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By Concha Fernández de la Puente - May 2001
This section aims to provide news of the European Commission's initiatives in the field of digital heritage and cultural content. Its objectives are to summarise the developments in programmes, projects and activities since the last Cultivate Interactive issue and to give a clear picture of progress in the area. It certainly does not pretend to be a comprehensive account of what the EC is doing in the area but rather a short summary of some of the key items. The content is based largely on the information provided in the e-Culture Newsletter, published by the European Commission, DG Information Society, Cultural Heritage Applications Unit, that can be found on the Web [1].
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These last months since the last issue of Cultivate Interactive and, therefore, since the last DIGICULT column, we have been very active and many initiatives have been launched.
In June 2000, an action plan for eEurope was agreed by the European Council at the Feira Sumit. In order to follow up on some of the agenda issues, a panel of national experts from most Member States were invited by the European Commission to a meeting in Luxembourg on 15-16 November 2000. The main objective was to develop strategies to improve the co-ordination mechanisms for Member States' digitisation programmes, in particular in the field of cultural heritage. The participants, agreeing that improved co-ordination was needed, came up with the idea of creating an inventory of the existing initiatives. As a first step, a questionnaire on digital policies was established
In January 2001, Sweden took up the Union’s Presidency for six months. They supported our initiative in the field of digitisation by holding our follow-up meeting in conjunction with a meeting under the Swedish Presidency in April in Lund. The meeting in Lund was extremely successful, achieving major objectives. The initial results of the responses to the questionnaire were presented and discussed. The Member States' representatives proposed tools to keep the data updated over the longer term. Benchmarking was identified as a sound mechanism to exchange good practice across Member States and to improve national practices in the field of digitisation policy. The countries who will next be holding the Presidency (Belgium and Spain) have already expressed their wish to continue supporting this important initiative.
Meanwhile we have continued with the day- to- day running of our cultural heritage programme. As a result of the opening of Action Line III.1.5 Trials on new access modes to cultural and scientific content of the 2000 Work Programme, a total of 53 proposals were received last December and 254 of them have been selected for funding. On the 6th February 2001, a meeting was held in Luxembourg with all the successful projects to brief them on the next steps in the contract negotiation. The meeting also gave the participants the opportunity to exchange experiences and discuss co-operation options for the future. We expect these projects to start this summer.
As mentioned in the last DIGICULT column, the IST work programme 2001 contains two action lines for the digital heritage sector: ALIII.1.2. Heritage for All and ALIII.1.3 Next Generation of Digital Collections. Both action lines were published on a call opened in January and closing in April [2]. The projects selected from this call are expected to start at the beginning of 2001. This will probably be our last major call under the 5th Framework Programme.
In the framework of this call, and especially of the action line on digital libraries, the Cultural Heritage unit has signed a co-operation agreement [3] with the Digital Libraries programme of the National Science Foundation (NSF) USA for collaborative work in the on RTD projects.
Other interesting action lines open in this call were ALIII.5.1 xcontent futures, that aims to provide opportunities for high payoff breakthrough research within the scope of the Key Action, yet with a focus on issues not covered at present by its Action Lines. And, ALIII.5.2 Competence building, that aims to support the acquisition of multimedia skills and to enhance the access to competence in multimedia: provide access to advanced emerging technologies and services, knowledge and competence relevant to multimedia systems and services, via world class competence centres already existing or emerging in Europe. These access measures could be very useful for cultural actors to reinforce their portfolio of expertise.
The EU funded DELOS network of excellence organised an EU-DL All Projects concertation meeting on 7 and 8 February 2001 in Luxembourg in cooperation with the Cultural Heritage Applications unit. Planned as part of a series of meetings to bring together representatives of relevant initiatives in the field of digital libraries, the objectives were to exchange information about the projects, to identify areas of synergy, to jointly promote standarisation and dissemination activities and to provide the IST Programme with a global view of the evolution of Digital Libraries technologies.
We have launched a study on Technological Landscapes for Tomorrow’s Cultural Economy (DigiCULT) [4]. This is a strategic study on the state of the art of use, development and research of information and communication technologies in the cultural (and associated) sectors in Europe. The objective of the study is to provide a clear set of action recommendations for cultural institutions Europe-wide. In order to achieve this goal, DigiCULT will provide an in-depth analysis of the state-of-the art of technologies, content, cultural services and applications as well as (user) demands and policies in the European cultural sector. Starting on 1 January 2001, the study will be coordinated by Salzburg Research over a period of 12 months, and will involve a consortium of nine highly acknowledged European cultural organisations.
The eCulture newsletter is now in its 8th issue. This has proved to be a very efficient communication tool for us, triggering many encouraging comments. The newsletter Web page [5] is among one of the most visited in CORDIS!
Also within the communication area, during the first quarter trimestre of 2001, we have restructured the digicult Web site [6]. It now offers new features such as a clustered approached to our projects and a more dynamic home page. Have a look and send us your comments.
The Commission is already working on the preparation of the next Framework Programme for RTD (FP6). In order to get wide input from the IST community, a web-based consultation system has been set up [7]. You are invited to reflect on future priorities and express your opinion using this tool.
The other interesting EC activity in the field of electronic record management is the DLM-Forum. Its goal is to investigate possibilities for wider co-operation in the field of electronic archives both between the EU Member States and at Community level. Thus the 1st and 2nd DLM-Forums (Brussels, December 1996 and October 1999), organised by the European Commission and the EU Member States, hosted some 800 experts and decision-makers from public administration, archives, ICT-industry and research. The DLM-Monitoring Committee and its special working party plan to organise the 3rd DLM-Forum 2002 during the forthcoming Spanish EU Presidency (1st half of 2002). This will provide an interdisciplinary European platform to present best practices and concrete solutions and to promote, with the support of DG Information Society, the European Network on Electronic Archives.
The EU eContent [8] programme was finally adopted by the Council on 22 december 2000 for the period covering the years 2001 to 2004 and with a total budget of 100 Meuro. The programme covers three main strands of action: improving access to and expanding use of public sector information, enhancing content production in a multilingual and multicultural environment, and increasing the dynamism of the digital content market. As a result of the call for proposals [9] for preparatory actions published on 20 April 2000, 28 projects have been chosen to stimulate the development and use of European Digital Content on the global networks and to promote the linguistic diversity in the Information Society. Some of the selected projects relevant to the cultural heritage area are: MNM (Minority Newspapers to New Media) and MUDICU (Multilingual Digital Culture Web Project). A complete list of selected projects is also available [10].
As we have already informed you, Culture 2000 [11] is a European Union financial support programme established to support cultural co-operation projects in all artistic and cultural sectors. In 2000, this Community programme provided aid for 219 projects amounting to over EUR 32 million [12]. The programme published a new call for proposals in January 2001, closing at the beginning of May. This year the focus is on projects which are aimed at young people, people with disabilities and disadvantaged sections of society and which promote their social integration and projects which combine artistic, cultural and scientific quality and are accessible to the general public. In order to extend the impact of the programme, the Commission presented on 12 March 2001 a proposal for a Council Decision on the participation of Central and Easter European Countries in the programme. This requires a decision by association boards, which the Commission hopes will be taken soon enough for CEECs to participate in cultural projects backed by the European Union in 2001. The same conditions and procedures will apply to CEECs as to Member States.
On 14 February 2001,14th the European Parliament approved the Common Position on the EU Copyright Directive [13]. Libraries were successful in lobbying their interests during the preparation of this directive and managed to have the most harmful amendments for the libraries rejected. The next stage after adoption by the Council of Ministers (which should go through) will be the process of the Directive's enactment in the different Member States.
As in previous issues, we have reviewed the main developments of the work done by the Commission in the cultural heritage sector over the past months. In the next issue we will be able to tell you more about the Sixth Framework Programme developments and some of the initial results of the projects funded under our current programme. Keep in touch with this column.
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Concha
Fernández de la Puente
European Commission
DG Information Society
Cultural Heritage Applications
concha.fpuente@cec.eu.int
<http://www.cordis.lu/ist/ka3/digicult/>
The information provided does not necessarily reflect the official position of the European Commission.
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For citation purposes:
Fernández de la Puente, C. "DIGICULT Column", Cultivate Interactive, issue
4, 7th May 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue4/digicult/>
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By Pascale Van Dinter - May 2001
How is the CULTIVATE project dealt with in Belgium? Which project tasks have been carried out to date? What kind of information is available via the national Web site? And what kind of information is sent via the national e-list? Pascale Van Dinter, the Belgian National Node, attempts to answer these questions and more.
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This
article is divided into three sections:
In Belgium public competences in the sector of libraries, are widely spread among federated entities of the country, the Cultural Communities; with the exception of the Royal Library (and the libraries of the federal scientific and cultural institutions) [1] which is placed under the responsibility of the Federal Office for Scientific, Technical and Cultural Affairs (OSTC) [2]. The other scientific and public libraries lie with the ministeries of the Flemish, French and German-speaking Communities or even with the provincial and local authorities.
