In response to feedback from faculty and students, LSA Technology Services has been increasing its support for digital scholarship and digital humanities by piloting services that offer new types of consultations, platforms, and community engagement. One of them, an integration between MiVideo and Omeka, improves streaming performance and increases storage capacity for video and other rich media content.
Omeka is a popular content management system and database for digital collections used for scholarship in the digital humanities at U-M. While Omeka allows for rich media content storage, the content has to be placed on the Omeka server, which quickly fills up when storing video and adds to project costs.
LSA Technology Services specialists Joe Bauer and Adam Gerard recognized that video storage and streaming performance would be problematic as more faculty and researchers begin utilizing the new Omeka S platform. Their search for a solution eventually led them Melinda Kraft, ITS service manager for learning management and MiVideo, U-M’s streaming and content management media service, powered by Kaltura. With Kraft’s expertise they were able to create a MiVideo instance dedicated to digital scholarship and supporting research.
“MiVideo has been a fantastic resource, allowing us to embed short clips from large video files into our Omeka exhibits without going through [a] time-consuming process,” says Bauer. “Kaltura’s infrastructure is optimized for large-scale media streaming. We are pleased to have found a solution that is available at no additional charge. In fact, to our knowledge, Michigan is the only institution that has successfully integrated Kaltura (MiVideo) with Omeka S.”
