Simple Tools for Generating a Searchable Repository of Access Grid Sessions

This paper describes the VIRGIL (Virtual Meeting Archival) system which was developed to provide a simple, practical, easyto-use method for recording, indexing and archiving large scale distributed videoconferences held over Access Grid nodes. Institutional libraries are coming under increasing pressure to support the storage, access and retrieval of such mixed-media complex digital objects in their institutional repositories. Although systems have been developed to record access grid sessions, they don’t provide simple mechanisms for repository ingestion, search and retrieval; and they require the installation and understanding of complex Access Grid tools to record and replay the virtual meetings. Our system has been specifically designed to enable both: the easy construction and maintenance of an archive of Access Grid sessions by managers; and easy search and retrieval of recorded sessions by users. This is achieved through standard platform-independent web tools which don’t require comprehensive knowledge or adoption of complex Access Grid tools. This paper describes the underlying architecture, tools and Web interface we developed to enable the recording, storage, search, retrieval and replay of collaborative Access Grid sessions within a Fedora repository.