Selection and context scoping for digital video collections

Abstract

Digital curators are faced with decisions about what part of the ever-growing, ever-evolving space of digital information to collect and preserve. The recent explosion of web video on sites such as YouTube presents curators with an even greater challenge - how to sort through and filter a large amount of information to find, assess and ultimately preserve important, relevant, and interesting video. In this paper, we describe research conducted to help inform digital curation of on-line video. Since May 2007, we have been monitoring the results of 57 queries on YouTube related to the 2008 U.S. presidential election. We report results comparing these data to blogs that point to candidate videos on YouTube and discuss the effects of query-based harvesting as a collection development strategy.