platform to support the incremental application of automated and human-based processes to create and augment metadata at large scales for AV collections. In this session, we will describe the proposed technical architecture for this system, dubbed the Audiovisual Metadata Platform (or AMP), discuss the use cases and technical considerations that informed its design, and discuss next steps toward implementation and pilot testing.