What do Eleanor Roosevelt, Frank Lloyd Wright, Margaret Sanger, and Henry Kissinger have in common? All of them, and 61 other celebrities were interviewed by Mike Wallace in 1957-1958, and many of these interviews have not been seen since. Students at the School of Information at The University of Texas worked with the staff of the Harry Ransom Center and Francisco Marroquin University to create an online searchable rich-media library of this unique excerpt of early broadcast television.

The collection makes use of software developed in Guatemala and deployed at the School of Information called Glifos. The software is designed to create, deploy, catalog, and present rich-media content in an XML-based specification that is technology-, platform-, and format-independent, ensuring content portability and contributing to the digital preservation and long-term usability of the contents and its metadata.

The “Mike Wallace Interview” collection contains a number of features available to users of the online video library: 1) Searchability of the collection, making use of metadata and full-text transcripts, as well as the saving and sharing of searches 2) Video navigation interface: tables of contents, specialized indices, transcript searching. 3) Annotation capabilities: creating, saving, updating and sharing of time-coded notes. 4) One XML file, output to multiple platforms using XSLT “skins”.

Ongoing research at the School of Information will study users of this collection to determine usability of the current rich-media materials, as well as the upcoming version using a Flash-based social-media format.

For a larger view of Figure 1 click here