Where is the card catalog index for our video lives?

15 years ago I took an average of 20 rolls of film a year.  Those ~ 700 pictures usually filled maybe 5 photo albums with the rest going in a shoe box.  If I ever needed to find a picture I grabbed the photo album or the box and could pretty rapidly find the picture I was looking for. 

In 2001 I bought my first digital camera and easily doubled the number of pictures per year placing them now in a virtual shoe box, a folder on my computer with a sub-folder for each event.  Thankfully a 2 MP camera did not take excessive hard drive space.

In 2005 I purchased my first digital SLR camera and immediately jumped to almost 2k pictures per trip.  As a 6 MP pixel camera coupled with more pictures, saving all my pictures on my laptop was no longer possible, but easily remedied by a portable USB hard drive.  In 2008, I purchased my first digital camcorder and now I am shopping for terabyte drives.

How do we find anything in this mess when an individual can easily approach a terabyte of files all labeled dsc-img0001.jpg?  Searching through an average of 9 folders each labeled Thanksgiving with the year is neither easy for efficient.  Now multiple this by thousands of employees at a company and we start to come to glimpse with the pain a corporation without a good indexing systems will begin to feel.

With digital recording equipment becoming increasingly better quality and lower price, coupled with the rampant increase in virtual meetings that can be recorded, companies are being inundated with new A/V files.  How to store these files has been the challenge of the data center teams which have created VSANs and other solutions to address that challenge.  I would rather address what I think will be a more critical question, how do I find the file I want when I need it? 

And if not how, then who; who is responsible for taking the recording of a meeting and entering in information so it can be cataloged and searched for by all users.  Librarians spend entire years learning how to index new books to keep an organizational structure useful to retrieve in an efficient manner any requested material.  Who is doing this for your files?  Is it an engineer who thinks and will thus label very differently than a sales team?  How do we make these labels universal?

While the tools are available to record have come included in virtual every meeting tool and with webcams, does your company have a system for storing, indexing, and retrieving files on-demand?  Do you simply get an email after a meeting saying it has been recorded and follow a link.  Hopefully you never lose that email otherwise the file is lost.  A YouTube system, while democratic in that it accepts files from anyone, by leveraging only basic title search makes searching for a particular file best effort based in someone’s personal naming system.  This is only going to become worse as every meeting, every lecture, every user becomes empowered to record, who watches and how do they find this new data? 

Anyone have experiences from your company on this?  Love to hear your comments!

Posted by Matthew Stein at 08:07AM PST