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NIH on demand
Personal Digital Library offers easy access to video assets
May 9, 2008
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by James Careless
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At the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD, Dr. Donald Lindberg is director of the National Library of Medicine, the world's largest biomedical library, which provides information and research services in all areas of biomedicine and health care throughout the world to both researchers and consumers. Not surprisingly, he spends a good deal of his time providing informational presentations and reports.
In doing so, Lindberg likes to incorporate pertinent graphic and video subjects. In his own office, he kept a collection of more than 100 videotapes, many one-of-a-kind historical pieces reflective of the people and developments in science over the past 50 years.
Sorting through the collection to find the exact desired clip was taxing to say the least. In addition, many of the videos were beginning to deteriorate. But no longer -- thanks to some innovative work by the NLM's Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, Lindberg now has all of his videos stored on a pocket-sized portable hard drive, with contents that can be searched by title, metadata, or any word contained in the audio track of any video in the collection. It's called the Personal Digital Library, and although Lindberg runs his on a Mac, it can just as easily be used on a PC.
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| With its familiar GUI, the Personal Digital Library was developed so the directory of the National Library of Medicine could easily integrate video and other graphic assets into his presentations. |
Inside Job
Initially, the PDL appears much like a conventional iTunes application. Once the hard drive containing the videos and their associated transcripts is connected to his laptop, Lindberg can immediately view a list of the entire library in alphabetical order in a multi-windowed template. He can simply select a video, play it or search within the video using a search word, or move a slider bar to visually select a point. From there he can mark in and out points and export a QuickTime clip to his desktop, where he can incorporate it into his slide presentation.
Actually, that's just the tip of the iceberg. The PDL can also be searched by metadata or any word within any transcript across the entire video library. Enter the term "bird flu," for example, and the PDL will retrieve all relevant clips within its entire archive, with information about the content also being displayed on the computer's screen.
The result: Not only is Lindberg's entire video archive always available, but he can quickly find and incorporate the specific clips he wants for his next presentation. Because the director's schedule is tight, being able to prepare his own presentation anywhere is a tremendous advantage.
In a perfect world, the NLM would have been able to buy an off-the-shelf PDL application. But staff at the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications (LHNCBC), the research and development arm of the NLM, decided to devise its own solution in a way that was realistic and affordable to deploy.
The process began with the videos themselves, which were of varying quality. "Since a number of the tapes had originally been produced by government organizations and universities, we were able to go back to the masters and make clean copies, which were then digitized and encoded into the QuickTime format using the H.264 codec," explained Mike Detweiler, an LHNCBC audiovisual production specialist who worked on the PDL. "In those cases where all we had to work with were old VHS tapes, some of which were in poor condition, we used digital restoration to upgrade them as much as possible and then converted them to QuickTime files."
Human Touch
All of the QuickTime files are time-stamped to correlate with the QuickTime files' time code, so that specific frames could be identified and found using the PDL's search engine. The next step -- and the most important part of the process -- was to create the database for this search engine.
Again, in a perfect world, a voice recognition program would take the generated text from the audio tracks of the video assets and use it as the basis for creating searchable metadata. Unfortunately, today's voice recognition programs are not up to the task, especially because much of the PDL's archived material uses biomedical terminology not included in the comparative databases of these programs.
"We would have liked to use an off-the-shelf product to capture text using speech recognition, but it just doesn't exist in our field, and we didn't want to wait another decade for it to become reality," said Eleanor Pomeroy, a LHNCBC education specialist. "We decided that the most efficient, accurate solution was to hire a medical transcriptionist. Only a human with the necessary medical knowledge and transcription skills has the know-how to correctly record the audio as text."
As well as transcribing the text using the QuickTime files, the transcriptionist was responsible for marking the files with the appropriate time stamp, so that the text would properly correlate with specific frames.
"With the necessary metadata and time code links created," Pomeroy said, "the next step was to build the user interface. Frankly, the engine that operates the PDL is far more powerful and sophisticated than what the iTune GUI allows access to. But our director is an extremely busy person, so we wanted to shorten the learning curve for him. This is where emulating an interface that he was already familiar with made sense -- it allowed him to use the PDL almost instantly, without any formal training."
Since devising the original PDL, the LHNCBC has expanded its capabilities. "We were given a new collection of medical videos from another source," said Pomeroy. "So we followed the same procedure but built a 'merge' function that allowed us to add the videos to the director's first collection without overwriting any metadata the director might have personally added." The original program had allowed for a user to add videos one at a time and to make comments or add metadata that would also become searchable by the user.
The LHNCBC is now adapting the PDL system for use in other NLM areas, and are currently considering deploying the system in their visitors center. "With the PDL, visitors can just as easily access the historical videos we have from a server, just as Lindberg does on his laptop," said Detweiler. "The PDL concept has proven to work so well, that it only makes sense to adapt it to broader users. And it only makes sense that this same model could be used by other government agencies to create searchable directories for their own video collections."
Beyond Health
The NIH's Personal Digital Library can be generalized to any kind of digital video collection, and be deployed on whatever scale is deemed necessary. For example, USAF aircraft mechanics can be given access to training videos no matter what their location. Press secretaries can log speeches, so that past promises and statements could be quickly reviewed. And educators can keep instructional videos with them at all times for use in any classroom.
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