The policies regarding public libraries have been defined since 1978 by Community decrees and implemented by a special administration for public libraries located within the ministeries of culture for the Communities. Higher Councils for public libraries (advisory bodies) have also been installed in the Flemish and French Communities.
University libraries are placed under the authority of the leading bodies for each university. There is no central administration responsible at Community level for these libraries.
Cooperation between libraries has been steadily increasing during the last years.
Public competences in the sector of museums are also largely exerted by the Communities. Museums are organised and managed by various authorities: municipalities, provinces, the Communities themselves (a limited number of institutions), the federal State (mainly the major federal museums located in the Brussels region), learned societies and private organisations. The principal federal museums are scientific establishments with a large autonomy, placed under the administrative control of the OSTC.
A central administration is installed in the ministry of culture for each Community (Flemish Community: Unit Visual Arts and Museums; French Community: Unit Patrimony, Visual Arts, Craft and Folklore). The Communities have established a regulatory framework with regard to the public funding of museums. Higher Councils for museums (advisory bodies) have also been installed in the Flemish and French Communities.
Although museums do in general enjoy a large amount of autonomy, cooperation is now increasing. New collaborations are being developed with regard to training, learning, publishing, research projects (in particular for telematics developments) and the digitisation of collections.
The public archives are governed by the law of 24 June 1955 which organises the General State Archives and the State Archives in the Provinces (16 deposits). Together these institutions form a federal scientific establishment placed under the administrative authority of the OSTC. The 1955 law prescribes the conditions under which all public archives must be transferred in this establishment. It will soon be replaced by a law that will take into account, among others things, the new federal structure of the country.
The Communities have established a regulatory framework with regard to the approval and public funding of private archives. The General State Archives (AGR) are de facto a national focal point as regards archival activities.
There are no permanent structures for cooperation between ALMs nor are there coordinated programmes. Some collaborations and synergies may possibly occur between various institutions who have the same organising/funding body or work within the framework of thematical programmes (e.g. the federal programme of scientific support to the development of the information society).
One of the main aims of CULTIVATE is to enforce national cooperation between ALMs within the framework of European programmes and the project is as such a useful initiative for the memory institutions in Belgium.
More detailled information on the situation of ALMs in Belgium can be found on the Cultivate Web site [3].
The STIS [4] is a separate government agency within the Federal Office for Scientific, Technical and Cultural Affairs (OSTC). The mission of the STIS is to retrieve and disseminate scientific, medical and technical information and documentation; to promote the use of electronic information sources, especially from international providers of scientific and technical information and to disseminate information about European research and innovation programmes.
Government agencies, universities, research centers and businesses, as well as the non-profit sector, can call upon the STIS whose main priorities include scientific research, innovation and science policy.
The National Focal Point (NFP) for European Libraries was created by the Belgian authorities in October 1990 in order to ensure exchange and disseminate information as well as follow-up the Telematics for Libraries Programme of the European Union. The OSTC were responsible for the secretariat and presidency of the NFP. From 1990 to 1998 the NFP represented Belgium in the European network of national focal points created for the Telematics for Libraries activities of the 3rd and 4th framework programmes for RTD of the European Union.
The Commission 'International Cooperation' of the Interministerial Science Policy Conference decided in January 1999 to enlarge the NFP to include representation of the archives and museums communities in order to be able to reflect in an appropriate manner the new place for these memory institutions in the 5th framework programme. The NFP became the National Focal Point for European Archives, Libraries and Museums (NFP/ALM) and the STIS was asked to act as chairperson and to run the secretariat.
In 1999, when some members of the "old" European network of National Focal Points decided to submit the CULTIVATE proposal under the IST-programme, the STIS became the Belgian partner in the new network.
STIS is planning to try to continue its information and assistance activities beyond 2002 after CULTIVATE has ended, within the new context of the European Research Area.
On February 5 2001, CULTIVATE Belgium organised an information day on European Archives, Libraries and Museums in the Royal Library Albert I in Brussels. This event attracted 100 participants from the ALM world. In the morning session presentations of EU programmes like IST-Digicult, Culture 2000 and eContent were given by representatives of the EU. The afternoon session was focused more directly on the 6th IST Call for proposals and on a presentation of the new Belgian CULTIVATE Web site. Belgian ALMs who have already work on European projects presented their experience in relevant areas. The Austrian partner of CULTIVATE also gave a presentation.
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The Belgian CULTIVATE Web site [5] is multilingual: French, Dutch and English. It contains 5 main items:
Under CULTIVATE one can find detailed information about the CULTIVATE network and the services provided at European level.
National Focal Point presents the National Focal point: a short history, the organisations that are represented in this national coordinating body, its tasks and its members. The subitem "Belgium, a Federal State" is especially designed for foreign visitors to explain how the Federal State is organised.
EU-programmes contains the following subitems: general information about EU-programmes and fundings, electronic tools for partner search and specific information on the different EU-programmes which are of interest for the ALMs.
Via the item National Activities one can find explanation of the national programmes, activities and research projects for ALMs implemented at federal and communities level. This section will be developed with the aim at giving a broad picture of the research and innovation activities of the Belgian ALMs and it should help establishing new collaborations with foreign partners.
Archives/Libraries/Museums gives a list of URL's of professional associations, advisory bodies, institutions and projects.The subitem "Report" presents a state of the art of ALMs in Belgium and is especially interesting for foreign users who want to know more about the status and the institutional framework of the memory institutions in Belgium.
Since March 2001 one can subscribe to the BE.CULTIVATE-list, an electronic list for those who want to know more about:
Subscription to this list is possible from the Belgian CULTIVATE Web site [6]. The information distributed via this list is provided both in Dutch and in French. At the beginning April 2001 more than 100 people had already subscribed to the list
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Pascale Van Dinter
Scientific Worker STIS and Project manager CULTIVATE
Belgium.
Keizerslaan 4 Bd de l'Empereur
1000 Brussels
Pascale.vanDinter@stis.fgov.be
Phone: +32 (0)2 519 56 42
Fax: +32 (0)2 519 56 45
Pascale Van Dinter worked between April 1995 and June 2000 for the Central Public Library Leuven (Belgium) on the following European projects:
Since July 2000 Pascale has worked at the Scientific and Technical Information Service as a project manager for CULTIVATE Belgium amongst other tasks.
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For citation purposes:
V. Dinter, P. "National Node Column: Belgium", Cultivate Interactive, issue
4, 7 May 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue4/nodes/>
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By Rachel Heery - May 2001
The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) develops and promotes interoperability standards that aim to facilitate the efficient dissemination of content. In February Rachel Heery attended their Open meeting held in the Berlin State Library (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin). The meeting marked the start of a validation period for the specification.
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Open Archive Initiative (OAI) designers and early adopters launched the recently released OAI Metadata Harvesting Specification to a packed meeting in the Staadsbiblothek , Berlin, in February. Following on from a parallel event in Washington, DC in January, this meeting marked the start of a ‘validation period’ for the specification. Over the next year experimental implementations of the specification will inform the OAI and the wider community as to the possibilities offered by the OAI model for metadata exchange. This brief article will only give a short summary of the many presentations from the interesting and varied programme. Readers are referred to the OAI Web site [1] where there are copies of presentation slides. In this short report I will merely highlight some of the themes that emerged and note some issues of particular interest.
After a warm welcome from Diann Rusch-Feja, Max Planck Institute, who is one of the European members of the OAI steering committee, the programme got underway. Presentations for the day included views from a number of stakeholders representing the OAI executive, implementers both information services and software development backgrounds, existing e-print archives, and vendors of library management systems.
Carl Lagoze, executive director of the OAI, led off with an overview of its history and an account of progress to date. The origins of the Open Archives Initiative were in the e-print community. The impetus for the initiative was a desire for effective interworking between e-print archives. In the early days the e-print community’s efforts were concentrated on enhancing interoperability between e-print archives, culminating in the Santa Fe convention in 1999 [2]. The work of the initiative continues to be relevant to this community, however as time went on it became clear that the fundamental enabling technology for simple metadata exchange is relevant in a much wider context.
Carl explained that its harvesting protocol positions the OAI independently from any specific content or economic model. OAI’s future ambitions promise to have much broader relevance in opening up access to a wide range of digital materials. The ambition is to enable 'interoperability that will work', and at a low cost so that the entry level for providing interworking services is lowered.
Paul Ginsparg, director of arXiv.org the well known e-print archive at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) gave a perspective from the longest established open archive. Serving the physics community this pre-print archive is central to scholarly information exchange, and has been successfully built on the model of author self-archiving. This analysis of both author and end-user interactions with the archive gave a fascinating insight into the patterns of user behaviour that can be gleaned from statistics. The LANL archive does not provide open access to robots at present and has no plans to change this policy. Paul explained this was primarily to exclude adverse impact on performance, but also indicated that such 'diffusion' of the target audience might not be beneficial. If this policy were to change it would be interesting to compare the way users of search engines, for example Google, interacted with the site compared to the behaviour of users who made direct access.
