5 years AV-Portal

Veröffentlicht am 29. April 201919. Februar 2021 von Bastian Drees

Today, 5 years ago, the AV-Portal of TIB went online under the name TIB|AV-Portal – at that time still in the old, blue TIB look and with a vertical line in its name. Among the first 2000 films were the educational videos by Jörn Loviscach, videos from the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and 600 films from the former Institute for Scientific Film (IWF).

5 years ago the AV-Portal launched still in the old, blue TIB-Look and with vertical line in the name as TIB|AV-Portal. The old tutorial https://doi.org/10.5446/14383 gives an impression.

Since then, the number of videos has increased tenfold and more than a thousand visitors use the analysis tools and search functions of the AV-Portal daily to research the stock of almost 20,000 videos and to use scientific AV media from fields of technology and natural sciences. The number of publishers and cooperation partners has also risen sharply in recent years, so we would like to take the 5th anniversary as an opportunity to present some of them here.

Jakob G. Lauth (SciFox): Educational Videos from Chemistry, Physics and Mathematics

Among the most watched videos in the AV-Portal are the educational videos of Professor Jakob G. Lauth, who teaches Physical Chemistry at the FH Aachen. Today, over 300 of his videos are already available on the AV-Portal, which he recommends to his students as preparation for courses and exams. In his experience, “traditional frontal instruction does not do justice to the individual learning speeds of the students”.

With over 2,500 views, the video “Siedelinie, Taulinie und Azeotrop – Wie liest man Siedediagramme?” is one of the most watched videos by Prof. Lauth on the AV-Portal. (DOI: https://doi.org/10.5446/15680)

With educational videos I have the possibility to present information in a multimedia way. Students – even those with impairments or language difficulties – can determine their own learning speed. Knowledge transfer must also be oriented to the life and learning world of the current generation, which lives practically online. The learning videos have a manageable length, are completely subtitled and can be called up at any time.

I recommend my students to watch the videos before attending my course (flipped classroom). I can then concentrate much more on discussing questions and deepening the material in the actual lecture. The videos are also ideal for exam preparation. By the way, I am most pleased about positive feedback from users of my videos. For example, several students from the University of Vienna sent me a bottle of wine and a thank-you letter: “Without your videos, we would not have passed the exam”.

For Prof. Lauth, the TIB AV-Portal is the ideal publication platform for his videos:

My videos are analyzed and categorized there and are therefore easy to find for anyone interested. The DOIs make the videos citable, e.g. for Wikipedia or in my ORCID profile.

Heidelberg Laureate Forum and Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings: Lecture recordings and interviews with Nobel Laureates as well as award winners from mathematics and computer science.

Almost 160 videos of the Heidelberg Laureate Forum are already available on the AV-Portal (here: https://doi.org/10.5446/40129). Around 500 videos of the Nobel Laureate Meetings will follow in the coming weeks.

The latest cooperation partners of the AV-Portal include the Heidelberg Laureate Forum Foundation and the Nobel Laureate Meetings in Lindau.
Gero von der Stein from the Council for the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings in Lindau:

Every summer, about 30-40 Nobel Laureates meet around 600 outstanding young scientists from all over the world in Lindau at Lake Constance. Since its foundation in 1951, the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings have promoted the exchange between scientists of different generations, cultures and disciplines. The lectures held in Lindau focus on outstanding scientists who present current or historically significant research findings, report on their lives and careers, or sensitize participants to socially important topics. Recordings of the Nobel Laureate Lectures have been made since 1952, first as audio recordings and later as videos, creating a remarkable pool of scientific history. Little by little, this unique archive is now also available on the TIB’s AV-Portal, thus reaching a wider circle of people interested in science.

Likewise, the Heidelberg Laureate Forum brings together annually since 2013 some 200 highly talented young scientists from mathematics and computer science with the winners of the highest awards in these subjects.

The young researchers are often inspired by their role models and motivated in their work. Numerous videos document the forum. A special highlight are the interviews with the laureates in which they talk about their lives and work. They report on their experiences in the scientific world, dare to look into the future of their field of research and give some advice that is not only interesting for young scientists. The AV-Portal of the TIB is an important institution when it comes to making information sustainable for science and education, and we are pleased that our videos are part of it.

say the representatives of the Heidelberg Laureate Forum Foundation.

