Uploaded 12 November 1999

This paper addresses two of the three key themes ofinfog99[1]  , namely: the provision of user access to digitally delivered screen products, and related issues for screen education in the digital environment. It describes research and development work undertaken during 1998 and 1999 by a University of Glasgow consortium, led by the UK’s Performing Arts Data Service (PADS), on a publicly funded pilot project concerned with the Networking of Moving Images for University Teaching and Research.

The BFI/BUFVC/JISC Imagination/Universities Networking of Moving Images Project 

The Imagination/Universities Project was the first move by national agencies in the UK to test digital delivery of moving images and consider the implications of scaling-up to a widely available national service for UK Higher Education. These are the principal organisers and funders of the PADS project. The activities of the British Film Institute (BFI) should need no introduction to the readers of this journal: their participation in the project lines up with their interest in opening up their collections in the National Film and Television Archive (NFTVA) to wider audiences and encouraging more extensive and more effective use of those valuable resources in educational contexts. The BFI, after an unsuccessful funding bid to the UK’s Millennium Commission in 1996, aimed at creating The Imagination Network using digital and network technologies to make the archive more widely available across the UK, retained its more modest, but still distinctly challenging, aspirations for university access to moving images and sought a partnership with the Higher Education sector to bring this about. This is how the word “Imagination” survives in the present project’s title.

The British Universities Film and Video Council (BUFVC) 

The BUFVC, a membership body supported – like both PADS itself and this project – by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), “exists to promote the production, study and use of moving image media for higher education and research”. It offers a wide range of services, including distribution of a valuable CD-ROM database of audio-visual materials, the sale to Higher Education institutions of a sizeable collection of specialist programmes across the full subject range (not only film or media studies). The BUFVC offers research, reading, viewing and video copying facilities at its offices in London; supports, undertakes and disseminates research; and provides an off-air recording back-up service of the daily output of the five British terrestrial TV channels. The BUFVC does this under a special agreement with the Educational Recording Agency (ERA), which administers off-air recording licences to specified educational establishments under Section 35 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988. Consequently all is not lost if an instructor in a BUFVC member institution neglects to tape an essential programme off-air: under this scheme you have the opportunity for two months after transmission to acquire a copy which can then be used legally in the teaching situation. Of particular interest to those who look forward to wider availability of digital moving image resources for educational use is the fact that the BUFVC does not see any legal obstacle to the ERA licence being interpreted as including digitised versions of off-air broadcast material as long as the original has not been re-edited. Indeed, not so long ago the BUFVC was exciting readers of its regular Newsletter, Viewfinder , about the possibility of a kind of legally constituted “digital buffer”, the contents of which could eventually be distributed to users over networks, taking advantage of “downtime” by downloading during low periods of bandwidth usage. Whilst this dream is not yet a reality, the BUFVC’s genuine commitment to the dissemination of moving image culture makes it a natural partner with the BFI in the present pilot project.

The Joint Information Systems Committee 

JISC, the third partner in the joint project, is an agency of the UK Higher Education Funding Councils, whose mission is “to stimulate and enable the cost effective exploitation of information systems and to provide a high quality national network infrastructure for the UK higher education and research councils communities”. JISC makes available funding for a wide variety of initiatives to help it achieve this mission, and funded the pilot, through its Committee on Electronic Information (CEI), because of its interest in a future national service of moving image delivery (alongside an existing commitment to a similar service for still images and future plans for audio resources).

The Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS)

PADS is one of five digital data Service Providers of the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) funded by JISC, initially for three years to the end of July 1999, but subsequently granted continuation funding for a transitional year to July 2000 to permit the detailed bid for a further three-year cycle of continuation funding to be developed. Following an extremely favourable and positive formal review of the AHDS by JISC culminating in May 1999, a recommendation has been made for continuation funding which will extend the life of the Service to July 2003. There is an AHDS Executive based at King’s College, University of London answerable to an external Steering Committee. The five Service Providers comprise two mature organisations with long digital pedigrees – the History Data Service (HDS) at the University of Essex and theOxford Text Archive (OTA) at the University of Oxford, alongside three “start-up” services – theArchaeology Data Service (ADS), which is a consortium of university and other archaeology interests centred on the University of York, the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS), hosted by the Surrey Institute of Art and Design and, of course, PADS which is a Faculty of Arts consortium at the University of Glasgow involving my own department – Theatre, Film and Television Studies – and the Department of Music. Myself and Dr Stephen Arnold of the Music Department are PADS’ grant-holders and co-directors.