The rapid development of the OAI specification is certainly impressive, as is the early focus on a very specific well-scoped implementation area. Carl went on to give a detailed consideration of the harvesting protocol and how it fits into the overall OAI interoperability framework. Drawing on work carried out with Herbert Van de Sompel, Carl gave a detailed presentation of the core concepts in the OAI metadata harvesting specification and how these are built into the protocol. The model is of a number of 'service providers' using the OAI protocol to harvest metadata from 'data providers', the protocol allowing a limited number of simple requests to be made within the gathering transaction. In order to facilitate interoperability data providers must provide their metadata in simple Dublin Core using XML encoding, although they may choose to provide metadata compliant to other schemas in addition if they wish.
The emphasis within OAI is on simplicity, and it will be interesting to see how far this simplicity will be retained in operational services, or whether there will be an imperative to provide refinements and differentials which will require adding complexity to the simple exchange of simple metadata.
The next part of the programme involved a number of first hand accounts of implementation experience from representatives of the group of alpha testers of the OAI specification. The alpha test period ran from November 2000 to early 2001 and involved participation from institutions in a variety of domains. There were a number of approaches to alpha testing, some looked at making metadata available for harvesting (acting as data providers), others looked at the role of service providers gathering metadata from repositories, and some focused on developing compliant software building on existing systems.
Kurt Maly, Old Dominion University, gave an account of the experience of testing OAI harvesting from the perspective of a federated service of e-print archives. The alpha test involved harvesting data from arXiv, cogprints, Virginia Tech Thesis/Dissertation collection and several other institutional repositories. In a summary of lessons learned Kurt noted that the expense of maintaining a quality federation service is highly dependent on the quality of metadata declared by data providers. Using a unified controlled vocabulary, or at least defining mapping relationship, is important in a federated archive service. Also he noted that in using XML syntax and character encoding a single error could influence large set of data, and such character encoding errors occur frequently in many data providers. Service providers also need to consider the trade-off between data freshness and harvest efficiency
Heinrich Stamerjohanns and Susanne Dobratz explained testing of the protocol at the Humboldt University, Berlin, which runs an eprint archive service for theses, dissertations, and scientific publications. The archive contains text in a variety of formats (SGML, XML, PDF, PS, HTML) as well as non-text data (video, simulations). The archive is now compatible with OAI version 1.0.
Jean Yves Le Meur told of his experience at the CERN library. This involved a test collection of books and eprints. Metadata was provided for these using three metadata formats: the mandatory Dublin Core, plus MARC and RFC 1807. One issue was scoping the collection to limit the metadata declared for the OAI repository, which meant trying to identify a sub-set of the whole CERN collection. Within the declared metadata there was also some question as to the best identifier to use. CERN also considered how full text identified by OAI metadata might be exchanged, at present the OAI protocol does not specify procedures for linking to full text.
Eva Krall, Ex Libris, outlined implementation of the OAI protocol in the library management system Aleph 500. Ex Libris were successful in using the OAI protocol to provide a simple means of maintaining a union catalogue as an alternative to message based replication of data between systems. However Eva noted that in the context of libraries there were some issues such as lack of authorisation mechanisms, and the need to transfer holdings data, so some refinements and enhancements might be required.
Andy Powell, UKOLN, carried out a test implementation of the OAI protocol within the Resource Discovery Network, a co-operative network of UK subject gateways giving access to high quality Internet resources. Within the RDN cross searching has been implemented using Z39.50 but because of performance issues and difficulty with building flexible browse interface there is interest in looking at a record sharing solution. One of the issues that emerged from testing was the richness, or lack of richness, of the simple Dublin Core schema for records. Simple Dublin Core does not support all the elements included within RDN records; e.g. it does not indicate the subject classification scheme in use. It may be that a richer metadata schema would be more appropriate. Andy indicated that issues of authentication and branding might also need further exploration.
Les Carr, University of Southampton, reviewed the eprints.org software which facilitates institutional and author self-archiving. The CogPrints Cognitive Sciences E-print Archive alpha tested the OAI protocol and is now OAI v1.0 compliant. The eprints.org software is freely available and is designed to be as flexible and adaptable as possible, so that universities world-wide can adopt and configure it with minimal effort for their institutional self-archiving needs. Les went on to consider ideas for building a citation database derived from analysis of use of e-print archives, and considered how analysis of use of archives might suggest the tools needed to support archive administration and user interfaces.
Future plans for implementation of the OAI protocol are being drawn up in different application areas. Donatella Castelli, Istituto di Elaborazione della Informazione, gave a brief overview of the Cyclades project. This is a recently funded project as part of the EC IST programme. Its aim is to support scholars in inter-acting with multi-disciplinary archives as members of networked scholarly communities. The project intends to develop a working space for groups to have shared access to their own documents, to other collections, and to related links and annotations. It will test whether such a quality service can be built on the OAI low barrier interoperability framework.
Jeff Young, OCLC, then outlined activity within the ALCME project at OCLC. ALCME is working with the National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) to develop a name authority linking mechanism. Participants will create authority records in their local repositories and share them with other repositories using OAI protocol for metadata exchange. Jeff intends to explore the use of RDF to enable participants to annotate each other's records. Further details of this ambitious application are available from the OCLC Web site.
During question time there was some reflection on already existing alternatives to the OAI framework. Inevitably a comparison with Z39.50 was suggested. But how can one compare OAI and Z39.50? In such a comparison to consider all the functionality of Z39.50 would be far too wide a scope. However realistic comparison should include more than the capability of both protocols to gather all metadata instances from a compliant repository.
The event also gave the audience some insights into options for 'OAI next steps'. Presentations during the day prompted ideas (in this member of the audience) ranging from facilitating shared metadata creation, in effect collaborative cataloguing, to more specific implementation matters such as working towards recommendations for the optimal size of a metadata repository. Identifying criteria to guide the harvesting process also seem of significant importance, in order to achieve a balance between distributed and centralised repositories. Of major interest is the business impact of the OAI model, where is the burden of work located for services following the OAI 'technical framework'? The next year will give data providers and service providers the opportunity to explore some of these issues. Already further meetings have taken place and are planned to take this forward.
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Rachel
Heery
Research and Development Team Leader
UKOLN
University of Bath
BATH
BA2 7AY
United Kingdom
r.heery@ukoln.ac.uk
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/>
Phone: +44 1225 826724
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For citation purposes:
Heery, R. "OAI Open Meeting", Cultivate Interactive, issue
4, 7 May 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue4/oai/>
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May 2001
The third annual Internet Librarian International Conference [1] was held between 26 and 28 March 2001 at Olympia 2 in London with pre-conference workshops given on Sunday 25 March and post conference workshops on Thursday 29 March. Caroline Milner of Rubicon Communications gave a preview of the conference in the last issue of Cultivate Interactive [2]. Members of the Cultivate Interactive Team were at ILI and attended a number of the presentations.
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The actual Conference ran over 3 days and offered three parallel programme tracks: Track A was named the 'Intranet professional’s institute' and covered issues surrounding Intranets, portals and knowledge management. Track B was the 'Webwizards’ symposium' covering tools and systems, Web design and management and navigating the net. Finally, Track C dealt with e-resources and looked at content management, e-roles and e-learning. The running of three tracks meant that delegates could not see all presentations given at the Conference. However, the choice of three speakers at all times suggests that there should have been something of interest to most at any point in the day.
Here is a mixed bag of the more memorable presentations:
William Hann gave a talk about the technicalities of running a portal. Hann is the managing director of Free Pint, a free email newsletter and Web site for information professionals [3]. His presentation covered how Free Pint had dealt with the realisation that they needed to generate income somehow. Initially William had gone for raising cash through Venture Capitalists but had had a 'funny feeling' that it wasn't a good idea and backed out at the last minute at the cost of several tens of thousand pounds of his own money. It was probably a sensible decision given the current state of other dot.com companies. The approach Free Pint opted for in the end was one of 'organic growth', a process which has included adding adverts to the newsletter, getting sponsorship, adding company financials to the home page and spending 6 months on technical development. William was very open about the mistakes Free Pint had made and the lessons they'd learned. The presentation provided useful advice for any portal or Web publication thinking of ways of increasing their financial status.
Brian Kelly of UKOLN took us on a lightning tour of the rights and wrongs of hosting advertisements on public-sector Web sites. The issue of whether this form of income generation is acceptable in today’s political climate is a pertinent, yet still controversial one. UKERNA have recently published a fact sheet dealing with advertising on Janet that is very helpful [4].
Brian's polemical presentation was followed by the Web masters roundtable panel session. The panel consisted of Brian Kelly again, Greg Notess from Montana State University-Bozeman Library, USA and Mary Peterson from the Royal Adelaide Hospital, Australia. The Web masters initially gave some interesting tips on deconstructing your Web site and then discussed how Libraries fit in to the concept of the Web. It was pointed out that when Tim Berners-Lee developed the three key architectural components of the Web (Data format (HTML), transport (HTTP) and addressing (URIs/URLs)) he forgot one of the most important components, metadata. Conclusions were drawn that the Library community do have a number of valuable roles to play in the Web world, one of the more important being in driving metadata, but that their developments should be based on sound architectural principles which avoid vendor lock-ins. They should also keep up to date with new Web technology developments, such as XML, or face being left behind. The panel session involved a fair amount of interaction with a profusion of comments from the audience.
