The Archive of American Television is the Television Academy Foundation’s continuing collection of more than 600 in-depth video interviews with some of television’s most influential professionals in all fields. As a consultant to the Archive, I worked with Jenni Matz, Manager of Archive Digital Assets & Business Development for the Archive and former student of mine, to conceptualize the initial idea for the project and to develop a metadata schema and set of controlled vocabularies to support detailed indexing of the video interviews. I then designed a wiki-based interface for indexers to process the interviews and coordinated the development of the software through which the interviews are indexed, stored, and managed.
The Archive's interviews are now being indexed at very detailed level. In addition to metadata describing details of the interview session(s) and the interviewee, we index a wide range of other elements from the interview to timecode (i.e., we can locate these elements at the exact spots in the interview where they occur), including: conceptual chapters of the interview, transcribed text of the interview, notable quotes made by the interviewee, and distinct topics discussed, as well as mentions of television shows and genres, industry professions, and notable people.
The indexed interviews are saved in XML format, making it easy to transform, filter, and use this detailed data for different purposes. Currently, the primary use of the indexing is to enable a broad range of options for browsing and navigating the more than 2,000 hours of publicly available video interviews at emmytvlegends.org.
