For their study of how people view digital video, a faculty-student team from the UNC at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science has won the Vannevar Bush Award from the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries.

“How fast is too fast? Evaluating fast forward surrogates for digital video” was researched by information science professors Drs. Gary Marchionini and Barbara Wildemuth with doctoral students Meng Yang, Gary Geisler and Todd Wilkens; and master’s students Anthony Hughes and Richard Gruss. Their work is part of the Open Video Project at UNC at Chapel Hill, which is funded by the Interactive Systems Program at the National Science Foundation. The project is available for review by the public at www.open-video.org.

The team’s study, aimed to improve user access of digital video collections, involved 45 subjects who viewed videos in fast forward mode. They subjects were tested for comprehension after viewing videos in various speeds -- 32, 64, 128, and 256 times as fast as normal. These speeds apply to digital video; home VCRs are capable of fast forwarding at only about two to four times real-time speed. The ideal speed, the study asserts, is 64 times as fast as normal. A 10-minute video would only take seconds to view in this manner.

The team’s ultimate aim is to help designers make more efficient video retrieval systems, so that users may more easily locate desired information, says Professor Marchionini, who has led numerous studies in information seeking in electronic environments. Digital libraries offer various forms of reference – titles, dates, creators and key words, for example. But when accessing visual materials, users also must be offered pictorial clues such as frames or a quick view option, he said.

“Before you make a decision to download a large file, you should have a notion of whether it is something you will want to use,” Marchionini said. “We want to give people overviews of the content that will save them time and effort.”

The Vannevar Bush Best Paper Award was given at the 2003 Joint Conference on Digital Libraries held May 27-31 at Rice University in Houston. The conference is organized by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. (IEEE).

Selections for the annual award, which carries a $1,000 stipend, are made by a panel of judges. The award is named in honor of Dr. Bush, who led the Office of Scientific Research and Development and the National Defense Research Committee during World War II and presented the vision for what later became the National Science Foundation. His paper “As We May Think” is credited as the conceptual basis for hypertext and the World Wide Web.

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