The Open Video Project

The Open Video Project is a project at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The purpose of this project is "to collect and make available a repository of digitized video content for the digital video, multimedia retrieval, digital library and other research communities." It is put together by the Interaction Design Laboratory at the UNC's School of Information Resources and Library Sciences. They continue to explain that researchers can use it for the study for various problems.

This project started in 1998 with 195 video segments. Eventually, the formats available increased to include MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and Quicktime. They also wish to increase the different available genres that are included in the depository.

Their collections are broken down into two groups- the Special Purpose Collections and the Contributor Collections. There is no clear indication as to what the policy is for adding to the collection, however, they do accept contributions, if the available staff is available. As of right now, they are not accepting contributions because the staff is not sufficient.

The audience of this, as stated in the about section, are researchers. While others can use it, researchers are the target audience. It allows for them study different problems, test for algorithms, creating surrogates for describing video content and various other studies.

This project looks like its coming along well. They stated in thier project status that they are continuing to upgrade their systems in terms of what will be available and also focusing on how their users will be able to access different items in the depository.