There were also some worthy sessions on Search Engines given by Danny Sullivan and Greg Notess. Both discussed 'the death of search engines', a prediction made a few years ago that finally seems to be taking shape. An introduction to the 'Invisible Web' was given by Gary Price and Chris Sherman. The invisible Web is the area not indexed by search engines and believed to be between 2 and 50 times larger that the visible Web [5]. It mainly consists of a number of very important databases, many of them from the government sector [6]. The presenters have a book coming out on their research in July [7].
Steve Coffman and one of his colleagues gave a live presentation of the Virtual Reference Desk [8]. The VRD is a way of providing live online reference assistance to users in need of support. A number of US libraries have started running VRD programmes and Steve got some of the librarians to log on in their pyjamas (so to speak). Three Slide sessions were given, one from London and two from different places in the USA. The whole presentation was very live and very dynamic. It was refreshing to see something different from your standard Powerpoint, and Steve's enthusiasm was enough to get us all excited.
The conference runs in parallel with an exhibition. Exhibitions at conferences generally tend to only be helpful if you are on the lookout for a particular product or service, such as library equipment or a new content management system. The freebees given usually only justify one lap of the exhibition hall. However this year the ILI Advisory Committee had the insight to include a number of free workshops. Some of the workshops echoed the presentations given at the actual conference whilst others were totally unique. Our very own UK National node Rosalind Johnson gave a tour of the new UK Portal & Cultural area of the Cultivate Web Site [9]. Stephen Abram of IHS, Canada & Bonnie Burwell, Burwell Information Services, Canada gave a number of workshops on Intranet Toolkits and e-learning. Steve Coffman also gave his global broadcast again using innovative technology to join together attendees from all over the globe.
On the whole the Internet Librarian International Conference did seem to be lacking a certain something. With 45 presentations given over the three days it became difficult for the delegates (and the library world) to establish clear themes or threads arising from event. The generalness of the Conference seemed to become a negative aspect, though this many of the delegates seemed happy with the generic level of content. It is possible that the Conference could benefit from more involvement from UK and European speakers and a broadening of the remit to include the wider cultural heritage sector. This however would reflect changes in the UK and Europe, which are not happening in the US from where a large portion of the delegates came.
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For citation purposes:
Cultivate Interactive "Internet Librarian International 2001", Cultivate Interactive, issue
4, 7 May 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue4/ili/>
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By David Cunningham and Neil Francis - May 2001
David Cunningham and Neil Francis report on the technologies available, as well as some of the problems encountered when trying to stream video content across the Internet.
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Advances in computing and networking technology mean that it is now feasible to deliver sound and video across the Internet. However there are still many users with old computers and slow network connections, and care needs to be taken to ensure that streaming technology is not used inappropriately and without due regard for the target audience.
This article is based on our experiences at the University of Bath where we have experimented with both live and recorded video. There is a Web page [1] with examples of some videos streamed from the University of Bath.
Streaming video can be used for live or recorded events. The main reason for broadcasting live is to reach a wider and/or more dispersed audience. Typical live broadcasts could be lectures, sports or entertainment events, and academic or other ceremonies. For a major academic lecture given at a university the number of people who could actually attend would be limited by the size of the lecture theatre, whilst the potential audience could be anywhere in the world. Live video is essential if the aim is to give a remote audience an experience as close as possible to being physically present at the event.
If an event is broadcast live it is relatively simple to make a recording which can then be published on the Web for later viewing. However, there are many more possibilities with non-live broadcasts. A streamed broadcast should be considered to be a multimedia event, which could include full motion video if appropriate. Good examples of multimedia lectures can be found at the Boxmind site [2]. Boxmind use synchronised broadcasts with several streams containing video, audio, scrolling text, pictures or diagrams, and hypertext links. The synchronisation ensures that the text display corresponds exactly to the spoken commentary. Although the pictures and diagrams would be generally considered to be an integral part of the lecture, it could be argued that the audio and video are not essential. It is however widely accepted that information retention rates are much higher when a student can see and hear a lecture in addition to being able to read the text.
 |
| Figure 1: A sample e-lecture from Boxmind |
Streaming technology is not new. Most people are familiar with it from an audio only point of view since Marconi invented radio in 1897. Streaming video followed with TV from the mid 1930s onwards. Most people would refer to this as broadcasting. This concept is well understood. A continuous stream of information is transmitted and receivers are able to tune in and receive the information in real time.
Streaming across the Internet, although similar in concept, has its own specific issues that must be addressed. The Internet was not designed for real time streaming. The Internet is a shared medium and uses a best effort delivery mechanism, Internet Protocol (IP) to deliver content. There is no dedicated path between source and the sink. IP breaks content up into self contained packets and these packets are routed independently. Limited bandwidth, latency, noise, packet loss, retransmission and out of order packet delivery are all problems that can affect real time streaming over the Internet.
In the main, traditional Internet traffic is not sensitive to these problems - or handles them higher up the protocol stack at its leisure. Live or on-demand streaming is a time critical application which is sensitive to the variation in delay that is normal for a shared access network like the Internet. Not only does the amount of bandwidth that you have access to matter but also the consistency or quality of this bandwidth. All Internet streaming technologies get around this by buffering a certain amount of content before actually starting to play. The buffer irons out the natural traffic variations inherent on the Internet. Many seconds worth of content can be buffered and in excess of 30 seconds worth is not uncommon. Note that after the initial buffering the streamed broadcast will start to play at the same time as more content is being downloaded. This is an improvement over earlier technologies where the whole file had to be downloaded before playing could commence.
It is probably still safe to say that the majority of end users are accessing the Internet over very narrowband dial up links. Comparatively few people have the luxury of access at anything over 2Mbps, however over the last couple of years cable and DSL access has been increasing allowing bandwidths between 128kb/s to 512kb/s to be available to end users. At this bit rate near-VHS quality rich media can be achieved through modern compression techniques and sophisticated codec technology.
It is not all about quality of bandwidth however. Content creation, serving, usability and availability are also challenges that need to be addressed.
There are a variety of compression systems used today. The Motion Picture Experts Group (MPEG) [3] has three open (ISO/IEC) standards that can be used for streaming.
MPEG-1, originally developed for VHS quality video on CD-ROM in 1988 and has its optimal bit rate at about 1.5Mb/s for quarter screen TV (352x240) at 30 frames/sec. MPEG-1 is mainly considered as a storage format, however it does offer excellent streaming quality for the bit-rate it supports.
MPEG-2 was ratified in 1996. It was designed for use in digital TV broadcasting and is best known for DVD encoding. Its target bit-rate is between 4 and 9Mb/sec but it can be used in HDTV for resolutions up to 1920x1080 pixels at 30 frames/sec which will witness average bit rates up to 80 Mb/sec. As an Internet streaming technology it is probably not useful as it uses bit rates higher than those to which almost everyone has access.
MPEG-4 was ratified in 1999 and is a new standard specifically developed to address Web and mobile delivery. Its optimal bit rate is between 385 to 768 Kb/sec. There is still active work continuing on this standard but a number of groups are putting some heavy research and development efforts behind making MPEG4 the standard on the Internet. Codecs are currently available from Microsoft and Apple (Quicktime) but exciting developments also from organisations like Ligos Technology [13], e-Vue [14] and the open source Project Mayo/Open DivX [15].
MPEG-7 (Multimedia Content Description Interface) is scheduled for release in July 2001, and work has started on MPEG-21 (Multimedia Framework).
Despite the open standards of MPEG most people use one of the big three proprietary formats. These are RealMedia, Quicktime and Windows Media. All three have specific advantages which have allowed them to gain ground in the market - mainly because they are free, and support the Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP).
A very popular player which is very widely distributed and available for all major OS platforms. RealNetworks claim over 70% of the Internet streaming market with the player being installed on over 90% of home PCs.
RealPlayer is up to version 8 and the latest generation codecs (developed with Intel), coupled with their SureStream technology, will probably keep them in a dominant position. RealSystem 8 supports over 40 media formats. Surestream is an automatic multi bit-rate technology that will adjust the streamed data rate to suit the client's connectivity. In practical terms this means that a single encoding will suit all users from dial-up to corporate LAN. Also supported is Synchronised Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) which allows mixed multimedia content to be delivered in a synchronised way.
RealServer is also available for most OS platforms but is only free for a basic 25-user licence. Streaming is RealNetwork's core business so they cannot subsidise the technology in favour of market share as Apple and Microsoft do. Serving more than a couple of hundred simultaneous streams can become quite expensive and one major drawback of the system.
Originally developed in 1991 version 4 now claims more than 100 million copies distributed world-wide. Quicktime's major advantages are its maturity and the large number of codecs available for it. It features an open plug-in feature to allow third party codecs to be added. MPEG1 and MPEG4 codecs are currently available.
