Attended a very interesting meeting at James Madison University today as part of a special task force looking into the many technical issues surrounding the streaming of multimedia content. The Virtual Library of Virginia (VIVA) project is the organizational unit sponsoring the group and given their early adoption of these technologies, JMU was the logical site. I left with a shorter list of “next steps” than some of my more volunteer-prone colleagues but have already sent a note to several contacts at Apple asking about the feasibility of LDAP authentication for QuickTime Streaming Server (QTSS). Limiting access to these multimedia streams in some easily-maintainable way struck me as the greatest challenge we face. Of course, assuming we figure out a way to seamlessly link to the campus LDAP server for authentication doesn’t solve all the issues. Our local implementation of LDAP doesn’t appear to store a great deal of information about the status of an individual and other sites reported a similar lack of granularity. Might be a student or perhaps just a contractor. Clearly, a good bit of infrastructure work remains to be done in this area.
As an aside, one of our participants pointed out that it’s ironic that universities seem to be locking down network access at about the same pace that organizations like airports and hotels are busily opening it up.
Since within the Library Systems Office we already have three XServe servers and a couple of XServe RAID arrays, I’m hoping we can fashion a QuickTime-based solution and jumpstart our efforts at Mason. I’ll be focusing my energies on that piece of the overall effort. Over the next few months the group will identify (and I hope sort out) issues like encoding options, workflows, authentication, pooling of efforts and coordination of activities. Today’s meeting was a very promising start and I have high expectations for the group’s productivity.