Project
NJVid is a project funded by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services comprising a statewide digital video portal and central storage repository. It provides a common online platform for presenting, accessing, hosting and archiving institutions’ licensed and locally-produced videos that educate and enlighten viewers in support of online teaching and learning. NJVid accommodates three overall collections of videos: locally-owned videos that can be viewed and shared by all, commercially-licensed videos, and noncommercial videos to which institutions provide members-only access. The first of these collections, known as the NJVid Commons, debuted in late 2008 as work concluded on the first year of development.
Collaborators are currently completing the second of three years of development on NJVid. During the past year, they have focused on creating hardware, software, and access management infrastructure and formed a community of licensees in support of sub-collections of commercially-licensed videos. The project’s developers envision NJVid’s online video portal and central storage repository will reduce the need to acquire hard copies of video titles from commercial video vendors. Doing so will diminish physical video redundancy among Media Centers across the state. This in turn will shorten acquisition time periods, increase access possibilities for end-users, and decrease staff workload and overall institutional expenditures.
New Jersey’s Virtual Academic Library Environment (VALE) is a consortium partner on the project. VALE membership elected the Films Media Group (FMG) video collection to be NJVid’s premiere commercial video collection. FMG is a leading distributor of professionally produced educational video. VALE and FMG negotiated a reduced consortium licensing price structure for FMG’s video titles. By selecting the popular FMG as the initial commercial video collection, NJVid’s collaborators identified eight institutions eager to participate in a trial period in early October. These institutions will be granted access to 25 commonly-licensed FMG titles to sample and evaluate in exchange for submitting constructive feedback about the collection’s efficacy. Following the evaluation, the FMG collection will officially debut, and NJVid will acquire additional FMG titles to host and accept new licensees. Commercial video collections for BioMedia Associates and Ambrose Video, among others, will debut thereafter.
A key stepping stone to launching NJVid’s commercial videos collection is establishing an access management service that authenticates and authorizes end-users within a statewide “community of trust”. NJEDge.Net, New Jersey’s Internet2 networking consortium, has developed a statewide federated access management system that enables institutions to use their local authentication and authorization mechanisms, or participate in a Statewide Directory system, to permit access to their licensed videos. NJEDge.Net facilitates access management via open source Shibboleth software. Typically a participating institution sets up a Shibboleth Identity Provider locally and points it to its LDAP or Active Directory. Then it sends the eduPersonScopedAffiliation attribute from its Identity Provider to the Shibboleth Service Provider at NJEDge.Net.
Beginning in December, 2009, users will be able to associate custom start and end points and textual notations to videos, known as annotations. They will also be able to create playlists of annotations. Users will use an annotation tool developed by Web programmers at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, to do so. The annotation tool is modeled in part on similar features offered by commercial video vendor Web sites, such as FMG. NJVid’s annotation tool will allow institutions to replicate in NJVid pre-existing learning objects already created elsewhere and add new ones.
In addition to annotations, institutions will also be able to create video portals within their Web site displaying collections of their choosing. For example, institutions will be able to create partner portals to the main NJVid video portal for specific academic departments displaying only videos pertinent to the department. These portals can be added to the department’s webpage so that students will not have to exit the institution’s native Web environment.
Following the debut of the FMG collection, NJVid’s developers will address remaining issues relevant to the third and final NJVid collection – Learning on Demand. This collection includes locally-produced videos of a temporal nature that necessitate self-uploading by staff and faculty. Development on Learning on Demand is scheduled for the third and final year of the grant.