The remit of the AHDS is to collect, catalogue, manage, preserve and encourage the re-use of digital resources which result from or support humanities research and teaching. These resources make up collections which are either acquired under agreement from individual depositors, project teams, and institutions, or made available to AHDS users through co-operating digital archives and information services.

The Performing Arts Data Service (PADS)

Within the wider ambit of the AHDS, PADS is charged with the task of building and sustaining a collection based on digital research data resources in:

* performed, notated and recorded music
* musical theatre and opera
* film and video
* broadcast arts
* drama, theatre and performance art
* dance

Its remit can be summarised thus:

* developing a collection policy
* building a catalogue
* identifying existing scholarly resources in performing arts suitable for inclusion in digital archives
* promoting standards and best practice in the creation, description, preservation, and distribution of digital information
* promoting the benefits of the AHDS networked environment to data owners and potential data depositors/creators
* researching mechanisms for effective serving out of time-based audio and video data

In the early phase of its existence PADS has focussed on the following priorities:

* implementation of a sophisticated technical infrastructure
* pilot collections projects
* development of collaborations with stakeholders
* user needs investigations
* metadata research and implementation

Hence, a pilot project dealing with moving image delivery and dissemination over computer networks falls squarely within the natural area of endeavour of a fledgling service which is attempting to build from nothing to a critical mass of data arranged across a series of collections and involving a range of data types. I hope to illustrate in this article the close coincidence between the particular aims of the project and the wider remit of PADS, so that our involvement in the pilot project can be seen as a natural extension of PADS’ core activities.

Project Development 

The first announcement of the project was at a widely publicised day-long consultation event organised by the BUFVC at the National Film Theatre, London in December 1996. Thereafter the project partners met to plan a “proof-of-concept” pilot project with the aim of “testing the concept of providing on-line access and search capabilities for moving pictures encoded for use in university teaching and research”. It was recognised from the outset that the pilot would be likely to challenge the very limits of existing technology and network capacity within the UK Higher Education environment, and the decision taken that it should be structured to take account of parallel investigations relating to data standards, inter-operability and other relevant strategies encouraging the development of what, in the UK, has come to be known, somewhat ambitiously, as the Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER). Rather than take the economically and strategically unsound route of inventing everything from scratch, the partners resolved that the project would, where possible, draw upon existing expertise, utilising appropriate staff, equipment and infrastructure within the Higher Education community. This is where PADS saw an opportunity when the project was announced and participants were invited to bid.

At this preparatory stage, the project group took some basic decisions which have underpinned the whole experience. In particular, they agreed that the pilot should seek to provide temporary access to some thirty hours of moving image material sourced principally from the BFI’s National Film and Television Archive (NFTVA). It was also decided to encourage pilot sites to augment this material with a limited amount of moving image material sourced locally, and on which pilot sites could be expected not to need to seek clearance of rights. Three academic disciplines, with particular educational requirements for the use of moving images in teaching and research, and offering user-bases in arts, humanities and science, were targeted: Film Studies, Social History and Medicine, and specialist subject advisory groups were assembled during Summer 1997 to advise on the selection of suitable content in each of these fields. After selection, the BFI began, in Autumn 1997, the process of clearing the rights on the NFTVA material for the purposes of the pilot. A call for proposals went out to the Higher Education community, eight bids to serve as pilot sites were received and four were short-listed, before two – coming from different parts of the UK and offering divergent approaches which would thereby broaden the test-bed – were selected. The Glasgow/PADS consortium was one; the other was the University of Glamorgan on behalf of the then newly-formed South Wales Metropolitan Area Network (MAN), which, like its counterparts in other parts of the UK, including in particular Scotland, provides co-ordinated connectivity between Higher Education institutions in a particular region over high-speed, state-of-the-art computer networks. (It was encouraging to see that for once the Celtic fringe had beaten off all other pretenders and dispelled the prospect of metro-centricity in the conduct of the project!). As will become clear, Glasgow/PADS was seen as offering a high quality, and possibly therefore more expensive, model, while the South Wales MAN proposed a lower-cost solution using NT server technology running AVI files into Microsoft NetShow and NetTheatre applications. Alongside selection of the two pilot sites, a Project Manager was recruited on a consultancy basis and located at his home institution of the University of East Anglia, while a Project Steering Group was established with representation from the BFI, the BUFVC, the Project Manager and the two pilot sites. The Manchester Visualisation Centre (a part of the University of Manchester’s Computing Service) was appointed as the digitising agency for the project.

