The Search Behavior of Media Professionals at an Audiovisual Archive: A Transaction Log Analysis (Abstract)

Finding audiovisual material for reuse in new programs is an important activity for news producers, documentary makers, and other media professionals. Such professionals are typically served by an audiovisual broadcast archive. We report on a study of the transaction logs of one such archive. The analysis includes an investigation of commercial orders made by the media professions, as well as a characterization of sessions, queries, and the content of terms recorded in the logs. We identify a strong demand for short pieces of audiovisual material in the archive. Also, searchers are generally able to quickly navigate to a usable audiovisual broadcast, but it takes them longer to place an order for a subsection of a broadcast than it does for them to order an entire broadcast. Queries are found to predominantly consist of (parts of) broadcast titles and of proper names. Our observations imply that it may be beneficial to increase support for fine-grained access to audiovisual material, for example, through manual segmentation or content-based analysis.