Copernicus Publications: Video Supplements and Video Abstracts of Scientific Articles

Persistent link between article and video: The TIB links to the corresponding article in the metadata of the videos and Copernicus links to the video. Here: De Cruz et al., The Modular Arbritary-Order Ocean-Atmosphere Model: MAOOAM v1.0. Geosciences. Model Development, 9, 2793-2808, 2016. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-9-2793-2016 and accompanying video: DOI: https://doi.org/10.5446/18552

Since October 2015, the TIB has been cooperating with the Open Access publisher Copernicus Publications with regard to the publication of scientific videos. Copernicus currently publishes 42 journals in the natural sciences which use the AV-Portal as a platform for scientific videos. Xenia van Edig, whom I was allowed to interview here two years ago, explains:

Scientific articles are not the only scientific output. Therefore, we offer our authors to link their articles via DOI with other outputs (such as data, model code, samples and also videos) related to the article. Videos can be used to illustrate and understand investigated phenomena, model runs, etc. (Video Supplements) or as a further introduction to an article (Video Abstracts). It is therefore a great service for our authors that the TIB hosts these videos and guarantees that the article is linked to its videos via DOI and vice versa.

This way about 200 videos of Copernicus authors have been published in the AV-Portal.

OSGeo: Conference recordings

At FrOSCon 2017 Astrid Emde presented the activities of OSGeo, FOSSGIS and Open Street Map and also talked about the TIB AV-Portal. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5446/32344

Another long-term cooperation partner is the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo), a global non-profit organization that promotes the development and use of free software from the field of geoinformation systems (GIS) as well as free geodata and education in this field. OSGeo is represented in German-speaking countries by FOSSGIS e.V., which in turn is the local chapter of the OpenStreetMap Foundation. Every year numerous conferences take place worldwide in this environment. The global FOSS4G Conference changes continents every year and takes place in Bucharest (Romania) in 2019. In the German-speaking area, it is the FOSSGIS Conference, which attracts more than 400 people each year at different locations.
Astrid Emde, who is involved in both FOSSGIS and OSGeo, reports:

Often, video recordings of the conference presentations are made during the events. These recordings are a fantastic way to share the content with a wider audience. The information is available afterwards for both conference visitors and third parties. We discovered the TIB AV-Portal as an excellent platform at a very early stage. More than 1,000 conference recordings have already been published in the portal and extensively accessed. The possibility of simply referring to a specific scene in a video via a link is very useful. So information can be passed on easily. A main argument for the TIB AV-Portal is above all the long-term availability of the contributions.
Therefore congratulations on 5 years of TIB AV-Portal!

International Conference on Grey Literature

For a long time there exist good contacts between the TIB and the Grey Literature Network Service (GreyNet), which was founded in 1992. The aim of GreyNet is to facilitate dialogue, research and communication between individuals and organisations in the field of grey literature. Grey literature is literature that is difficult to obtain and not commercially available.
What is new, however, is the cooperation between GreyNet and the TIB in the field of audiovisual media. Dominic Farace of Grey Literature remembers:

In 2017, a conference paper and poster were presented in Rome during the Nineteenth International Conference on Grey Literature entitled “Video is the New Grey”. Up until then, this annual conference series focused on capturing and publishing its content via GreyNet’s edited proceedings and flagship journal. It was TIB’s conference paper and awarding winning poster focusing on the importance of video as an integral element of contemporary scientific outputs, which led to an agreement between GreyNet International and the TIB-AV Portal to host and publish the video presentations of its annual conference. This collection now boasts 33 published video recordings.

This year the 21st International Conference on Grey Literature will take place from 22 to 23 October at the TIB in Hannover. Of course the lectures will also be recorded in 2019 and published in the AV-Portal. This will be done for the first time by the TIB Conference Recording Service, which was established in 2018. Among the first conferences recorded by the TIB Conference Recording Service were the Leibniz MMS Days.

Leibniz MMS Days

The Leibniz Network “Mathematical Modelling and Simulation (MMS)” brings together scientists from all sections of the Leibniz Association, from the natural and engineering sciences as well as from the economic, social, life and environmental sciences, who seek to answer questions in their fields with mathematical modelling and simulation. The aim of the MMS network is to “systematically use the interdisciplinary potential and exploit it for synergies”. The exchange takes place primarily at the annual MMS Days, which have been recorded since 2017 and published on the AV-Portal (MMS Days 2018, MMS Days 2019).

The AV-Portal today

Much has changed in the last five years. Since 2016, the portal has shone in the new TIB colours, the number of users has more than doubled every year and new functionalities have been added. The Lab Non-Textual Materials team works daily on further development. But it’s the content that brings the whole thing to life: the films and, of course, those who produce and publish them on the AV-Portal. Therefore we would like to thank all publishers of scientific films, of which we could only present a few here. We are looking forward to successful cooperations in the future and invite all scientists to use the AV-Portal for their films and audiovisual materials, so that the next five years will be as successful as the past five years have been.

Bastian Drees

... arbeitet im Kompetenzzentrum für nicht-textuelle Materialien (KNM).