The plug-in feature has allowed over 200 digital media formats to be supported by Quicktime 4 with companies such as Sorenson Labs [6] producing very impressive codecs. As with RealPlayer, SMIL is available and now RTSP is also supported. (Prior to version 4 only progressive streaming, not true real time streaming was available in Quicktime). Quicktime 5, currently in beta, also has support for immersive virtual reality.
Quicktime server is supported natively in MAC OS. The open source Darwin Streaming Server [7] is available for other platforms and is free.
Windows Media Player (currently at version 8) is the newcomer to the streaming world. Because of this there are fewer codecs available for it. There is an MPEG4 codec and Microsoft's proprietary but very good ASF codec. Microsoft have put some work into their RTSP implementation and it is considered more efficient than others. SMIL is supported, but only at a basic level.
Microsoft give the player away free and the company's marketing might means that the format is quickly gaining popularity. There are currently 220 million players in 26 languages in existence.
Microsoft's streaming server (called Microsoft Media Services) is free and supplied as standard under Windows 2000 Server and as a free download for Windows NT server. Microsoft have not open sourced the code which means that other platforms are not supported. This is considered a major disadvantage as far as flexibility is concerned.
The components of an end to end streaming system are the client or player, the server and some sort of content creation process. As always, content is king so the greatest amount of time will probably be spent on the creation process.
The designer of the content will use various production tools to create the content. These tools convert audio, video, or animation to a data type format that the server can stream. Because most servers can deliver content in many different formats, there are a number of tools that people can use in creating content. Production tools can epitomise the content for efficient delivery over the Internet, based on the nature of the material and the capabilities of the client computers.
Each of the big three provides tools for creating or converting content into a format that can be handled by their servers and epitomised for Internet Streaming. RealNetwork's RealProducer 8 will convert from a number of raw formats (AVI, MPEG-1, AU, AIFF etc) and is free for the basic version. Apple's Quicktime Player (free and pro) also provides content authoring and import/export facilities and Media On-Demand Producer is free from Microsoft.
Sonic Foundry's [9] Stream Anywhere can be downloaded for about 125 US dollars and provides for the creation of streaming content in Real and MS Media formats. A more complete (and more expensive - upwards of 600 US dollars) product is Terran's Media Cleaner 5[10]. Cleaner 5 is a complete suite of tools for preparing video and audio for the web and is considered the industry leader in this field.
The content creator can also create a Synchronised Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) file to synchronise several clips within a presentation. A SMIL file co-ordinates the layout and playing of two or more media clips in parallel (simultaneously) or in sequence. A typical example of this is a lecture or presentation with associated slides where the presentation of the slides can be synchronised with the audio content of the lecture.
RealNetworks have put the most effort into developing SMIL for the web and have created proprietary formats of RealText, RealPix, RealVideo, RealAudio and RealFlash for use within a SMIL script. SMIL version 2.0 is currently in draft and will enhance the language significantly.
Creating content with SMIL [11] (which is based on XML) takes more time and effort but the results are worth it. RealNetworks can supply the Oratrix Development program GRiNS [12] for the creation of SMIL texts. There are many examples on the web showing how, for very little bandwidth, excellent media rich presentations can be compiled which are much more informative and interesting than the statically presented video.
Local experience has shown that it is not usually sufficient to simply encode existing video content for streaming. Content producers need to be cognisant of the tremendous compression ratios that are common in this arena. Subtle visual information is lost and picture sizes will be small. Limited camera movement is important as is good lighting, simple backgrounds and close ups of subject material.
All the systems have ways of making it easy to provide a single link for users encompassing multiple data rates. This means that your files can stream without the user having to specify a particular bandwidth. QuickTime's approach is to create a different file for each. This complicates the encoding process and does not address the issue of fluctuating bandwidths. However, having each file individually encoded does provide enormous flexibility.
RealNetwork's SureStream technology and Microsoft's Intelligent Streaming lets you put multiple tracks in a single file each with a different bit rate for delivery. Of the two Real's SureStream is the most sophisticated and flexible, and if bandwidth fluctuations are an important factor in delivery of content this will deal with it best. Combining SureStream with SMIL is also possible.
The content creator can either prepare media clips in advance or encode a live event as it happens. In this the term encoder refers to the software (such as RealProducer, for example) that converts live or pre-existing media into a format that the server can deliver.
Just as a Web server delivers pages to Web browsers over the Internet, streaming servers deliver media clips to clients (clips are created with the production tools described elsewhere). Real time streaming requires specific servers. RealNetworks, Microsoft and Apple all provide streaming servers. These servers give you a greater level of control over your media delivery but can be more complicated to set up and administer than a standard HTTP server. Also, real time streaming uses special network protocols, such as RTSP or MMS (Microsoft Media Server).
Ideally the user should have a simple hypertext interface and have to do no more than click on a link. Any upgrade or download of a client player utility should be automated and transparent. In practice client downloads tend to be large and complicated procedures with too many options available for the average user.
Streaming availability on the global Internet should ideally mean a server ready to stream content to any clients who have an interest in receiving it. Unfortunately the demand and availability of media rich content has lead to a breakdown of the traditional client server model. Single servers streaming content to diverse groups of clients distributed across the Internet are ineffective in terms of both server load and network congestion.
Over the last couple of years strategies have evolved in the commercial sector to address these problems. Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are an attempt to introduce a coherent approach to building an infrastructure of caching proxies, mirror servers and proxy accelerators to enable a more efficient and speedier delivery of streamed content to end users. The ultimate goal is to replicate content and bring it closer to the end user in a transparent fashion. In this way the user sees no URI changes and has no knowledge (nor interest) in the actual source of the content.
There are several commercial CDNs already offering these services. Probably best known is Akamai [16] with its FreeFlow technology. Adero [17] use what they call their GeoTraffic Manager and Omnicast technology to move fresh content closer to the audience. Digital Island [18] does very much the same with its Footprint technology. They claim a 10-fold speed increase by distributing content to their world-wide network of servers.
iBeam [19] use their MaxCaster media serving system located in points-of-presence around the world. They use proprietary software and satellite networks to push content through their network. They claim more than 500,000 simultaneous streams now and will be capable of serving millions of streams in the future. Edgix [20] use their Edge Delivery Platform which includes edgeMedia, edgeNews, and edgeStream to ensure high performance delivery of content to end users.
Although the above are commercial ventures, the notion and requirement for the CDN model has been appreciated generally. Over the last 12 months work has been carried out within The United Kingdom Education & Research Networking Association (UKERNA) [21] to look at providing a similar distributed resource for delivering streamed content within UK academia. The recent upgrade to JANET (SuperJANET4 [22]), providing 2.5Gbps backbone links increasing to 10Gbps in the next two years, provides a huge leap in bandwidth availability. This offers excellent opportunities to experiment with streaming media but is also cause for concern as without proper management even large bandwidths like this can be swamped.
UKERNA intend to pilot an implementation of a content management system using the JANET core network. Content will be replicated at the edge of the (core) network and clients automatically directed to their nearest edge node. In this way core network resources are far more efficiently managed than in a centralised server model, and the end user should benefit from better and faster access to the resources they require.
SuperJANET4 new backbone contains eight Core
Points-of-Presence (C-PoPs) geographically located throughout the
UK [23]. Here bandwidth and switching
converge and offer the capacity to accommodate additional
services and opportunities above pure transmission and
routing.
Given a good a network connection streaming video works well, although in many ways it is surprising that it works at all. As mentioned earlier, the nature of the Internet and its use of IP means that a broadcast is competing with other data transmissions, and in general there is no way of guaranteeing sufficient bandwidth to ensure an uninterrupted broadcast. Video conferencing systems usually use other network technologies such as ISDN, which has a relatively low but guaranteed end to end bandwidth, or ATM which can be set up with channels with guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS). Bandwidth over the Internet is increasing rapidly but unfortunately demand seems to be keeping up with supply, so increasing bandwidth alone is unlikely to solve the problem. Various developments are taking place which should ultimately result in QoS being available over IP [24] and this, together with the emergence of CDNs, should result in a rapid growth in the use of video over the Internet.
A more mundane, but nevertheless important, difficulty in our experience is that many users have trouble setting up their client machines to receive audio and video. In the case of PCs most users seem to need a PC expert to help them install, for example, Real Player. A more fundamental problem in many educational establishments is that teaching rooms have frequently been set up without audio hardware. Where there are a large number of machines in one area it is generally necessary to use headphones.
Because "live" broadcasts are not really live but are typically delayed for around 30 seconds it is difficult to set up remote feedback. For example where an on-line lecture has been publicised in advance it would be beneficial to allow questions from the remote audience. One way to achieve this would be to set up a Web page so that people could type in their questions, which could then to relayed to the lecturer by another person in the room.
Many organisations have their networks protected with a firewall and, even if normal Web traffic is allowed, special provision may have to be made to allow access to the ports used to receive streaming video. The same applies when serving video to the Internet from inside a firewall.
Despite the problems, our experience of streaming has shown that it is practicable to deliver multimedia broadcasts across local and wide area networks, providing the end user is connected to the network with a reasonably fast connection such as Ethernet, DSL or cable modem. We do not consider it feasible to use a dial-up modem connection to view full motion video streamed broadcasts although it should be adequate for audio only or slide-show presentations.
