Audio/video digital libraries: designing, searching for documents, and generating Metadata

The aim is to provide a theoretical and experimental background on the techniques and the methodologies for the organization, creation, and management of an Audio/Video Digital Library (A/V DL). The frontier of DLs consists in the possibility of managing multimedia documents other than pure textual information. In particular, due to the large amount of A/V material that is available in a digital form and due to its economic, environmental, health, cultural, and social significance, the management of A/V digital libraries is becoming of crucial importance. The course will illustrate the techniques and the methodologies to design, build and maintain an A/V DL, along with fundamentals on techniques for generating and searching metadata. Extensive examples will be offered of existing systems and approaches. As a running example we will refer to the ECHO system, which provides a DL service for historical films. It indexes and retrieves the A/V material by using speech transcripts, and enables video features to be automatically extracted from the video and metadata manually associated by the user. Metadata are described by using an A/V metadata model based on the IFLA-FRBR standard.