University of Iowa

The Academic Technologies, a group within Information Technology Services at the University of Iowa, is deploying Virage publishing software for two significant streaming video projects. As part of these projects, thousands of hours of video footage will be encoded, indexed and delivered to students and faculty across campus, and to remote locations worldwide. Faculty and students will have instant access to these large video collections directly from a web browser.

The first project, a five-year effort funded by the National Science Foundation, will provide political science students with tools to analyze news coverage from major broadcasters, such as BBC and CNN. Using Virage, the news content will be automatically indexed via closed-caption text or speech recognition. The resulting metadata will be placed online where political science students can perform advanced searches on the data, anytime and anywhere.

The second project is an undertaking to provide online access to an oral history of Iowa's rich tradition in journalism. During earlier stages of the project University students interviewed an array of distinguished veteran journalists. The interview footage has accumulated over the years and includes more than 50 hours of interviews and transcripts. Academic Technologies staff will encode and index the video, integrating the transcripts as part of the Virage SmartEncode process, and publish the finished video interviews online. Users will be able to search for specific interviews by both topics and transcripts.

'Virage provided us with a solution that meets all of our requirements,' said Kaspar Stromme, senior computing consultant, Academic Technologies. 'Our goal is to deliver a significant volume of video content to the web in the most efficient manner possible. Virage software automates the entire process of encoding, indexing, archiving, and publishing of video content. We estimate that it cuts the time required to process our content in half. Given our success to date with Virage, we are exploring additional video projects related to African art, foreign languages and biology.'

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