This article has concentrated on the technology needed to produce and deliver multimedia, and in particular video presentations. However, careful consideration should be given as to whether video is needed as part of a multimedia presentation. Although easy to produce, a continuous shot of someone talking direct to camera is technically demanding on bandwidth and probably adds relatively little to the presentation. In particular, when producing material for education and training a combination of slide shows, animation and recorded computer session together with a commentary is easier to deliver and in many cases more effective than full motion video.
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David
Cunningham
Assistant Director
BUCS
University of Bath
BATH
BA2 7AY
United Kingdom
D.Cunningham@bath.ac.uk
<http://staff.bath.ac.uk/ccsdc/>
Phone: +44 1225 826288
Neil Francis
Team Leader
BUCS
University of Bath
BATH
BA2 7AY
United Kingdom
N.J.Francis@bath.ac.uk
<http://staff.bath.ac.uk/ccsnjf/>
Phone: +44 1225 323571
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For citation purposes:
Cunningham, D and Francis, N. "An Introduction to Streaming Video", Cultivate Interactive, issue
4, 7 May 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue4/video/>
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By Jim Strom - May 2001
Over the last few years there has been a dramatic improvement in the quality of IP-based network media technologies. Both real time and on-demand media can now be created, served and played at the desktop using PC-based platforms and software freely available across the Internet.
In our second article on this topic Jim Strom, responsible for the Future is Hybrid Multimedia Presentations [1], gives us a behind the scenes look at what can be achieved with streaming video using a number of examples and case studies.
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If you want to see a good example of streaming video then have a look at the TERENA (Trans European Research Network Association) conference given in Lund, Sweden in June 1999 [2]. The whole conference was streamed out live across the Internet. When I watched it, I realised that streaming technology for distance learning had finally arrived. The quality of the video and audio was much better than anything I had ever seen or heard before. It was as good as actually being there at the conference. In fact it was better, because during parallel presentations I could pull down the separate streams and easily switch between sessions without having to shuffle between rooms. That’s the real benefit of interactive Web media – doing things that can’t be done in real life.
Behind the scenes there was a lot of technical preparation and resources needed to achieve the quality of the video stream in Lund, however the techniques can all be replicated on PCs using freely available software. The stream from Lund shows the presenter’s slides running alongside the video. This was done using SMIL (Synchronised Multimedia Integration Language), which defines the layout and synchronisation of the different media clips in the stream. When we set up the Advanced Telematics Centre (ATC) [3] in 1999, at the University of Manchester, we recognised the importance of this technique for e-learning and have since used it extensively in both live and on-demand developments with streaming media. This paper illustrates 2 case study examples of streaming productions that the ATC has done using SMIL.
In order to play smoothly, video data needs to be available continuously and in the proper sequence without interruption. Until fairly recently, it had to be downloaded in its entirety to the PC before it could be played. With streaming, the file remains on the server. The initial part is copied to a buffer on the PC and then, after a short delay, called ‘preroll’, starts to play and continues as the rest of the file is being pulled down. Streaming provides a steady method of delivery controlled by interaction between the PC and the server. The server regulates the stream according to network congestion and thereby optimises the presentation on the PC.
There are 3 software components involved in streaming:
On-demand content is controlled by the client. The user can select a pre-recorded stream and also freely choose when to view it. Furthermore the user can control the video stream - pausing, jumping ahead/back, restarting, etc – just as with a video recorder. On the other hand, broadcast content is controlled and scheduled by the server. The content is only made available for viewing at selected times. The viewer can only watch the stream as it is being transmitted without any control over it, just as with a television or radio broadcast. Broadcast content can be scheduled to come from an archived file or can be a live transmission from an external audio/video device such as a camera or video recorder.
A unicast stream refers to a single link from the video server down to the client for access to either on-demand or broadcast content. A single video server is able to handle many simultaneous unicast links to clients accessing the same or different content. Unicast streams can range from 20Kbps to more than 1Mbps so an important consideration here is the aggregate bandwidth needed by the video server. 60 unicasts, for example, coming down together at 20Kbps each, are going to amount to a total bandwidth of 1.2Mbps (60x20Kbps) over the video server’s local network.
Multicast gets around this problem by sending out a single stream that can be picked up by any number of clients, thus saving network bandwidth. In the case of the previous example, that would mean 20Kbps bandwidth usage for 1, 60 or 6000 simultaneous viewers watching the same broadcast. The number of viewers is immaterial. However, multicast only offers the client the opportunity to join a live or scheduled broadcast. The user has no control over the stream and cannot stop or restart the transmission. Multicasting is controlled by the network infrastructure itself and is dependent on the routers being multicast-capable. Institutions may be able to offer this internally over their own intranets if their routers are enabled. Also, over the academic network, we have access to Mbone – the academic multicast backbone. But outside of this, across commercial Internet, there is very little opportunity to use multicast at the moment. Unicast is therefore the predominant form of streaming for global access.
On-demand content can be delivered from a Web server rather than having to set up and manage a separate video server. When a user requests the video file, it starts to be copied down to the PC using HTTP like any other Web data. Control is passed to the player and the stream plays as the rest of the file is being brought down. However HTTP and its underlying TCP/IP protocol are designed simply to transfer text and images reliably to the client and offers no inherent control over the stream. This leads to a bursty form of transfer rather than a steady delivery. In practice it is better to use a video server to regulate the transfer and give a smooth playback at the client end without rebuffering interruptions. For a useful overview of the pros and cons of this, see Microsoft’s white paper on Streaming Methods [4].
The two main contenders in the streaming arena are RealNetworks’ RealSystem G2 and Microsoft’s Windows Media Technologies. Both suppliers provide the basic three streaming software components for free, downloadable across the Internet. Apple’s QuickTime is also now capable of streaming, with the release of QuickTime 5. Table 1 shows the platforms and provision of the player, server and encoder software.
| Product | Player | Video Server | Encoder |
| RealSystem G2 URL: <http://www.real.com/> |
Free (RealPlayer 8 Basic) | Free (RealServer 8 Basic; up to 25 streams) $2000 (RealServer 8 Plus; up to 60 streams) $6000+ (RealServer 8 Professional; 100-2000 streams) | Free (RealProducer 8 Basic) $199 (RealProducer 8 Plus) |
| Windows 98/NT/2000 + Mac | Windows 98/NT/2000 + others (Linux, Free BSD, Solaris, HP/UX, IRIX) | Windows 98/NT/2000 + Mac + Linux + Solaris | |
| Windows Media Technologies URL: <http://www.microsoft.com/> |
Free (Windows Media Player Version 7) | Free (Windows Media Server Version 7; Up to 2000 streams on a single processor server) | Free (Windows Media Encoder Version 7) |
| Windows 98/NT/2000 + Mac + Solaris | Windows NT/2000 | Windows 98/NT/2000 | |
| Apple QuickTime URL: <http://www.apple.com/> |
Free (QuickTime Player 5) | Free (QuickTime Streaming Server 3) | £18 + VAT QuickTime Pro |
| Mac + Windows 98/NT/2000 | Mac + Windows NT/2000 + others (Linux, Free BSD Solaris) | Mac + Windows98/NT/2000 |
Table 1: Streaming Media Software from Real Networks, Microsoft and Apple.
Both RealSystem G2 and Windows Media Technologies embody a rich set of streaming management features including multicast capability, security and authentication resources and tools for streaming slide presentations. Both video servers provide Dynamic Stream Control so that the stream rate is adjusted according to network conditions. Also both products offer Multiple Bit Rate Encoding. This is the ability to encode a single file that can be streamed out to clients at different data rates according to their access bandwidth. The server will automatically select the appropriate encoding suited to the client’s bandwidth when the connection is made.
In an ideal world you might expect to view any content on any player. However, in general, content generated by one supplier’s encoder is only viewable through that supplier’s player. Also watch out for version incompatibility between players and content. For example, content encoded with the latest version of a supplier’s encoder may turn out to be not viewable by earlier versions of the player. This problem occurs with versions of RealPlayer.
The video server uses a streaming protocol to manage the flow of data and control information with the client. RealSystem uses RTSP (Real Time Streaming Protocol), a standards-based client-server protocol for streaming media. Windows Media uses a proprietary protocol called Microsoft Media Server (MMS). Each system has its own file format for the streamed data. RealSystem encodes into a .rm file format. Windows Media encodes into an .asf or .wmv file format. You can see examples of these with the following references: [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10] representing both RealSystem and Windows Media encodings for 56Kbps, ISDN and DSL access rates. [You will need to have RealPlayer 8 and the Windows Media 7 Player installed to view these.] In each case, the same content has been encoded so a direct comparison of video and audio quality can be made. The playback window size is 320x240 pixels.
The content used in these examples is a 1-minute clip of Professor Frank Sumner from the University of Manchester (Figure 1). The clip was taken from a videoconference link with an assembled group in Antwerp where Professor Sumner was talking about his experiences at the time of the Manchester Baby (the first stored program computer that ran its first program on 21 June 1948).
