Community media archive
From Access Humboldt - Wiki
Thousands of community groups and over one million volunteer producers, directors, presenters and technical staff participate in PEG access production annually. These efforts result in more than 20,000 hours of new local programming each week!
Programs in this Collection are shared from Community Media Centers around the country.
If you're interested in finding out more about the Community Media Archive or contributing video to it, contact john@accesshumboldt.net
Contents |
History
The Community Media Archive started as a partnership between The Internet Archive and Access Humboldt.
During the fall of 2008, Access Humboldt prototyped an automated link between their Telvue Princeton playback server and the Internet Archive. However, shows were being uploaded to the generic Open Source Movies collection. They were looking for more of a "presence" on archive.org and found that a "collection" was needed in order to get a "landing page" on archive.org. In addition to solving their own issue, they decided to approach archive.org about setting up a Community Media collection to establish a place for other centers.
In December of 2008, a conversation between Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, and Sean McLaughlin, Executive Director of Access Humboldt led to a collection manager being assigned to the project and the establishment of the Access Humboldt collection as a sub collection of the Community Media and News and Public Affairs collections of the Internet Archive.
In April of 2009, Access Humboldt contacted WCCA TV in Worcester, MA. Searches of archive.org showed that WCCA had uploaded several hundred shows over the past 3 years, but that they were uploaded to the generic Open Source Movies collection. After WCCA joined the CMA, the several hundred previously posted shows were added to their new collection by the Internet Archive staff.
In July of 2009, John and Jesse presented their work on the Community Media Archive at the 2009 Alliance of Community Media national conference in Portland. The presentation emphasized the technology-agnostic character of the CMA, the benefits of partnering with The Internet Archive and how other community media centers could get set up as contributors to the CMA. As a result, additional centers expressed interest in joining the CMA.
In February 2010, John started work on an Enhanced Metadata project for video files on the Internet Archive. Details were gathered for every video uploaded to archive.org from 2006 through June 30, 2010 (yes, all 445,000 of them). The key fields missing from the Internet Archive's search engine were runtime and video quality (screen size, a/v parameters, bitrate). In time for the ACM 2010 conference in Pittsburgh, a list was produced of all 2,700 MPEG2 videos with a screen resolution of 720x480 and a runtime of 27 minutes to an 1 hour and 2 minutes was distributed with hyperlinks to the show's detail page and a download link to the MPEG2 version on archive.org (see 30-60.xls link in the ACM 2010 Presentation Links below). These are the videos that would be the best candidates for re-broadcast on a PEG channel because they shouldn't need to be transcoded. Further filters could be added based on the presence of key words in the description or subject fields.
In early 2011, John identified 3 NASA children's education series (NASA Connect, Destination Tomorrow and NASA Science Files) from the list of MPEG2 video distributed at the 2010 ACM conference. the 3 series comprised 37 hours of video in 61 episodes. He scripted the download of these episodes from the Internet Archive, and wrote an interface to Facil's program table to automatically insert the metadata for these episodes into Facil as well as automating the insert of the MPEG2 video files into the Princeton B3400 playback server. As a result, the 61 episodes were ready for inclusion in Access Humboldt's schedule without further manual data entry.
In preparation for the 2011 ACM conference, John created summaries of the items uploaded, number of downloads, file size of derived and original files for collections in the Community Media Archive and related collections like those of the Open Media Project.
At the 2011 ACM conference, he presented a proposal for a Community Media Archive upload service which would allow access centers without adequate bandwidth or IT resources to get their video added to the Community Media Archive using SDHC cards and postal mail. Access Humboldt is looking for 3-5 access centers who would like to particpate in the pilot of this upload service.
As a result of a discussion at the conference, the Open Media Project and it's subcollections, Denver Open Media and BAVC, merged with the Community Media Archive collection.
Shortly after the conference, the Community Media Archive collection was made available on the Roku box as part of an unofficial Internet Archive channel. To add this channel to your Roku box, go to https://owner.roku.com/add/NMJS5
In the spring of 2012, John created a "TED Talks" collection on archive.org that contained MPEG2 versions of talks without trailing commercials. At the beginning of the project, there were over 400 talks that contained trailing commercials. By July of 2012, the number had shrunk to about 40. The collection is updated daily Monday - Friday. The collection was meant to demonstrate how rich metadata aids in discovery of new items and to encourage media centers to more fully describe their submissions.
At the 2012 ACM conference in Chicago, John presented a 90 minute workshop on the Community Media Archive project and how to get started with it.
In the fall of 2012, John assisted Somerville Community Access TV with establishing a collection and uploading over 400 videos from their backlog of programs.
In early 2013, John returned to his "enhanced metadata" project of 2010 to demonstrate the value of adding metadata after an item had been uploaded to the Internet Archive. Using the Access Humboldt collection as a test, he identified that 75% of the 3,400 items in the collection could be associated with 66 series. After review and correction by Jerusha Wilhemi, AH's Media Distribution Manager, he uploaded a "series" metadata element to 2,774 items in the collection. Using "series:series_name" notation combined with the "one button" RSS feed generator on the archive's "advanced search" page, visitors can now subscribe to series by RSS feed. Similar "series name" analysis has been performed on Worcester's, Denver's and Seattle's collections. Updates of those collection with series name is awaiting approval of the respective Access Centers.
Late Jaunuary 2013, the Roku channel that contains the Community Media Archive collections from the Internet Archive was updated to include the following access centers: Dakota Media Accesss, Denver Open Media, Foxboro Cable Access, Maine Community TV Archives, Media Edge, Mendocino Coast TV, PhillyCAM, Rogue Valley TV , Seattle Community Media, Somerville Community Access Television.
