Developing an Educational Multimedia Digital Library: Content Preparation, Indexing, and Usage

The Maryland Electronic Learning Community (www.learn.umd.edu) is building a multimedia digital library of educational resources. Now in the fourth year of the project, we evaluate early decisions we made about segmenting and indexing videos. We also discuss an experiment in encouraging collaborative community indexing with a Quick Indexing Tool. We conclude that a broader base of users would better support the infrastructure requirements and we propose ways that such a broad base can be developed while also providing a framework for local learning communities. We propose a federated system of collaborative indexing communities.