The pilot sites effectively began work on the project at the beginning of 1998 and initially the project was to have run to the end of that year. However, unforeseen delays of various kinds quickly showed such a timetable to be unrealistic, with the result that the project only came to an end in July 1999. Indeed the final Project Report has recently (September 1999) been finalised for consideration by JISC’s CEI, when discussions begin on future initiatives in the field of digital moving image delivery for the UK Higher Education sector [2] .

The PADS pilot 

When PADS began its work as a pilot site, it assigned its Systems Manager, Steve Malloch to work full-time on it. Indeed, the Directors of PADS are deeply indebted to Steve, to Catherine Owen, Collections Manager, and to Celia Duffy, formerly Project Manager (but now departed for pastures new) for their excellent work on the project at different stages, but it is Steve Malloch who has been with it through every twist and turn and whom I must particularly thank for the technical information in this paper.

Realising the importance of documenting and reporting results, PADS interpreted the chief Aim of the project in slightly more detail as follows:

to investigate, research, demonstrate, document and report on the most effective management of digitised moving image materials, along with associated metadata implemented to accepted cataloguing standards, so as to facilitate their efficient and user-friendly delivery over fast computer networks in support of high quality teaching and research.

Clearly, we were keen to propose PADS as a pilot site because we could identify real synergies between the project’s objectives and the special remit of PADS concerning the development of on-line digital data collections for the performing arts. We reasoned that we were already grappling with the challenges of accessioning, mounting, describing and disseminating multimedia objects and instances of time-based media and that, in the interests of interoperability, we should have a stake in this project. We had already, at the time the project was announced, done a great deal of detailed research into technical solutions for time-based media and the wide range of data types encountered across the performing arts. We had specified and installed what we considered to be a highly appropriate and flexible technical architecture. We had also done extensive investigation into user needs through a series of preliminary workshops [3]  and had played a leading role in national discussions about the representation of metadata attached to moving image resources, focussing specifically upon Dublin Core attributes [4] . Moreover, we had already decided to try and investigate for ourselves, for the ultimate good of our service, many of the same kinds of issues envisaged by the pilot. We were, and remain, interested in collaborating with others in the UK, as well as tapping into overseas experiences, to progress the idea of a larger-scale moving image delivery service for UK Higher Education.

Content

Though PADS’ core activity concerns the Performing Arts, and hence we were most of all interested in the implications of the pilot for Film and Television Studies, we got a very pleasant surprise when we found that the Social History footage selected for digitisation by the subject panel consisted entirely of classic British television of the 1950s and 1960s (I suspect I haveRichard Paterson of the BFI to thank for that, since he would have known only too well that the commitment of Glasgow Film and Television academics to that material would have been at least the equal to that of any social historians!). This material included such landmark programmes as Ken Loach’s acclaimed drama-documentary,  Cathy Come Home (Jeremy Sandford/Ken Loach/Tony Garnett, BBC, 1966), Denis Mitchell’s legendary documentary of the 1950s, Morning in the Streets (Denis Mitchell, BBC, 1959), Peter Watkin’s controversial play about nuclear holocaust, The War Game , written in 1966 but banned from transmission until 1985 by the BBC, as well as a range of programmes covering the early years of ITV in the 1950s, early quiz shows like Double Your Money (A-R, 1955-68) and an episode of the celebrated sitcom, Steptoe and Son (BBC, 1962-74).

Key activities 

Project activities at the Glasgow site fell under three distinct headings:

* accessioning of material, including design of user interface, checking metadata and content, loading/installing materials
* testing of the system and its data contents for technical evaluation purposes and to ensure robustness and ease of use
* demonstrations and workshops for academic staff and students and the encouragement of systematic user feedback

Technical specification 

The PADS server architecture is based around two Silicon Graphics (SGI) Origin 200 servers and the Hyperwave database information management system. The Media Server runs Mediabase software which provides a web-based interface for accessing the MPEG video and audio material, and optimises the operating system for high rate input/output including internal bandwidth guarantees, with the option of reserving bandwidth for high demand video titles. Both the Mediabase 2 and the newer Mediabase 3 versions were used and comparisons made between them, as well as between the two client-side software decoding applications bundled with Mediabase 3 – the CompCore and DirectShow MPEG players. The Media Server has both 155Mbps ATM and 10/100Mbps Ethernet connections, and operates with some 50Gb of disk space on a single ultra-fast SCSI bus. It is installed in the central campus switch room of the University of Glasgow’s Computing Service, some two hundred yards from the building occupied by PADS and the Department of Theatre, Film & Television Studies where the majority of the client side experimentation has taken place. Fibre optic cable links the buildings which are two of the best networked facilities on campus.

