Anticipating a future with widespread access to large digital libraries of video, a great deal of research is currently focused on many areas related to digital video. Research in these areas requires that each investigator acquire and digitize video for their studies since the multimedia information retrieval community does not yet have a standard collection of video to be used for research purposes.

The purpose of the Open Video Project is to collect and make available a repository of digitized video content for the digital video, multimedia retrieval, digital library, and other research communities. Researchers can use the video to study a wide range of problems, such as tests of algorithms for automatic segmentation, summarization, and creation of surrogates that describe video content; the development of face recognition algorithms; or creating and evaluating interfaces that display result sets from multimedia queries. Because researchers attempting to solve similar problems will have access to the same video content, the repository is also intended to be used as a test collection that will enable systems to be compared, similar to the way the TREC conferences are used for text retrieval.

This repository is hosted as one of the first channels of the Internet 2 Distributed Storage Infrastructure Initiative, a project that supports distributed repository hosting for research and education in the Internet 2 community.

The Open Video Project is sponsored by and developed at the Interaction Design Laboratory at the School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. The project is supervised by Dr. Gary Marchionini and Dr. Barbara M. Wildemuth and currently developed primarily by Dr. Gary Geisler and Yaxiao Song. People who used to be actively involved in the developing team include Rich Gruss, Meng Yang, Xiangming Mu, Anthony Hughes, Thomas Tolleson, and Curtis Webster. The initial framework for the repository was developed by Laura Slaughter as part of the Baltimore Learning Community Project at the University of Maryland and she collected and digitized much of the first stage of video content. Please contact us if you have suggestions, questions, video to contribute, or would like more information about the project.

The Open Video Project began in 1998 with the development of a basic framework and the digitization of the initial content, about 195 video segments. Additional video was also contributed by the CMU Informedia Project, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the Prelinger Archives. This first stage of this project also included entering metadata for each segment into a database, and creating this Web site to enable researchers to access the available video.

In the next stage of the project, we continue to add video segments to the repository, expanding both the available formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and QuickTime) and genre characterics (student television, anthropological footage, technology demonstrations) of the video. As part of our work at UNC's Interaction Design Lab, we are also doing research on creating innovative interfaces to the video repository that enable users to more easily search, browse, preview, and evaluate the video in the collection.

We welcome your ideas about these issues and invite active collaboration on these and other issues the community identifies.

The Open Video repository provides video clips from a variety of sources, especially various video programs obtained from U.S. government agencies such as the U.S. Records and Archives Administration and NASA. Although the government agency videos were produced with public funds and are freely available from the Archives, no copyright clearance has been obtained for audio or video elements in these productions. We encourage researchers to use the data under fair use for research purposes. Those wishing to use these video clips in any commercial enterprise must bear the burden of obtaining copyright clearances.