Indexing and retrieving documentary films: managing metadata in the ECHO system

Wide access to large information collections is of great potential importance in many aspects - economic, environmental, health, cultural, social, etc. - of everyday life. Historical video documentaries hold by national audiovisual archives, constitute one of the most precious - from a historical and cultural viewpoint - and less accessible cultural information. This paper presents the approach adopted in the ECHO (European CHronicles On line) system, to provide an effective support for indexing and retrieval of historical documentary films A combination of automatic and manual indexing is adopted. The paper describes in detail the Metadata Editor that simplifies the task of manual indexing; metadata are represented in an XML form, thus enabling the extension of the model according to specific needs.