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| Figure 1: Antwerp video clip used to compare the quality of Real Video and Windows Media |
The audio and video will come down as separate streams. During the preroll, the player will buffer a small amount before starting to play with the aim of bringing down the remainder as the clip is playing. If the client’s bandwidth is not sufficient to sustain the stream then there will be frequent pauses as rebuffering takes place. You can see this happening in the ‘Manchester Baby’ examples if the ISDN or DSL clip is pulled down over a modem link. The server will always try to maintain the audio stream at the expense of the video stream since interruptions in the audio are more noticeable than changes in the video.
Media files can become very large and therefore take up considerable disc space. In producing the ‘Manchester Baby’ clip, the original video was first captured for editing in an uncompressed, AVI (Audio Video Interleave) format. This 1-minute clip at 24-bit colour depth, at 15 fps and with a 320x240 pixel frame size took up 267Mb! When compressed however for the two encoding systems, it came down to around 350Kb (56K), 800Kb (ISDN) and 4,300Kb (DSL). Projecting from these figures, a 1-hour stream for access rates of up to 250Kbps is going to take up around 260Mb of storage on the video server.
SMIL (Synchronised Multimedia Integration Language) is the XML complaint markup language that provides a time-based synchronised environment to stream audio, video, text, images and animation. SMIL is the officially recognised standard of the World Wide Web Consortium. RealSystem G2 and QuickTime 5 are SMIL compliant. The current Windows Media 7 player is not, however the next release of the Windows Media, due out later this year, will be compliant, albeit with a Microsoft flavoring. So SMIL is set to become the common media mark-up language across all the three steaming platforms.
A SMIL file (with a .smi extension) defines the layout and sequencing of the media clips. Sequential (<seq>) and parallel (<par>) tags allow you to specify that clips should be played either one after another or at the same time.
Using a SMIL file to control a presentation means that a slide stream can be run in parallel with a presenter’s video stream, scrolling or ticker text can appear and live links to other Web pages or media can be built in. RealNetworks have added some extensions of their own to the SMIL standard and have defined two additional data types:
The following two case studies, together with some general guidance on production, provide examples of using SMIL with RealSystem G2.
This event was a student fashion show held by UMIST Department of Textiles. The requirement was to stream it out live over the Web and to provide an archived copy on the server. The encoder used a Windows98 PC (Celeron 400, 64Mb) together with a Hauppauge WinTV capture card and the free RealProducer Basic software. The encoded stream was fed over a LAN to a video server, (WinNT4, dual PII 400, 128Mb + SCSI drive), running the free RealServer Basic software. The event was advertised on the Department’s Web site with a link to a SMIL file on the video server. The SMIL file produced a presentation (Figure 2) with 3 media inserts: the UMIST logo, some ticker text produced using RealText and the live video window. The stream was archived onto the encoder PC as it was broadcast. The source video was also captured onto digital videotape and used to generate an edited version of the Webcast to go up on the server. The resulting stream can be seen at [11].
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| Figure 2: UMIST fashion show live Webcast |
The SMIL code used for this is shown in Table 2. Basically the code defines the layout for the different areas in the presentation window and then, in the ‘body’, specifies the source and relationship of the three streams. The surrounding ‘par’ tags cause the streams to be played back in parallel.
A further example of a live Webcast done by the ATC can be seen at [12]. This was an outside event for the Mottram Millennium festival (Cheshire) where a civil war re-enactment was captured in the field (literally) and relayed back over a wireless link to a nearby cybercafe for encoding. From there it was exported over ISDN to the video server in Manchester. The example shows the use of scrolling text to support the video presentation.
| <smil> <head> <meta name="title" content="UMIST Fashion Show 2000"/> <meta name="author" content="Advanced Telematics Centre"/> <layout> <root-layout width="390" height="270"/> <region id="logo" z-index="1" width="72" height="270" left="0" top="0" /> <region id="ticker" z-index="1" width="318" height="30" left="73" top="241" /> <region id="media" z-index="1" width="318" height="240" left="73" top="0" /> </layout> </head> <body> <par> <img region="logo" src="umist.gif" fill="freeze"/> <textstream region="ticker" src="fashion_ticker.rt" fill="freeze"/> <video region="media" src="fashion_video.rm" fill="freeze"/> </par> </body> </smil> |
Table 2: SMIL code used for the UMIST student fashion show.
Some things to bear in mind with live streaming
This event was a public seminar on xDSL broadband access technologies with speakers from the industry. The requirement was to obtain a good quality video of the presentations and then to create the streaming media afterwards. The set up was to use a camera crew with 2 cameras, lights, fixed and roving mics, audio and video mixing, etc.
The videotapes were edited and then used to generate the streaming video using a NT workstation running RealProducer Basic. The resulting presentation is shown in Figure 3. The speaker’s slides were converted to jpegs and encoded using RealPix to be synchronised with the presenter’s video.
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| Figure 3: xDSL Presentation by Patrick De Boeck, Telindus K-Net |
The SMIL file used for this is shown in Table 3. There are 6 media inserts covering the presenter’s video, slides, Web site (via logo) and email links for the speaker and the ATC. The body of the code contains a switch element to differentiate 3 different streaming bands - 150Kbps, 80Kbps, 20Kbps - and to stream a different encoding of the presentation slides and the presenter’s video according to the access bandwidth at the client end. The resulting presentation can be seen at [13].
| <smil> <head> <meta name="title" content="Telindus K-Net xDSL Presentation"/> <meta name="author" content="Advanced Telematics Centre"/> <layout> <root-layout background-color="black" width="650" height="400"/> <region id="background" z-index="1" left="0" top="0" width="650" height="400" /> <region id="atc-email" z-index="2" left="75" top="362" width="500" height="20" /> <region id="media" z-index="2" left="20" top="124" width="180" height="140" /> <region id="presentation" z-index="2" left="203" top="15" width="440" height="330" /> <region id="speaker-email" z-index="2" left="12" top="95" width="180" height="20" /> <region id="speaker-logo" z-index="2" left="50" top="33" width="111" height="50" /> <region id="atc-logo" z-index="2" left="30" top="350" width="30" height="36" /> </layout> </head> <body> <par> <img region="background" src="background.gif" fill="freeze" /> <ref region="speaker-email" src="speaker.rt" fill="freeze" /> <ref region="atc-email" src="atc.rt" fill="freeze" /> <img region="speaker-logo" src="telindus.gif?url=http://www.telindusk.net/" fill="freeze" /> <img region="atc-logo" src="atc.gif?url=http://www.telematics.eu.org/" fill="freeze" /> <switch> <par system-bitrate="150000"> <img region="presentation" src="telindushighband.rp" fill="freeze" /> <video region="media" src="telindushighband.rm" fill="freeze" /> </par> <par system-bitrate="80000"> <img region="presentation" src="telindusmidband.rp" fill="freeze" /> <video region="media" src="telindusmidband.rm" fill="freeze" /> </par> <par system-bitrate="20000"> <img region="presentation" src="telinduslowband.rp" fill="freeze" /> <video region="media" src="telinduslowband.rm" fill="freeze" /> </par> </switch> </par> </body> </smil> |
Table 3: SMIL code used for the Telindus K-Net xDSL presentation.
Some things to bear in mind with on-demand encoding
Using video streaming in a live teaching situation and linking in presentation slides and other Web material is not straightforward. Generation tools have yet to appear before this process becomes more automated and easier. The Click & Go Video project is devising a methodology for using video streaming in real time (lecture-based) and collaborative (tutorial and distance–based) learning. One of the technical underpinnings of the project is to look at automating the set up process using a Web-based SMIL generator. Figure 4 illustrates the type of options that may be presented to the user.
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| Figure 4: 'Click and Go' SMIL generator |
Click and Go Video is being run under the JISC/DNER Programme: Enhancements for Learning and Teaching [14], and will evaluate its methodology with three teaching departments in Manchester - the Department of Textiles, UMIST (teaching of fashion marketing), Manchester Royal Infirmary (teaching of surgery) and the Department of Hospitality and Tourism, MMU (teaching of catering). Each of these case studies requires a different set of video production techniques and interaction for the learner covering:
Over 2001/2002, the project will be running a series of workshops on video streaming and producing ‘how to do it’ guides together with advice on learning and teaching best practice. Further details are available on the Click and Go Video Web site [15].
In finishing this paper, the Advanced Telematics Centre has just completed another live Webcast, this time for the International Association of TEFL Conference in Brighton. The opening keynote speaker, Professor Carol Chapelle, from Iowa State University came in over an Internet videoconference link to Edinburgh University and from there over an ISDN6 link to the conference in Brighton, with the videoconference being picked up by Manchester University and streamed out over the Web. Despite the rather complex connection set up, the streaming worked. There were even email responses coming back to Brighton from people who were picking up the stream and who were able to have their questions relayed to the speaker. It was particularly fitting since the theme of the presentation was about the use of Web technology in TEFL. See [16] for the recorded session.
Streaming video technology has clearly reached a state where it can start to be used effectively. As the process of capturing and exporting media clips becomes easier and more straightforward, and set up tools become more widely available, then we will start to see a rapid take-up and expansion of its use. Take a look at the Scottish Parliament site [17]. This is really a vision of the sort of media enriched Web site that we can increasingly expect to see.
