EVIADA: ethnomusicological video for instruction and analysis digital archive

The field of ethnomusicology depends heavily on ethnographic research or "fieldwork" by researchers that often involves the capture and subsequent analysis of audio and video information, to help document and understand the musical practices of people all over the world. Ethnomusicologists have used a variety of recording technologies over the years to capture film and video, and much of this footage lies in researchers' offices and home basements. No systematic mechanism exists for preserving and providing access to this video for other students and scholars.The Ethnomusicological Video for Instruction and Analysis Digital Archive (EVIADA) [1] is a multi-year collaborative project between Indiana University and the University of Michigan to create a digital archive for field video recordings captured by ethnomusicology researchers. This digital archive will serve both to preserve this content for future generations of scholars and also to provide a resource to support teaching and learning in ethnomusicology, anthropology, and related disciplines. The creation of EVIADA has involved a unique collaboration between ethnomusicologists, librarians, archivists, and technologists in carrying out all stages of the project, including video digitization, metadata creation, and system and user interface design.As part of the project, we are developing several software tools: The Segmentation/Annotation Tool is a Java Swing application written using Apple's QuickTime for Java API. It allows an ethnomusicologist who is contributing a video collection to the archive to divide that video into a hierarchy of segments, attach free-text descriptions and controlled vocabulary terms to each segment, and output this information in the form of a METS [3] XML document incorporating MODS [2] descriptive metadata records. This METS document can then be ingested into downstream archival and delivery systems. We hope to evolve this software into a more general-purpose tool for the creation of METS documents for video objects.We are also building a web-based user interface on top of the Fedora digital repository system to allow users to search and browse video content in the collection via the descriptive metadata and annotations, making appropriate use of controlled vocabulary thesauri to increase search recall.