The sub-net on which the Media Server is installed is a test network not used for regular traffic and thus has no impact on conventional users; its use has been donated by the University’s Computing Service whose staff have provided significant network support throughout the pilot. The normal connection between this sub-net and the parent building sub-net is by means of a 100Mbps switch, though additional or alternative hardware has been installed for each testing stage of the pilot. Initial testing of the server infrastructure used a half-hour television current affairs programme which had been digitised by the Manchester Visualisation Centre at a number of different bit-rates: MPEG1 at 1.25Mbps, 2.5Mbps and 5Mbps, and MPEG2 at 2.5Mbps and 5Mbps, as well as a sample of locally sourced material from Glasgow University’s Media Services Unit coded at three different bit-rates: 1.4Mbps, 2Mbps and 2.5Mbps. Subsequent tests used a range of material encoded by Manchester at 2.5Mbps.

In order to provide an interesting technical contrast with our own SGI infrastructure, PADS arranged for the medical material to be mounted separately on a server maintained elsewhere on campus by the University’s Department of Computing Science, which is separately conducting an ambitious multimedia research initiative known as the Revelation Project, which has the aim of persuading users in diverse academic fields to store complex data content with them while its educational uses are under development. The Revelation Projectuses Sun server technology with a Sun Media Centre for the streaming of video. On the client side, the principal recipients of streamed video have been a number of Pentium II PC desktop workstations, with CPUs ranging from 200MHz to 266MHz , all with 64MB RAM and either Matrox Millenium or ATI graphics cards (with 4MB RAM), 10/100Mbps Ethernet cards, 17 inch monitors and running Windows 95. A PC laptop with an Intel 166MMX processor, 32MB RAM, 2MB Trident graphics on a 12.1 inch screen , and a 10/100Mbps Ethernet PCMCIA card was also used for testing, as were two 90MHz PowerMacs running Mac OS 7.5 and two elderly SGI Indy machines with 133Mhz processors, both with 96 MB RAM and 24 bit Indy Graphics boards. This array of technology provided a broadly based platform for experimentation and allowed well informed conclusions to be drawn with regard to relative performance. The majority of the PCs are located in the Learning Resources Room of the Department of Theatre, Film & Television Studies, a modern, well equipped computing and videotape viewing laboratory for students which has the advantage of offering excellent access by virtue of its proximity to the PADS offices. When at full complement, it has between sixteen and eighteen fairly high-end PC workstations and is in heavy demand from undergraduate and postgraduate students of screen and theatre studies.

Video streaming was tested over various types of local network technology in the interests of comparing performance and assessing the most reliable configuration so that a stable environment could be presented to users at the evaluation stage. We demonstrated the delivery of moving images from the server on the following:

* conventional contention-based Ethernet (the normal standard for multi-user web and e-mail use at the University)
* dedicated switched fast Ethernet
* fast Ethernet (Revelation Project connectivity)
* IP over ATM
* native ATM
* mixture of Ethernet and ATM (Cambridge Conference demonstration)

Additionally, some comparisons were carried out, using MPEG2 decoding cards, between software and hardware MPEG decoding, and between MPEG1 and MPEG2 content coding. To this end, four different MPEG decoding cards for PC were purchased at prices between £150 and £1000 in order to determine the most advantageous and cost-effective configuration The final project report contains detailed results, analyses and recommendations arising from all these tests.

Data and metadata 

In excess of sixty separate items of moving image and text materials representing the Film Studies and Social History disciplines were mounted on the PADS SGI system, while the medical materials were mounted on the Revelation Sun system. Relevant metadata was received from the BFI in respect of the NFTVA materials, from Glasgow Media Services in respect of the locally sourced materials, and from the North West Film Archive (based in Manchester) which supplied a small amount of selected footage. In each instance, PADS had discussions with the data holder about the nature of the text and its compliance with the Dublin Core. PADS sometimes had to augment the metadata supplied where this was deemed necessary for trouble-free use. In the case of the Film Studies material, which focussed on Hitchcock, and in particular on the silent and sound versions of his film, Blackmail, the BFI additionally supplied various scanned JPEG images and Word documents for use as contextualising study material. This included script extracts, interviews, copies of scholarly articles from Sight and Sound magazine plus pages scanned from BFI publications.

