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1. Introduction
Today, there are many applications of digital video libraries in education, medicine, publishing, law, consumerism, research and so forth. The rapid growth of digital libraries (DLs) has changed our lives more readily than we have ever speculated. The applications of DLs range from technical to home-use applications and from critical to entertainment-based applications (Pratha et al. , 2006). A DL can involve various types of data such as text, speech, audio, images, graphics, and video (Rarnaiah, 1998). For example, a DL object could be a document, such as a computer science technical report, a weather map (image), an interactive presentation of a speech, a video clip of a movie, an instructional visual aid or even an olfaction (i.e. a smell). Enhancing multimedia applications with olfactory stimuli has the potential to create a more complex - and richer - user multimedia experience, by heightening the sense of reality (Ghinea and Ademoye, 2012). A DL includes collections of data which are stored in digital formats and accessible via computers. The digital content may be stored locally or accessed remotely via computer networks. DLs provide an integrated set of services for capturing, cataloguing, storing, searching, protecting and retrieving information. These services provide a coherent organization and convenient access to typically large amounts of digital information (Gonçalves et al. , 2007).
DELOS[1] is a Network of Excellence on Digital Libraries , and DL.org[2] is a Coordination Action on Digital Library Interoperability, Best Practices and Modelling Foundations . In the context of these umbrellas, DL researchers and practitioners have produced a Reference Model for Digital Library Management Systems (Candela et al. , 2011, p. 3). In this reference model, a DL is defined as:
A potentially virtual organisation, that comprehensively collects, manages, and preserves for the long depth of time rich digital content, and offers to its targeted user communities specialised functionality on that content, of defined quality, and according to comprehensive codified policies.
At present, digital video libraries have to encompass various technologies such as storage, databases, multimedia networking, information systems, artificial intelligence, multimedia databases, high performance processing, communications, user interface, hypertext, hypermedia and security. Figure 1 depicts a digital video library architecture.
The major components of such an architecture are presented below:
The Media Server...