Search behavior of media professionals at an audiovisual archive: A transaction log analysis

  • Authors:

  • Bouke Huurnink;Laura Hollink;Wietske van den Heuvel;Maarten de Rijke

  • Affiliations:

  • Intelligent Systems Lab Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam, Science Park 107, Amsterdam, the Netherlands;Computer Science Department, FEW, VU University Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1081A, Amsterdam, the Netherlands;Research and Development Department, Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, Sumatralaan 45, Hilversum, the Netherlands;Intelligent Systems Lab Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam, Science Park 107, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

  • Venue:
  • Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Finding audiovisual material for reuse in new programs is an important activity for news producers, documentary makers, and other media professionals. Such professionals are typically served by an audiovisual broadcast archive. We report on a study of the transaction logs of one such archive. The analysis includes an investigation of commercial orders made by the media professionals and a characterization of sessions, queries, and the content of terms recorded in the logs. One of our key findings is that there is a strong demand for short pieces of audiovisual material in the archive. In addition, while searchers are generally able to quickly navigate to a usable audiovisual broadcast, it takes them longer to place an order when purchasing a subsection of a broadcast than when purchasing an entire broadcast. Another key finding is that queries predominantly consist of (parts of) broadcast titles and of proper names. Our observations imply that it may be beneficial to increase support for fine-grained access to audiovisual material, for example, through manual segmentation or content-based analysis. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.