The Open Video Digital Library Toolkit
Your own Web-based digital video library — without programming
The Open Video Digital Library Toolkit (OVDLT) project is intended to provide museums, libraries and other institutions holding moving image collections tools to more easily create Web-based digital video libraries. Funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services and now released as an open source product under the MIT License, the OVDLT project provides a no cost solution for libraries, archives, museums, and other institutions who want to make available their digital video resources through their own Web-based digital library.
Features include:
- Rich end-user features: favorites, user-generated playlists, playlist annotations, tagging, saved searches
- Easy library administration: site-integrated form-based library configuration, user management, easily configurable metadata schema
- Quick, intuitive cataloging: integrated forms, easy control over public/private videos and featured videos, one-click posterframe selection
- Automatic video preview generation: storyboards, fastforwards, and excerpts
OVDLT runs on Linux or Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6 based on a Ruby on Rails framework with MySQL as the database management system. See Requirements for more information.
Sample Sites
How does an OVDLT-generated site look? Check out these sample sites:
Getting Started
Visit our support site to get started on creating your own digital video library with OVDLT. Documentation there covers requirements, installation, initial and on-going administration of your OVDLT site, cataloging, and more.
Open Source Development
OVDLT is open source and available under the MIT License. You are free to use the software under the terms of the license. The OVDLT source code is hosted at our GitHub code repository.
If you are a developer interested in contributing to the project, we would love to hear from you.
Bugs, Questions, Feature Suggestions?
We're committed to improving OVDLT. If you're using it and have problems, questions, or ideas for improvements, let us know. Our support site contains discussion areas where you can submit your feedback and see if others have similar issues.
Project Information
The OVDLT project is an extension of the Open Video Project, which is a Web-based digital video library established at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1998. Open Video provides digital video primarily for the education and research communities, some of whom told us they were interested in creating a similar Web site to host their own video collections. OVDLT is intended to make it easier for these organizations to do just that.
The OVDLT project was generously funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) under their National Leadership Grants in Library and Museum Collaboration program (official grant title: "Digital Video Library Toolkit for Museums and Libraries with Limited Resources"). The primary investigator for this grant was Gary Geisler. The project's museum partner ws Northeast Historic Film.
Related Project Materials
Materials related to the development of this project:
Sample Video Collection: To investigate and illustrate video quality and filesize tradeoffs when digitizing video with different video formats and codecs, we developed a sample collection of video segments digitized in 12 format/size combinations. Sample content comes from our museum partner, Northeast Historic Film (NHF).
Metadata Schema Development: We spent considerable time at the beginning of this project investigating potential metadata schemas. We analyzed the most important existing metadata schemas appropriate for digital video (MIC, MODS/METS, MPEG-7, Dublin Core, etc. and developed a Web page to compare and contrast elements and keep track of our investigation.
User Needs Assessment: To help us understand the characteristics and needs of potential users of OVDLT, we conducted a Web-based survey as part of a user needs assessment. This was a five-part survey, advertised through an e-mail posting to a wide variety of individuals and image and media-oriented listservs serving potential OVDLT users in the academic, archives, history, museum, and libraries and computers communities. Detailed, anonymized results from the 83 responses to this survey are available.