IU Tapping Tech For Audiovisual Archive Project

(Image of Jon Dunn courtesy of Indiana University.)

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a $1.2 million grant to Indiana University Libraries to develop a system to search for digitized audiovisual files. The funding will support a multi-institutional effort led by IU Libraries to create and test an Audiovisual Metadata Platform, which will generate searchable, time-stamped descriptions for digital content. The effort will use human labor and tap into automated technology to help make hundreds of thousands of digitized resources more accessible.

IU Libraries will partner with the University of Texas at Austin, New York Public Library and information management consultant AVP on the project. Jon Dunn, who is the project’s principal investigator and assistant dean for library technologies at IU says less than one-half a percent of library, museum and archival collections available online are video or sound. "Discovery opportunities for recorded audio or moving images are extremely limited today," he said. "Our work will generate descriptions, or what is known as metadata, through a combination of expert human labor and new uses of automated processing technology."

The technology used in the project will include natural language processing, speech-to-text conversion, facial recognition, scene and music detection and object recognition. The grant covers 27 months. You can connect to more about the effort by clicking here.