PBCore sessions at the 2010 AMIA Conference
The 2010 AMIA Conference is next week. (How’d it get to be November already?!) For those PBCore denizens attending, please note two sessions that will be of particular interest, both on Thursday, November 4th:
8:30am - 10:00am
Moving to a Digital Asset Management Environment: A Case Study on Fresh Air
Chair: Dave Rice - AudioVisual Preservation Solutions
Speakers: Daniel Pisarski - TelVue Corporation, and Julian Herzfeld - WHYY
Since 1975 WHYY’s production, Fresh Air, has generated thousands of 1/4” analog reels, DAT tapes, CDs, and digital files as well as even more Microsoft Word and Excel documents reflecting a disconnected set of rights, inventory, descriptive, and technical information. This panel looks at all aspects of an initiative to assemble Fresh Air’s metadata collections under PBCore while bringing digital media and metadata into a production-oriented digital asset management system
11:00am - 12:00pm
Coming Attraction: PBCore 2.0
Chair: Courtney Michael - WGBH Media Library & Archives
Chris Beer - WGBH Interactive
Speakers: Courtney Michael - WGBH Educational Foundation
Jack Brighton - University of Illinois
Katrina Dixon - Northeast Historic Film
Kara Van Malssen - Broadway Video Digital Media
There are a number of metadata standards being used by the library and archival community. However few are adequate, and easy for describing media collections. PBCore is a metadata standard that was developed specifically to describe media. Many in the moving image archival community have begun to utilize the standard. After 2 years of a development hiatus, a new initiative has launched to continue development of the standard to bring it to PBCore 2.0. This session will give an overview of PBCore - why it is a good standard to use for media collections and the work to date to bring it to PBCore 2.0. It will demo and tour the new redesigned PBCore.org website highlighting changes, navigation, and the community input features. And finally there will be several use cases showing practical use of PBCore in real archive projects. The end will be a roundtable discussion to get more feedback from the AMIA/IASA community and take questions.
Metadata as media
(As always, I speak only for myself as a media producer and archivist.)
I attended the panel discussion on PBCore at the recent Open Video Conference, and was struck by something that should have been obvious. Those of us pushing development of PBCore have failed to clarify one basic thing: What is PBCore for? I’ve been to workshops and sessions on PBCore over the past six years and have been on metadata panels at the AMIA Conference, the PBS Tech Conference, NETA, and iMA. We often focused on explaining the PBCore elements and why they are useful for cataloging media assets. But at the OVC, the question was raised “Why do we need PBCore to catalog our stuff if we already have a good media database?” The question reveals a conflation of two distinct things: having a media database, and being able to easily interoperate with other databases.
PBCore 2.0 session at the Open Video Conference, October 1, NYC
For those attending the Open Video Conference this weekend in New York, don’t miss the panel on PBCore 2.0. A stellar lineup will talk about the process of developing 2.0, and hopefully share some details about where it’s going.
Here are the panel specifics, copied from the OVC schedule:
Summary: An Introduction to PBCore 2.0: Metadata for Public Broadcasters - (4:30 PM - 5:30 PM)
Description: PBCore has served the Public Media community as a metadata schema for describing media since 2005. With a new round of funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, WGBH Boston is working on PBCore 2.0 – an updated version which will increase its flexibility as a schema and therefore its applicability to diverse user scenarios. In addition, a new web site with updated documentation is set to launch next month (November, 2010). Come learn about PBCore: how it is evolving, how it is applied, and how it can benefit your workflow and interoperability as a video content producer or consumer.
Presenters:
Chair: Nan Rubin — PBCore Project
Linda Tadic — Audiovisual Archive Network
David Rice — Audiovisual Preservation Solutions
Chris Beer — WGBH Interactive
Making PBCore End User Friendly
Two screencast were recently added to Blip.tv that show how the Open Media Project’s Drupal modules make PBCore easier for end users. Craig Sinclair from Amherst Community Media created a screencast that shows how to configure the PBCore module for Drupal to display customized elements in a hierarchy to users. I added another screencast that shows how to add PBCore to any content type with CCK and how to use some simple javascript to limit the number of options show to users.
Sites using the current beta of the module can now export a node as XML as well as dump of their site specific configurations making it easier to compare how organizations are implementing PBCore in practice.
The PBCore module for Drupal is still rough around the edges, but the structure is now there for anyone with even basic PHP skills to contribute.
Deadline for PBCore 2.0 change requests looms
July 25th if the official deadline for input on the next major revision of PBCore. A release of PBCore 2.0 in November, 2010 is expected to represent a major leap forward, based on lots of change requests and research among the user community, plus where projects like the American Archive need to go. This is our chance to make sure it’s going in the most useful direction, and solving the right problems.
You can see the full list of submitted change requests, and add your own, here:
By July 25th please!