Many thanks to Paul Hammond-White from the Click and Go Video project, and from Jules Newgrosh and Fotis Zapheiropoulos at the Advanced Telematics Centre, for all their help and advice given in researching this paper.
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Jim Strom
Project Director
Advanced Telematics Centre
University of Manchester
MANCHESTER
M13 9PL
United Kingdom
jim.strom@man.ac.uk
< http://www.telematics.eu.org/>
Phone: +44 161 868 0545
Fax: +44 161 868 0565
Jim Strom is employed as a Team Leader for Telematics Applications at Manchester Computing, University of Manchester. His responsibilities cover management of the Advanced Telematics Centre, which provides advice and practical support to regional SMEs and public sector organisations in the use of interactive Internet technologies for business development and innovation. He is also the Project Director for the Click and Go Video project. Over the last 15 years he has been involved in university teaching for communications networks and distributed systems. Recent research covers Internet-based electronic commerce for SMEs in the local economy and the evaluation of IP-based desktop videoconferencing and streaming resources for deployment across city and regional network infrastructures.
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For citation purposes:
Strom, J. "Streaming Video: A Look Behind The Scenes", Cultivate Interactive, issue
4, 7 May 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue4/scenes/>
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By Elhanan Adler and Orly Simon - May 2001
Elhanan Adler and Orly Simon describe how the Jewish National and University Library (JNUL) has begun a digitisation project aimed at making many of its unique collections accessible to remote users [1]. The first stage of this project, recently completed, is the digitisation and cataloging of the JNUL's unique collection of some 1200 ketubbot (Jewish marriage contracts). This collection contains both manuscript and printed ketubbot from a wide variety of countries and time periods, many of them beautifully illuminated. The search engine allows access by country, city, date, and all persons named (bride, groom, witnesses), and retrieves colour images in several resolutions.
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The Jewish National and University Library (JNUL), founded over 100 years ago, today serves a threefold purpose as the Central Library of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the National Library of the State of Israel and the National Library of the Jewish People. In its latter role (chronologically its initial one) the JNUL strives to collect materials of all types which reflect or represent the history of the Jewish people and its culture throughout the world. The JNUL collections of Hebraica and Judaica are the largest in the world.
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| Figure 1: Ketubba. Jerusalem, Eretz
Israel Paper 64 x 56 cm. |
In the last two years the JNUL has embarked upon a major digitisation project aimed at making significant parts of its collections accessible worldwide. With the aid of a multi-year grant from the David and Fela Shapell Family, digitisation of several entire collections at the JNUL is underway covering manuscripts, rare and ancient maps, Jewish music and fragile printed materials. The ketubbot collection is the first one to be completed and made Internet accessible.
For over 2000 years Jewish law has required that every husband present his wife, at the time of their marriage, with a marriage contract or ketubba, guaranteeing the wife's financial rights in case of the husband's death or divorce. While the core text of the ketubba has changed very little over the ages (and much of the text is still written in the ancient Aramaic language), over generations various local customs found their way into the legal text of the ketubba. Their decoration often reflects the Jewish art of the locality and period. Some ketubbot are ornate, illuminated manuscripts which are considered valuable works of art and can be found in museums and private collections throughout the world. Even today many couples will forgo the standard printed ketubba provided by rabbinic authorities in favor of a personalised, illustrated one prepared by a calligrapher which is subsequently framed and prominently displayed in the couple’s home. Ketubbot are therefore a rich source of material on Jewish history, customs, genealogy and art. The fact that, as legal documents, ketubbot always contain exact dates and place names also allows their absolute identification with specific communities and periods.
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| Figure 2: Ketubba. Herat, Afghanistan,
1812 Paper 59.5 x 42.5 cm. |
The collection of Ketubbot in the Jewish National and University Library numbers over 1200 items, arguably the largest such collection in the world. The ketubbot originate in over 50 different countries, providing a wide gamut of both textual and artistic variation. While most are entirely handwritten, some are printed forms with the personal details added by hand, and there are even some blank forms used in specific localities. The earliest ketubba in the collection is from Eretz Israel and dates from 1024; it was preserved in the Cairo Geniza, one of the most important sources of medieval Jewish manuscripts. The most recent is from Jerusalem in the year 2000. From the start of the project it was decided to digitise the entire collection and not just selected items as it was felt that researchers would benefit most from access to as many of these items as possible. For the same reason the JNUL has invited other libraries and collections to join in the project by depositing digital images of their ketubbot at the JNUL site, and adding their metadata to the project catalog. The JNUL hopes that this project will ultimately expand to be a world repository of ketubbot.
The JNUL collection provides an excellent opportunity to study the local customs and legal stipulations which were practiced in various Jewish communities. The JNUL collection includes many ketubbot with additions relating to such topics as dowry, inheritance, polygamy (practiced for many years in some Oriental communities) and care of children from previous marriages. In North Africa and Yemen, the ketubba often contained an obligation by the groom not to force his wife to move to another city without her consent, and in some ketubbot from Syria and Eretz Israel, there is a clause barring the husband from going on distant journeys without leaving his wife a conditional bill of divorce, to spare her the status of abandoned wife (aguna) in case of his disappearance. An interesting local custom of the town of Ioannina, Greece, has the groom subsequently attesting to the bride’s virginity as an addendum to the ketubba (this addition is found in all five Ioannina ketubbot in the collection, spanning a period of 100 years).
The JNUL collection contains hundreds of illuminated ketubbot whose border decorations reflect both Jewish texts and symbols and the prevailing art of the locality. Italian illuminated ketubbot show the strong influence of the secular artistic preferences (human figures, nature scenes) while in ketubbot from Islamic countries geometric designs are prevalent.
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| Figure 3: Ketubba. Rome, Italy,
1771 Parchment 83 x 51 cm. |
Since many of the ketubbot are works of art, it was decided to film and scan each Ketubba to a single high standard appropriate to the quality of the originals. Accordingly, the ketubbot were filmed using Cibachrome 35mm colour microfilm, and subsequently scanned using Kodak Photo-CD Pro. The resulting 72mb TIFF images were then individually processed using Photoshop to produce three public images: a “thumbnail” of 9.5cm. height (aver. size: 31k), a screen width image 750 pixels wide (aver. size: 200k), and a large image, no-reduction conversion from TIFF (aver. size: 1.5 mb). The latter image, equivalent to viewing the ketubba via a magnifying glass, almost always allows exact reading of the text. In several cases where the text was particularly difficult to read, an additional specially enhanced image was added.
The photography was done in-house by the JNUL Photographic Department. Scanning, post-scanning image processing and other graphic needs were outsourced to a commercial service bureau. Quality assurance of the images was done by the JNUL Automation Department.
The above public images are all saved at resolution of 72 DPI and bear a copyright notice. This resolution provides excellent viewing but is not of sufficient quality for commercial reproduction. High quality copies can be produced by the JNUL from the archival TIFF master files upon request.
Detailed cataloging of the ketubbot was done by the Manuscript Department of the JNUL (previously only brief cataloging had been done). Cataloging was based on MARC format with a few local fields added. In order to be both world-wide accessible as well as faithful to the original text, many fields were entered twice – once in English or Romanized form, and again in the original Hebrew characters. In order to maximize usefulness of the project for genealogical research all names (bride, groom, witnesses, etc.) were recorded.
The data was entered into an ALEPH-300 database (ALEPH-300 being the standard library system of all Israeli university libraries). The various fields are searchable using the ALEPH-300 WWW public catalog software and the bibliographic records display the URLs of each ketubba.
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| Figure 4: ALEPH record |
In consideration of the fact that the use of library catalog software requires some expertise, and that we expect that most casual browsing of the collection will be by country/city, we have also create a single html geographic listing with direct access to each ketubba.
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| Figure 5: Access by country list |
The initial display page of each ketubba provides brief bibliographic information and a “thumbnail” image of the ketubba. Links on this page lead to full bibliographic information (the ALEPH record) as well as to the additional, larger images.
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| Figure 6: example of ketubba page |
A series of virtual exhibitions based on the collection, and prepared by relevant scholars is planned. The first exhibition on Jerusalem in ketubba decoration is now in preparation.
The JNUL ketubbot collection digitisation project is but the first of a series of projects aimed at making the Library’s collections accessible worldwide. Further stages of the digitisation program will involve additional JNUL collections such as manuscript books, ancient Holy Land maps, the Albert Einstein Archive and the National Sound Archives.
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Elhanan Adler
Director, Israel Center for Digital Information Services
c/o Jewish National and University Library
P.O.B. 34165
Jerusalem,
Israel
Orly Simon
Head, Computation Department
Jewish National and University Library
P.O.B. 34165
Jerusalem,
Israel
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For citation purposes:
Adler, E. and Simon, O. "900 Years of Jewish Marriage Contracts at the Jewish National and University Library", Cultivate Interactive, issue
4, 7 May 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue4/ketubbot/>
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ISSN 1471-3225 |