The User Interface developed for the pilot found at the PADS web site, makes good use of a key feature of the PADS digital resource library, namely the browsing and searching facilities enabled by the Hyperwave database system. Users can browse the contents under various classified headings, for example:

* full alphabetical list
* TV of the 1950s and 1960s
* the Alfred Hitchcock collection

User trials and demonstrations 

A number of small-scale workshops and larger-scale public demonstrations were conducted with different types of audiences, using single and multiple video streams, during the later part of 1998 and early 1999. Good quality streaming was successfully achieved both via data projector on to large screens in the Department’s cinema (which doubles as a lecture theatre) and seminar rooms, and to multiple workstations in the computing laboratory. Hence the user extremes of, on the one hand, public exhibition to a cinema full of students viewing on large screen and, on the other, of private individual study at computer workstations could both be amply explored. Demonstrations were also made at a number of conferences held locally in Glasgow, most notably the Screen Studies Conference (July 1998), Digital Resources in the Humanities (September 1998), and the Revelation Project launch (October 1998). The pilot was also referenced at a number of international events, including the International Conference on Digital Libraries, Crete (September 1998) and WebNet98 in Florida (Nov 1998).

The most important large-scale demonstration came just before Christmas 1998 at the Networking Moving Images Conference organised by the BUFVC at Robinson College, University of Cambridge to monitor interim results. This was attended by most of those agencies, project leaders and educators in the UK who recognised the educational value of widespread digital moving image delivery. For this ground-breaking event, a special dispensation on bandwidth and connectivity had been negotiated with UKERNA, the networking authority, so that real-time streaming direct from the PADS servers in Scotland via the UK Higher Education network, SuperJANET to the conference hall in Cambridge could be experienced. Excellent picture and sound quality was achieved and this remains the most comprehensive and impressive live demonstration of the pilot undertaken by PADS.

It was always a cornerstone of the project, one especially dear to the BFI and BUFVC, that there should be some use of the digitised materials in live teaching situations, permitting the receipt of feedback from student users in Higher Education. One problem of arranging this on any significant and consistent scale was that course content in university departments is usually determined well in advance of actual classroom delivery, making it difficult to fit teaching very closely to the available footage. We decided to deal with this problem by setting up workshops and seminar simulations that would bring the project and its materials to the attention of bodies of students, both new to university study and nearing the end of their undergraduate careers. We also thought it useful to share our development work as widely as possible with academics not directly involved with the project. These measures, we believed, would, in combination, produce the kind of user response we needed, and in this we were not disappointed.

In November 1998, the Hitchcock film study resources were integrated into a lecture on film narrative and mise en scène to over one hundred first-year Film & TV students, who were additionally able to access the same materials for repeat viewing and close analysis under computing laboratory conditions over the next several days. Sixty-seven students completed our Evaluation Questionnaire with constructive responses. As a contrast, a much more experienced group of eleven volunteer fourth-year Honours students of Film and Television participated in a hands-on evaluation seminar which was externally moderated by a professional facilitator. We also held an interactive workshop, for twelve Film & Media Studies academics drawn from the neighbouring universities of Stirling, Strathclyde, and Glasgow Caledonian with a view to eliciting their responses as to quality of performance, how they would envisage using such a resource in their teaching in different institutions, and what features they would expect from any future scaled-up enterprise. We also arranged a live demonstration session, using a mixture of Ethernet and ATM, at Glasgow School of Art for staff of that institution and the nearby Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama; this gave us an opportunity to disseminate our materials over ClydeNet, the Central Scottish MAN. Finally, in March 1999, we ran a workshop attended by historians and sociologists from the Glasgow University’s departments of Sociology, History, History of Medicine and the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute.

A good example of the interactive tasking handed out to participants is that used for the experienced fourth year Honours students. After initial questions about user interface, screen manipulation, metadata layout, and so on, the students were confronted with the following scenarios:

1. Hitchcock
You’re doing an essay on the differences between the sound and silent versions of Hitchcock’s Blackmail (UK,1929). Use the extracts of the moving images, the texts and the metadata. How would you normally view this film for study purposes? Think about how you would do your bibliography for the essay – did these resources give you enough information?

