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7.12.2006
"CornellCast" offers Big Red audio and video on the Web
The sights and sounds of
Cornell have a new home.
As the Web has become more and more a channel for
multimedia, the university's departments and divisions have
begun to offer more than the written word. Words and even
still photos just can't convey the cacophony of the Big Red
Parade down Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, the oddball gait of a
walking robot or the subtle body language of an outstanding
lecturer.
So Cornell's Office of Web Communications (OWC) has created
a central clearinghouse for Cornell multimedia. Just a click
away from the university home page at <http://www.cornell.edu/video>,
the new "CornellCast" page will host video and audio
presentations of major campus news and events and provide
links to other multimedia sources on campus. Visitors to the
site can subscribe to RSS feeds that will notify them
whenever new content is added.
"Increasingly, people turn to video as a way of getting
information,"
explained Tracy Vosburgh, director of multimedia development
and production for the Division of University
Communications. "It is a very effective way to capture the
rich resources of Cornell and get them out to the general
audience. This will be a site that allows people to
participate without being on campus." Vosburgh will be the
curator of the collection; the effort to create the page and
organize its relationships with video providers was led by
OWC Web Content Manager Carrie Sanzone with assistance from
Cornell Information Technologies (CIT) Web programmer Cleibe
Souza.
In addition to hosting its own content, the site links to
audio podcasts from Mann Library; video tours of the Law
School; the eClips collection of videos about
entrepreneurship, business and leadership; audio and video
from the College of Human Ecology; multimedia stories about
the Campaign for Cornell; video clips of birds in action
from the Lab of Ornithology; educational programs from
Cybertower; and audio and video news from Cornell Chronicle
Online.
Vosburgh welcomes faculty lectures and research reports as
well as student-produced content. Cornellians off-campus
also are welcome to participate, she said.
"This page is going to grow," she said. We are actively
soliciting submissions. And there should be no perception
that it's hard to get on this page. If it's a great Cornell
moment, it should be up there."
As the site grows, she adds, older videos will be archived
but will remain available. An example is the recent
on-campus lecture by former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon
Peres. "After it's no longer today's news it will live on
here," she said.
Most videos will be available either as streaming video from
a CIT server or downloadable to play on a computer or iPod.
(Streaming video begins to play almost as soon as you click
on it, without waiting for an entire file to download.)
Eventually, Vosburgh said, the page could become the
standard location for live streaming of such events as the
Peres lecture.
Source: The Ithaca Journal
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