The University of Oregon has a portal for accessing its streaming video assets. The UO Channel “is a gateway to video programs that reflect the quality, creativity, and diversity of academic and cultural life at the university. Featured programs include lectures, interviews, performances, symposia, documentary productions, and more. In addition to video/streaming media on demand, the UO Channel also provides access to campus radio stations.”

The project is a collaborative service of the libraries, the computing center, and the media/PR office at UO. Hooray for the library’s involvement!

At Miami I had identified a similar streaming initiative for the digital media lab’s action plan. Libraries have the potential to play a significant role in developing the access, categorization, management, and preservation of a university’s streaming media assets. Practically, every university now has some type of streaming media project. If libraries are not already involved, they should learn about the status of these initiatives and offer their services.

The Guardian has a brief article today on the US copyright law and the Creative Commons. Nothing really new here but a few good statements, such as “the production of ideas relies on two opposing ingredients: not just a system of ownership, which allows people to profit from their creations, but also a healthy public domain, which provides the raw material that ideas spring from, and where free collaboration can bring new ideas into being.”

The article closes with a quote from Lawrence Lessig:

“Culture,” Lessig has said, “is remix. Knowledge is remix. Politics is remix. Everyone in the life of producing and creating engages in this practice of remix. Companies do it. Politicians do it … We all do it. This is what life is in the expression of creativity. Remix is how we live”.

The ability to link to a segment within a digital audio or video file will be an important element in the future of digital scholarship. A project at the BBC explores a variation on this functionality through the use of a wikipedia-like interface that allows anyone to annotate a specific segment of audio. The BBC project is:

a demonstration of a functional working interface for the annotation of audio that’s designed to allow the collective creation of useful metadata and wikipedia-like content around radio programmes or speeches or podcasts or pieces of music.

A description, along with screencasts, is available at On the BBC Annotatable Audio project

A comment on that blog also refers to a similar project called Annodex, which looks interesting.