2. Television
You’re doing research into British TV genres of the 1950s and 1960s for a dissertation. You might want to focus on drama or light entertainment or social affairs. Try some searches and use the extracts of the moving images, the texts and the metadata. How would you normally view archive TV material for study purposes? Think about how you would compile your bibliography for your dissertation – did these resources give you enough information?

3. Searching
Try searches on keywords of your own choice – try searching for any type of moving image material you’re interested in. How easy do you find the searching facility? Were your searches successful? How could the searching be improved?

4. Browsing
Often you come across interesting resources in a traditional library simply by browsing through the shelves. Try browsing through the resources presented here. Do you find enough useful information to make you want to look at the moving image or text resources?

Findings: the users 

All of these encounters with users of different experience levels, needs and backgrounds were successful in that they gave us valuable responses which could be analysed and fed back to the project principals in our final report, where the findings are presented in some considerable detail and which will be published in suitable formats and locations, including the PADS web site [5] , in the near future. The reactions were almost unanimously favourable with most respondents agreeing that the ready availability of digital moving images for use in teaching and research would radically alter their working practices for the better. Some respondents were, not surprisingly, unrealistic about how quickly a critical mass of material could be achieved in the face of problems of bandwidth, cost of digitisation, labour involved in metadata description and, of course, the thorny issue of copyright. Nevertheless, they were of the view that public funding should continue to be allocated to development work of this nature, and some were even alarmed at the prospect that the pilot site’s resources would eventually be taken down from the web at the end of the project because of the nature of the rights clearances.

The questionnaire and discussion responses of staff and students were found to differ quite considerably, suggesting that there are varying attitudes to information technology depending on generation, occupational experience and purpose. There is a sense in which students regard the innovative method of delivery with some nonchalance, that is to say, real-time desktop and classroom delivery is nothing more than they have come to expect from a study environment that is increasingly digitally-based. They are, after all, now arriving at university possessing good familiarity already with IT, and many of them come from homes with a computer and internet connection. Students with lower levels of experience of learning methods – in other words, those with no institutional memory – can therefore be somewhat blasé about the digital process even in the face of their tutors’ crusading enthusiasm. Many of them are attracted immediately to the flaws and constraints at the expense of the real progress achieved, and ask for facilities which might be seen as going beyond research aids into the pedagogically unacceptable realm of digital “spoon-feeding”. Clearly there has to be a balance here, and this tends to be appreciated by the more experienced and confident students.

The reactions of academic staff, even those in the relatively progressive field of Media Studies, are rather different. Such staff, with years of experience of unsatisfactory conditions attaching to the discovery, exhibition and re-use of moving image materials, are much more alive to the breakthrough that on-line digital delivery provides, more appreciative of the problems having to be addressed by pilot projects such as this, and more forthcoming about the potential benefits. They are also able to deploy their experience to comment upon priority areas for further development, pointing to, for example, the desirability of a national rights management strategy, the need for pilot studies to move forward to the cataloguing of a critical mass of available data, and better indexing and easy-to-use tools (though here they do tend to reveal a problematic wish to manipulate and re-purpose content – a process not likely to be welcomed by commercial interests!). Film Studies academics, accustomed to familiar constraints on availability and picture quality offered by the 16mm film hire and VHS sectors, as well as inadequate projection facilities in many university teaching spaces, were able to recognise that digital delivery is the support mechanism of the future for screen studies.

General findings
Some general conclusions can be drawn based on the detailed feedback obtained in our user workshops:

* students like the form and want to use the material
* they take it for granted and want access from home as well!
* staff are also very welcoming of the form, but more aware of complexities
* users like being able to work on different resources from one location
* they like not having to rely on a tape being in the library at a particular moment; multiple access preferred
* metadata warmly welcomed; helps user decide relevance before viewing
* some would still prefer to use videotape to view a whole film, but consider that on-line access is better for detailed analysis, note-taking and essay writing, possibly while simultaneously watching a sequence
* image quality very important: students react quickly to problems with sound or image quality; staff on the whole are more tolerant
Several user interface issues emerged:
* both reduced window and full-screen playback are wanted (full screen better for watching, window better for simultaneous taking of notes)
* students are reassured by an integrated environment to work from
* students request simple user interfaces, with a big button to take them back to the start if they get lost
* browsing and searching is much appreciated (but search facility needs to be simple and intuitive or students become insecure)
* running time code wanted by some users

