FEATURE Video publishing
from the website, while viewing statistics of videos associated with that page are recorded at the video server level through the player. ‘A good TV website will bring all these things together offering a variety of useful stats to administrators,’ he said.
Graph 1 by McGraw Hill indicating number of videos over time
needs to feel that they are watching the video from the site they are on while the video is streamed, smoothly and stutter free, from a third party,’ he observed.
Transcription, metadata and discovery With any electronic resources for researchers, discovery is a paramount consideration for usefulness to researchers. The first step towards this is transcription. Semantico’s Wratten noted: ‘Video content also offers the exciting prospect of being able to search across the transcript, greatly improving their discoverability.’
Martha Sedgwick, executive director of
product innovation at SAGE, said: ‘Every video that we produce will have a corresponding transcript, which will include a large amount of metadata associated with that video, enhancing its searchability. The videos will also be supported by abstracts on our online platforms.’ All of this helps optimise searching for the videos, both on open free web and within the platform using a full text search within the transcript.
Gardner described a similar approach at Alexander Street Press: ‘We transcribe every word spoken, regardless of idiom, dialect or slang. We do this manually, using people rather than machines. This is a huge task but it is vital for the searchability of content.’
After videos have been transcribed, metadata can be added, which enables indexing and searching.
However, Gardner noted that
‘accurate, sophisticated (semantic) indexing is very difficult and costly’.
He added that, when searching for videos on the internet, there is no integration with other materials (inbound/outbound linking) or systems (discovery layers, LMS/VLE, MARC records) and searchers are unlikely to find high- quality material. He said: ‘You can’t search precisely, you can’t be sure the content you find is legal or that it
Graph 2 by McGraw Hill showing the number of AccessEngineering video views in each year
will be there tomorrow, and you can’t search within the content item.’
Gardner said Alexander Street Press pre-
selects the best content in specific disciplines, clears copyright, integrates with the searchers’ systems and ensures there’s a permanent link to the content.
Sedgwick said that SAGE will be using text-mining tools and semantic enrichment to create relationships between content. She explains: ‘The end goal is that our videos will sit alongside the book and reference material, and will be linked to and from our book and journal content so that all of our resources will
‘The end goal is that our videos will sit alongside
the book and reference material, and will be linked to and from our
book and journal content’ Martha Sedgwick, executive director of product innovation at SAGE
be connected and inter-searchable.’ ‘The searching facility on any video site is only as good as the metadata and enriched data attached to each entity,’ noted Reynard. He said that from the very outset of creating
IET.tv, IET has added large amounts of essential metadata for every video produced: ‘This leaves us in a fantastic position of being able to give very specific search results to keywords while also recommending other interesting media and documents that relate to the results.’ Reynard also noted that publishers of video content need to consider how they will gather usage data. He explained that any usage data and statistics such as page views are recorded
24 Research Information DECEMBER 2014/JANUARY 2015
He added that metadata stored in databases needs to be intrinsically attached to a video record while utilised by the website, which can create difficulties in how video platforms are created.
Wider experiences
The increased use of video is not, of course, a solely scholarly activity. Like many trends, it mirrors activities in the wider internet. Mainstream newspaper and television sites are often great examples of embedding video within their text content to enrich the material and provide a different way of engaging with news.
are showing increasing usage of video in the classroom, with reports such as 92 per cent of faculty saying they use video in teaching,’ observed Shoman of SAGE. ‘We are engaging with a new generation of students who have grown up in the digital world. Many students go to YouTube first rather than Google – we have to adapt to the environment and the preferences of the students within this. Being successful is about adapting to changing student engagement and learning.’ However, Shoman also noted: ‘Content stays at the centre. Part of this is ensuring that this high-quality content is valuing the author and what the author has to say, while ensuring it meets market and reader needs.’
‘Studies
The use of video in academic publications is still in its infancy, but there are some exciting initiatives on the horizon. Statistics from McGraw-Hill (graphs 1 and 2) regarding video usage on its Access Engineering Library platform show a growing trend through a year- on-year increase in monthly video views. IOP’s Wright noted: ‘We are also seeing an emerging trend that papers with videos may have a citation advantage. We are tracking this with interest,’ although he added that it is still early days.
While there are still challenges facing the incorporation of video into publications, they are by no means insurmountable and video looks set to be an important component of academic publications. As Daniel Smith, head of academic publishing at IET, predicted, ‘Overall, video is an integral part of the future.’
Nicola Davies is a UK-based freelance journalist and former academic researcher
@researchinfo
www.researchinformation.info
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