VALE
New Jersey's Virtual Academic Library Environment (VALE) is a consortium partner on the project. VALE membership elected the Films Media Group (FMG) video collection to be NJVid's premiere commercial video collection. FMG is a leading distributor of professionally produced educational video. VALE and FMG negotiated a reduced consortium licensing price structure for FMG's video titles. By selecting the popular FMG as the initial commercial video collection, NJVid's collaborators identified eight institutions eager to participate in a trial period in early October. These institutions will be granted access to 25 commonly-licensed FMG titles to sample and evaluate in exchange for submitting constructive feedback about the collection's efficacy. Following the evaluation, the FMG collection will officially debut, and NJVid will acquire additional FMG titles to host and accept new licensees. Commercial video collections for BioMedia Associates and Ambrose Video, among others, will debut thereafter.
A key stepping stone to launching NJVid's commercial videos collection is establishing an access management service that authenticates and authorizes end-users within a statewide "community of trust". NJEDge.Net, New Jersey's Internet2 networking consortium, has developed a statewide federated access management system that enables institutions to use their local authentication and authorization mechanisms, or participate in a Statewide Directory system, to permit access to their licensed videos. NJEDge.Net facilitates access management via open source Shibboleth software. Typically a participating institution sets up a Shibboleth Identity Provider locally and points it to its LDAP or Active Directory. Then it sends the eduPersonScopedAffiliation attribute from its Identity Provider to the Shibboleth Service Provider at NJEDge.Net.
Beginning in December, 2009, users will be able to associate custom start and end points and textual notations to videos, known as annotations. They will also be able to create playlists of annotations. Users will use an annotation tool developed by Web programmers at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, to do so. The annotation tool is modeled in part on similar features offered by commercial video vendor Web sites, such as FMG. NJVid's annotation tool will allow institutions to replicate in NJVid pre-existing learning objects already created elsewhere and add new ones.
In addition to annotations, institutions will also be able to create video portals within their Web site displaying collections of their choosing. For example, institutions will be able to create partner portals to the main NJVid video portal for specific academic departments displaying only videos pertinent to the department. These portals can be added to the department's webpage so that students will not have to exit the institution's native Web environment.
Following the debut of the FMG collection, NJVid's developers will address remaining issues relevant to the third and final NJVid collection - Learning on Demand. This collection includes locally-produced videos of a temporal nature that necessitate self-uploading by staff and faculty. Development on Learning on Demand is scheduled for the third and final year of the grant.