Building a National Strategy for Digital Preservation: Issues in Digital Media Archiving Digital Video Archives: Managing Through Metadata

As analog video collections are digitized and new video is cre-ated in digital form, computer users will have unprecedented access to video material—getting what they need, when they need it, wherever they happen to be. Such a vision assumes that video can be adequately stored and distributed with appropriate rights management, as well as indexed to facilitate effective information retrieval. The latter point is the focus of this paper: how can metadata be produced and associated with video archives to unlock their contents for end users? Video that is "born digital " will have increasing amounts of descriptive information automatically created during the production process, e.g., digital cameras that record the time and place of each captured shot, and tagging video streams with terms and conditions of use. Such metadata could be augmented with higher-order descriptors, e.g., details about actions, topics, or events. These descriptors could be produced automatically through ex-post-facto analysis of the aural and visua