Findings: technology 

The final project report inevitably contains a mass of technical detail – especially relating to different conditions and levels of performance – but I shall try to summarise briefly our main findings. Firstly, and predictably, we have learned that significant systems administration time is needed to set up a server and client system effectively, whatever hardware and software solutions are chosen. Secondly, picture and sound “quality of service” is very important in the minds of users; even minor flaws seen during experimentation tend to distract and disappoint the user who is usually looking for quality at least as good as VHS video. On the server side, the PADS’ chosen infrastructure of Mediabase MPEG players running on SGI servers alongside Hyperwave database software provided an extremely stable and powerful solution through all stages of the pilot, including live streaming from Central Scotland to the South-East of England. Configuration and administration are relatively straightforward, but we do not discount the utility of other server solutions for moving picture delivery and we therefore counsel continual monitoring of other project successes as well as tracking of new product entrants to the market. In any case, it seems to us that individual institutions will be likely to adopt their own technical solutions based on prior experience and affordability and hence flexibility and interoperability are going to be key concepts for some time yet. The small part of our pilot undertaken using the Revelation Project’s Sun server system (the medical material) was much less successful, with an unacceptable level of unexplained client machine failure and with no full-screen playback option available. However, we did not have the opportunity to test this model to its limit and received no systems administration time from the server’s owners (the Computing Science Department) to help optimise settings.

On the client side, we found that the powerful PC workstations we used gave the best playback results, though we believe that Apple Macs and SGIs with faster clock speeds than ours would have performed equally well. Time spent carefully optimising configurations for MPEG playback paid huge dividends. There were noticeable differences in quality between supposedly identical machines which were eventually attributed to such factors as the brand of graphics driver used, the range of colour screen resolution and the presence or otherwise of DirectX support. The best pictures were smooth, clear and useable even at the lowest bit-rate tested (1.4Mbps), though some slight “pixelation” was evident on close inspection. The highest bit-rate of 5Mbps gave the best picture resolution but produced less-than-perfect lip-synch, while 2.5 Mbps gave the best balance between picture quality and sound synchronisation. Of the different graphics cards tested, the high-end product recommended by SGI for use with Mediabase, the Optibase Videoplex, gave an extremely good picture especially with SVHS output; two of the three cheaper cards tested also performed very well – to a level which would be more than adequate in a networked PC laboratory environment where volume and cost are factors. Generally speaking, hardware decoding on to an external Reference Monitor provided the best quality image and proved more robust at dealing with “glitches” on the network.

Network performance under Contention-based Ethernet at 10Mbps – the method of connection in daily use by staff and students in the building where our trials took place – was uneven and cannot be claimed to have been a success. It varied a great deal depending upon time of day and day of the week, but multiple simultaneous streams were not really possible over this technology even at the lowest bit-rate. Dedicated switched Fast Ethernet was, however, a different matter, suggesting the need to clear bandwidth specifically for moving image delivery purposes. We managed to run up to fifteen active connections of 2.5Mbps at once (a total bandwidth of 37.5Mbps) during user demonstrations with few problems. 16 simultaneous streams at a mixture of bit rates, producing a total bandwidth of 74.86Mbps, was also successfully achieved over dedicated fast Ethernet. However, as many as eighteen simultaneous streams at 5Mbps pushed the bandwidth allocated to Mediabase (90Mbps) to its limit and further connections beyond that were refused; at this level of network load, a PC with hardware decoder gave performance identical to when it was the only workstation running. Results of IP over ATM and native ATM testing at MPEG2 were still under analysis as the project report was being finalised.

Minimum specification

An anxiety encountered during the project’s early stages was that expressed by academics from Higher Education institutions not so well blessed with high-speed networks or powerful computers with the necessary peripherals and software to permit efficient reception of moving image resources. Indeed, on more than one occasion, worries about possible exclusion from the latest developments in networked delivery of moving images were expressed by academics working in institutions with less enlightened IT policies or with very constrained equipment budgets. They pressed for clear advice on the minimum equipment specification necessary so that they would be in a better position to argue cases within their respective institutions for sensible long-term planning of equipment expenditure with a view to achieving economies of scale and regular upgrade of obsolescent equipment.

