Media Exchange (Public Television & Higher Education)
& NETA with the Utah Education Network

Context
PBCore Integration
Contacts

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In January 2006, The National Educational Telecommunications Association (NETA) convened a meeting of public television and content providers to discuss service for higher education. The PBS Adult Learning Services was dissolved in September 2005, leaving questions about the role of PTV with higher education.

Representatives from public television stations with learning-objects services or strong higher education ties, along with content providers and national leaders, met in Salt Lake City, Utah, in June 2006 at a PTV Higher Education Learning Objects Meeting. The 35 participants had a very substantive conversation regarding how public television can best serve higher education in a changing digital world. Public television has strong community connections, public trust, and partnerships. It also has a viable digital infrastructure to deliver high quality content. Public television station leaders provided direction to help inform and work with content providers on developing a learning objects service for higher education.

In the recommendations and next steps proposed by the group, it was decided NETA should lead a planning team that would work with various constituent groups, including CPB, PBS, PBS stations, the University Licensee Association, the National Media Market, The National Association of Media & Technology Centers, and the Consortium of College and University Media Centers. The initial key steps resulting from the opportunities for action included:

• Generate a list of sharable PTV content.
• Generate a list of available vendor content.
• Conduct a needs assessment and assess the gaps or opportunities in the marketplace.
• Determine which educational needs PTV is uniquely qualified to fulfill, and which ones it can reasonably shoulder.

The University of Utah's Office of Information Technology (Media Solutions, New Media Group) teamed up with the Utah Education Network (UEN) Digital Media Service to build a "proof of concept " in a working model for a media exchange or marketplace of public broadcasting content available for sharing with higher education. As expressed in the recommendations and next steps from the June Meeting, the lack of rights-available content provides a barrier to meeting faculty needs. A web-based marketplace of content would include bartered and fee-based content in which contract negotiations between Providers and Seekers are handled privately, not through the system. In essence, the marketplace is a system-wide "Craig's List" for educational content.

The Higher Education Media Exchange expands on the work already accomplished in three of UEN's current digital media services...

eMedia
eMedia offers educational media to Utah’s K-12 schools. It includes videos and other media from the Utah Instructional Media Consortium, local documentaries and current affairs programs from KUED-7, national PBS programs, and additional media from UEN and other trusted education partners. This service is only available to K-12 teachers and students in Utah through the Pioneer Library.

CollegeMedia
CollegeMedia offers media appropriate for college students. Videos and other media include college telecourses, local documentaries and current affairs programs from KUED-7, national PBS programs, and additional media from UEN and other trusted education partners. Because of licensing restrictions, CollegeMedia is only available to faculty and students affiliated with schools in the Utah System of Higher Education.

MediaHub
UEN offers general public access to local current affairs programs from KUED-7, media from special community events and additional media from UEN and other trusted education partners. This media is for non-profit private use only.

The Exchange does NOT house or distribute actual media essence or digital files (with perhaps the exception of samples, excerpts and previews in later versions). Instead, it is intended to provide a mechanism for describing the assets (intellectual content) and facilitate the connection between those who need content and those providing shareable content.

This Media Exchange itself does NOT address the selection criteria, needs assessments, gap analyses, availabilities, group buys, and rights negotiations for content appropriate to use in higher education venues. Other working groups and appointees are tasked to explore these topics.

In order to provide descriptions of media items for the Media Exchange, a metadata scheme, based on the Public Broadcasting Metadata Dictionary, PBCore, is in use. There are good ways and there are improper ways to enter descriptions. A comprehensive
Metadata User Guide for the Media Exchange was created and posted (http://www.uen.org/media_exchange/UserGuides/MetadataGuide/). Each data field in the Media Exchange is defined in this Metadata Guide and supplies usage guidelines.

The Media Exchange metadata dictionary parallels PBCore. The semantics or meaning behind the common data elements are the same. As well, the structure or syntax for data entry are drawn from PBCore, as are pre-established picklists of terms and vocabularies. Some of the fields in Media Exchange use variations on the actual names used in PBCore. Media Exchange determined that it did not matter what a field was called, so long as the underlying descriptions matched PBCore. The names were altered in order to offer a more informal language style for both those contributing content and those seeking content (consumers).

PBCore INDEX TO METADATA FIELD NAMES

Extensions were added to PBCore in order to accommodate the education needs behind the Media Exchange. "Academic Disciplines" is an example of an extension in which a comprehensive list of higher education fields of academic pursuit can be referenced to describe the topical areas of submitted content and media assets. Also, numerous fields were added to provide "Contact Information" for media providers.

Because of certain restrictions imposed by time, budget, and the underlying digital asset management system for Media Exchange, the metadata elements are presented in a flat, non-hierarchical arrangement. For example, many of the technical format description fields are separated into distinct elements for sound-related attributes and for visual-related attributes. The project consciously made this decision (a flat arrangement without repeating containers of elements) and determined that when metadata needed to be exchanged with other information systems, the import/export XML functionality of the DAM system would be engaged to customize and parse data consistent with PBCore v1.1.

The screen grabs included below show metadata entry and cataloging screens that would be used by Content Providers supplying program descriptions. Any entries are purely illustrative...

Anyone is invited to review and harvest from the Media Exchange Metadata User Guide (available as online HTML or as a PDF document). Similarities between PBCore and the Media Exchange are unavoidable, since the data dictionary design was accomplished by a 6-year veteran of the PBCore Team.

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