In March 2013, John helped the Veterans Helping Veterans program and it's producer Sheryl Shaffer, get a collection established on the Internet Archive. This show had been distributed via bliptv, pegmedia.org, youtube and social media. John uploaded the backlog of 19 shows from DVD copies. He also started downloading current episodes from youtube and transcoding MPEG2 versions for the collection for download by other access centers.
ACM 2013 Presentation Session Handouts
PDF Version of Community Media Archive presentation
HTML Version of Community Media Archive mindmap
Wendy Blom's Case Study of Somerville Community Access TV
iPhone Screenshots of the Community Media Archive on the Roku
Internet Archive URLs of Interest
Internet Archive Search and RSS Feed Examples
"An Evening at the Archive" PDF announcement
ACM 2012 Presentation Session Handouts
Internet Archive URLs of Interest
PDF Version of Statistics for the Community Media Archive and Related Collections as of 07/08/2012
Internet Archive Feature Stack Diagram - Bold Version
ACM 2011 Presentation Session Handouts
PDF of Statistics for the Community Media Archive and related collections as of 07/07/11
Two page PDF version of John's vision (2010-11-10) for the future of the CMA
ACM 2010 Presentation Session Handouts
PDF version of Scope of Internet Archive Video Collections
Internet Archive URLs of Interest
Internet Archive Search and RSS Feed Examples
ACM 2009 Presentation Session Handouts
PDF version of ACM 2009 Presentation Session Handout
Interactive HTML version of ACM 2009 Presentation
Automation
Access Humboldt has been developing an automated system to contribute presenters content to the Community Media Archive at the Internet Archive. John Hauser, the lead in developing relations with Internet Archive was also in charge of designing, programming, and implementing the automation software to allow the Access Humboldt operations team a hands-off approach while ensuring all content ends up online. Initially the system was developed to draw all necessary metadata and MPEG2 files directly from Telvue's Princeton Server. As Access Humboldt migrated to use Facil for it's programming interface we redeveloped the software to pull all program metadata directly from Facil and connect to the files located on the Princeton Server's storage system. Once combined and inserted into a database the upload process to Internet Archive begins. Once the file upload is complete and verified Internet Archive handles the transcode process to provide more web-friendly formats such as h.264 encoded MPEG4 fies and Ogg Theora. Once the files are available at archive.org they can be downloaded at full MPEG2 broadcast quality or viewed online in an embedded flash video player. In depth Internet Archive automation details
Participants
Current contributors include:
- Access Humboldt - Community media programs from Humboldt County, California, USA - Locally produced, non-commercial TV programs.
- WCCA - WCCA TV 13 is a community media public access center located in Worcester Massachusetts. The videos archived here reflect the interest and/or stories of the citizens of Worcester Mass. produced or presented originally on WCCA TV 13. You will find these works will cover a time span that covers the late 1980's through today. Video subjects include, but are not limited to, personal stories, music and performance videos, and various community produced programs presenting all types of subjects. Visit wccatv.com for further information.
- Falmouth Community Television - The mission of Falmouth Community Television is to provide their community with access to information technology and training in its use so that individuals and groups have a forum to communicate their ideas, information and concerns to the community-at-large. As a non-profit organization, FCTV is committed to expanding community access to its facilities by seeking out and offering its members additional information avenues.
- Easton Massachusetts - Moving image archive for the Town of Easton, Massachusetts. This archive is administered by Easton Community Access Television in partnership with the Ames Free Library.
- Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC) - The Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC), based in San Francisco, California, inspires social change by enabling the sharing of diverse stories through art, education and technology. BAVC manages San Francisco's public access television station, SF Commons, and numerous innovative adult and youth training programs.
- Davis Media Access - Davis Media Access (DMA) is a community media center serving Davis, CA and surrounding areas. DMA's main projects are DCTV Channel 15 on the Comcast cable system - public access television; Educational Access Channel 17 on the Comcast cable system; and KDRT-LP, 95.7 FM, Low-power community radio for Davis and beyond.
- Open Stage Media - Open Stage Media is Schenectady New York's Public, Educational, and Government Access Channels broadcasting on Time Warner and Verizon Cable TV systems. We also are streaming live on the web at www.openstagemedia.org. Built upon a 30 year tradition of public access in our city, OSM has recently partnered with Proctors Arts Center (www.proctors.org) to build an entirely new community media center for our citizens.
- Fall River Community Television - Fall River Community Television (FRCTV) serves as the public access television operation for the City of Fall River, MA. Our facility is located at Bristol Community College (BCC).
- Open Media Project - The Open Media Project (OMP) is collaborative, open-source software development effort between multiple public access stations and community technology centers to free the staff of public access stations and community technology centers from many repetitive tasks. Subcollections of the OMP are Denver Open Media, Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC) in San Francisco and Seattle Community Media.
Documentation
URLS for Community Media Archive Presentations
- Access Humboldt
- Community Media Collection
- Access Humboldt Collection
- Browse by Subject
- View Tag Cloud
- Item Details Page
- Item Metadata Edit - this will work only if you have "edit this item" rights
- Details Page - Government Meeting
- Shows separate audio files as well as video files
- http://www.archive.org/details/AH-fcc_7-06-09
- Advanced Search Results Example - most recent 50 Creative Commons licensed shows by date'
- Internet Archive Advanced Usage FAQ
- Internet Archive - JSON Interface
- Internet Archive S3- Like API
- Google Search "Portugal de Amores"
- Wolfram Alpha - Bandwidth Calculation - Time to transfer 2.2GB at 3mbits/sec
- Wolfram Alpha - Bandwidth Calculation - Transfer 2.2GB in 1 Hour
