“Video searches – video series – video playlists”: 10 years of content development and editing of the TIB AV-Portal
The dynamic, functional portal development of the past ten years has been remarkable and is promising both now and in the future. User-friendly features are great, but a repository is first and foremost valuable and utilised through content that is as attractive and relevant as possible. This article portrays the growth of researchable and usable science videos and the range of genres in the TIB AV-Portal, accompanied with insights into the editorial curation of the content.
Media development in general
It was mentioned in the article Three questions put to Margret Plank and Matti Stöhr about the TIB AV-Portal: the TIB AV-Portal was launched at the end of April 2014 with around 2,000 videos, in particular the previously digitised stock of the former IWF (Institute for Scientific Film). This changed rapidly – especially in parallel with the sometimes very complicated and time-consuming rights clearance process, which continues to this day, with the aim of making the very valuable but historical IWF scientific film heritage freely available online. The number of media in the TIB AV-Portal quickly doubled.
By mid-2017, there were already 10,000 videos in the portal, two years later there were already 20,000. Since the end of 2022, well over 40,000 videos have been searchable and viewable.
More than IWF and conference recordings: Genres in the TIB AV-Portal
With the basic stock of IWF films, the project development and finally the publicly visible and usable science video repository TIB AV-Portal began. These are primarily documentary in nature, but researcher portraits, interviews and experiments were and are also part of this special film collection. The range of genres expanded early. A large number of recordings of scientific lectures and discussions, especially in the context of conferences, have been and continue to be added. These, often presenting the latest and very specific scientific findings and results for the first time, now make up over 56 per cent of the total collection.
The categorisation of videos into genres provides orientation in terms of form and content. With the genre facet, videos in the TIB AV-Portal are categorised as concretely as possible, but practicably in concise and clear (basic) categories with regard to their overarching production context and explicit and implicit purpose of use, and can thus be researched in a targeted manner. The boundaries are sometimes fluid and cannot be drawn rigidly. Pragmatically, videos are or will be linked to a genre type in which the characteristic focus lies. Up to two genres are assigned if there are several focal points or in cases of doubt. The individual genre types briefly defined – sorted by frequency of occurrence:
| Genre | Beschreibung |
|---|---|
| Conference/Talk | Videos of lectures and (panel) discussions, usually in the context of scientific events such as conferences, which mostly are presentations in front of an audience. |
| Lecture | Present teaching content in a traditional lecture format. They offer a contextualised overview of the teaching and learning content, usually within the framework of a semester. |
| Documentation/Report | Videos that report in detail on research respective scientific projects, whereby various design and production elements such as animations and visualisations can be integrated. |
| Workshop/Interactive Format | Recordings of scientific events, with a more or less high degree of active participation of the participants, beyond a question-and-answer part. |
| Explanatory Video | Usually short to medium-length videos that clearly explain and contextualise scientific facts or phenomena, often with a background in academic teaching. They can cover a variety of content and sometimes have a smooth transition to longer webinars or tutorials with a 'how-to' character. |
| Experiment/Model Test | Visualisation of mostly representational experimental set-ups that depict scientific phenomena and processes. They are often accompanied by an off-camera voice or by people in front of the camera to explain the character and aim of the experiment or model. |
| Research Data | Data produced or used in video format as part of scientific projects, which are often related to the published research result. They are produced and methodically prepared differently depending on the subject area and objective. |
| Video Abstract | Short films that supplement the written abstract of a scientific publication, often in the form of a journal article.They offer a quick overview and ideally create more comprehensibility and awareness of the work, its methods and results through clarity. |
| Interview | (Structured) discussions with scientists about their research work, teaching activities, careers and life experiences.They are often held on the occasion of science award ceremonies or during scientific events. |
| Webinar/Tutorial | Film instructions that explain a topic, a certain process or a function.("HowTo") |
| Other Video | Category for comparatively rare videos that cannot be explicitly assigned to at least one of the other genre types. |
As far as possible, which is particularly the case with conference recordings, videos are summarised as series in the TIB AV-Portal to provide a contextualised overview of the contributions.
Since 2020 – dynamic content editing (“behind the scenes”)
Sven Strobel has already briefly summarised this in his post 10 Years of a Scientific Video Platform: The History of the TIB AV-Portal from its Beginnings to the Present from a Development Perspective: After the TIB AV-Portal was comparatively “static” for many years, far-reaching, low-threshold and dynamic possibilities have been created step by step since 2020 to curate scientific videos and accompanying information in an editorially flexible manner and to present them as attractively as possible on the portal homepage and beyond – especially as video recommendations.
This works very simply in the background using a few lines of Markdown via the GitLab backend of the AV-Portal or the TIB. In concrete terms, individually compiled (thematic and/or formal) playlists, video series and also results of special search queries can be integrated both on the portal homepage and in other places of the website.
The low-threshold integration of (short) explanatory and annotative texts, URLs, images and ultimately video (series) IDs with a simultaneously defined “look and feel“ – display and interaction are type-dependent – enables very effective editing and code economy. A preview is carried out in the test system and the product owner does the productive release.
Particularly frequently used: the original watchlist function, which can be used by any user with a portal account. Note lists and playlists can be made publicly visible and shareable. These can be embedded editorially not only in the TIB AV-Portal itself – for example in the “Best of“ video recommendations or on specific publisher pages: Example German Physical Society (DPG) with selected video abstracts.
Content curation is of course only possible if you can work with content that is constantly growing in scope. Videos naturally come from authors and editors. How the publication process has developed over time will be the subject in one of the next parts of our blog series.
... arbeitet seit Mai 2020 an der TIB mit Schwerpunkt Wissenschaftskommunikation besonders als Community Manager für das TIB AV-Portal. // ... has been working at the TIB since May 2020, specialising in science communication, especially as Community Manager for the TIB AV-Portal.
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