These questions and answers will be added to during the life of the service, derived from user queries.
Service
Data/Interface Use
Playback
Content
Q. What is NewsFilm Online?
A. NewsFilm Online is a JISC-funded service comprising a selection of news stories and programme scripts from the ITN/Reuters archives - some 3,000 hours of footage with around 60,000 stories. Descriptions of the collections can be found here: http://www.nfo.ac.uk/description/collections.html
Q. How can I gain access to material from NewsFilm Online?
A. Subscriptions to NewsFilm Online are available until the end of the current agreement on 31 July 2012; the service will be free of charge until at least this date. To subscribe, institutions must complete, sign and submit the NewsFilm Online sub-licence, which can be downloaded from the JISC website: http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/catalogue/nfo/subscribe
Q. Is IP access available for subscribing institutions?
A. Yes - if you are on a computer within your institution's IP range, and you do not see a 'login by direct access' option, your institution may not have IP-checked access enabled. Your local support staff should contact the EDINA Helpdesk at edina@ed.ac.uk with the institutional IP range to enable this access.
Q. Is trial access available?
A. As the service is free of charge, we are not offering trials.
Q. I am from a subscribing academic institution. Who is my site representative?
A. Information on local site representatives for all EDINA services can be found on our website, at the 'local site representative' link: http://edina.ac.uk/support/
Q. Does EDINA provide training and support materials?
A. EDINA will run training courses for site representatives and institutional staff; we will inform NewsFilm Online site representatives of these courses and advertise them on the EDINA website, along with information on BUFVC training events: http://edina.ac.uk/events/
Q. Our institution would like to set up Z39.50 access for NewsFilm Online. What is the target information?
A. Z39.50 target information is not currently available for NewsFilm Online.
Q. Where can I see descriptions of the collections in the service?
A. Outwith the service, this can be found on: http://www.nfo.ac.uk/description/collections.html
Q. Does EDINA provide a streaming service for these films?
A. EDINA do not provide a streaming service. For the Film & Sound Online service, some institutions have set up their own streaming services using films they have downloaded. If you wish to do this, they must be restricted to subscribing students/staff at the institution within an intranet or VLE. You can often watch films by left clicking on the download link (if software is available); these are not streaming, rather they download to the computer's temp file.
Q. When I download or play a video clip, the sound is OK but the colours are all wrong and the picture is difficult to make out.
A. This is related to a bug in Windows Media Player. Either upgrade to the latest version of Windows Media Player (currently v11), or change your settings as follows: Go to the "Options" menu or right-click on the video and choose "Options"; then go to the "Performance" tab and set the "video acceleration" option to "none" and click "OK".
Q. What was the digitisation process for creating the NFO materials?
A. Ingestion of the NfO material was from broadcast quality videotape and encoding to a digital sub-master (MPEG2). Thereafter WMP and QT files were created from the MPEG2 via a process called transcoding.
Q. What is the encoding specification for the downloadable videos and how was it decided?
A. QuickTime - Version 6, MPEG-4 Video, Millions AAC, 48.00 Hz
and
Windows Media Player - Windows Media Video 9, Windows Media Audio 9
This is an update of the specification used for the other JISC service, Film & Sound Online, whose specification was decided by the former Managing Agent and Advisory Service (MAAS).
Q. How was the metadata created and what schema was used?
A. SD and Southampton have a copy of the metadata schema. I do not have a copy.
Q. How was the material classified by subject? Was a particular thesaurus used?
A. The News ML subject index was used. See http://www.iptc.org/NewsCodes/
Q. How were the news stories selected? By what criteria?
A. Sampling was underlaid by diversity so that the stories could appeal to the widest range of subject areas.
Q. Why are some stories available only in segments, not in full?
A. It was decided that the file size for the longest stories was too large for them to be made downloadable in full.
Q. Why do some stories have no commentary?
A. Some stories were never shot with a commentary. If ITN, the commentaries would have been read during the broadcast. If the stories in question are Reuters', commentaries were never recorded, but the edited stories were supplied with specimen scripts. Those stories would have been re-edited by Reuters' broadcaster customers and voiced locally.
Q. Why do some stories have no sound?
A. Such stories would have been shot by a camera operator on location without a sound recordist as a part of the crew.
Q. Which subjects/disciplines are the NFO materials relevant to in both Further and Higher Education?
A. JISC expects the NFO content to appeal to the widest possible range of academic subjects. No particular subject areas are ruled out.
Q. Why do some programme scripts have no video associated with them?
A. They would have been either accompanied by a still image during the news broadcast or simply read to camera by the newscaster
Q. What are the copyright reasons that stop me from seeing some of the videos and still images?
A. The film and sound copyrights in question are owned by individuals and organisations other than ITN or Reuters and so were not available to the digitisation project. Purchase of such rights would have been extremely expensive and would have consumed considerable administrative time.