Taking this point seriously we recommend in the final report that due consideration be given by the project partners to the problem of disproportionality in equipment provision between potential stake-holding institutions. This is almost certainly a matter of existing concern to the JISC in their desire to ensure wide uptake, but we consider it will become grounds for resentment if we find ourselves faced with a dual economy – of “haves” and “have-nots”. We therefore propose the following minimum specification for an individual workstation capable of decoding and displaying content within the context of the Glasgow site’s technical model. It assumes an appropriate networking infrastructure, and up to date drivers for components.

PC Platform:

* Windows 95 or Windows 98 PC (NT not recommended)
* Pentium MMX 166MHz
* 32MB RAM
* Good quality graphics card (ideally one optimised for video playback, e.g. ATi Rage Pro chipset based card)
* 10/100Mbps Ethernet card (depends on networking used)
* 10 to 20MB of free disk space (type of disk not important)
* Soundcard (good quality one recommended for lecture theatre use)
* Headphones, or, amplifier and speakers
* Netscape 3.01 or later, or Internet Explorer 3.0 or later
* CompCore or DirectShow MPEG player (download from Mediabase server)
* DirectX6

MPEG 2 software decoders are now on the market, which require Pentium II or greater class systems running at 300MHz or faster with 64MB RAM recommended.
For Apple Macintosh, the recommended minimum specification is:

* MacOS System 7.6 or later
* 16MB RAM
* 120Mhz PowerPC 601 processor
* Netscape 3.01 or Internet Explorer 3.0 or later
* QuickTime 3, or later

Macs below this specification will not work with Mediabase while a significantly more highly specified Mac is to be recommended.

Networking infrastructure is as crucial to the quality of moving image delivery as the minimum specification workstation and this should be taken into account in financial planning. Unfortunately due to the range of technologies available and vastly differing implementations between campuses, there cannot easily be an equivalent minimum specification for campus networking. A wise policy, however, would be to plan a system that allows10Mbps to be streamed to each video workstation with good, or guaranteed, Quality of Service.

Copyright

One of the abiding concerns surfacing in the published papers for infog97 was, perhaps not surprisingly, the question of rights management. This was certainly an issue affecting the Imagination/Universities Network Pilot where strict rights clearance and user authentication procedures naturally had to be followed. The BFI engaged in extensive clearance negotiations with the rights holders to cover the limited period of the project and the two pilot sites had to agree strictly to observe the terms, taking care to remove the film and video clips from the internet on expiry of the relevant licences. This, we have now done, leaving only documentation of the project as an example of good practice along with the metadata descriptions generated to accompany the actual clips of moving images. The BFI is, however, engaged in further negotiations aimed at extending some of the licences for a further period and we await the outcome with great interest since it would allow PADS to re-mount the resources and conduct further trials of their active use in educational contexts.

The future 

The JISC has made no secret of its hopes to enable a wider, possibly national, arrangement for the routine networked delivery of moving images to Higher Education users in the UK using high-speed networks. To this end, they will use the Final Report and the measured experiences of the two pilot sites as empirical evidence to inform their deliberations on possible future developments. PADS is proud to have made a significant evolutionary contribution to the debate that is now to ensue, and remains ready to offer its accumulated expertise and enthusiasm in whatever way is appropriate for the more widespread dissemination of our valuable moving image heritage for interactive use in learning, teaching and research.

Footnotes:
[1] This article is a fuller version of the paper presented in Keynote Session 2 at the infog99 Conference, Treasury Theatre, East Melbourne, Thursday 15 July 1999
[2] Imagination/Universities Network Pilot for online delivery of moving images (a joint project of the British Film Institute, British Universities Film & Video Council, Joint Information Systems Committee), Final Report (August 1999).
[3] See Celia Duffy and Catherine Owen (Performing Arts Data Service), “Scholars’ information needs in a digital age: the view from the performing arts”, The New Review of Academic Librarianship (1998), 182-84.
[4] See Celia Duffy, ” Performing Arts Data Service: evaluation of resource discovery metadata for moving image resources”: in Paul Miller and Daniel Greenstein, eds, Discovering Online Resources across the Humanities: A Practical Implementation of the Dublin Core (Arts and Humanities Data Service and the UK Office for Library and Information Networking [UKOLN], 1997), 27-29.
[5] http//:www.pads.ahds.ac.uk/