UFM team digitalized »The Mike Wallace Interview»

Quinn Stewart and Grete Pasch, at a demonstration of The Mike Wallace Interview Online

«50 years ago,

Mike Wallace, known for his television program 60 Minutes produced a series titled  The Mike Wallace Interview.  In it he interviewed Salvador Dalí, Henry Kissinger, Eleanor Roosevelt, and other personalities like Leonard Ross and Eldon Edwards. These interviews were transmitted live and filmed in film reels. The basic characteristics of these programs was the shrewdness with which Wallace approached his guests, facing them with opposite opinions and commentaries as a result of the preparation that Wallace and his team did for each interview.   At the beginning of the Sixties, Wallace donated his film collection to the Harry Ransom Center (HRC), a library/museum at the University of Texas in Austin, where they remain until today» related
Grete Pash, director of the Ludwig von Mises Library, at Universidad Francisco Marroquín. 

«In the middle of 2005», Grete Pasch said, «my colleague Quinn Stewart from the University of Texas commented me that Mike Wallace was very interested in digitizing and placing on the Internet 60 interviews of this collection.  Steve Wilson, in charge of the audio-visual collection at the HRC, already had the necessary authorizations and was working with Quinn in the digitalization of the videos.  But the most interesting challenge for Quinn and me was to enrich those videos with metadata, transcriptions, and tables of contents to facilitate the search and use of the collection.  And for this, Quinn decided that the best tool would be the GLIFOS-media system designed by Rodrigo Arias and developed totally in Guatemala by
glifos.com«, explained Doctor Pasch.    

During the first semester of 2006, Pasch and Stewart designed the Digital Media Collections and distributed part of it to a group of students from the masters in informational sciences at the University of Texas.  As part of the projects of the course, the students digitized and added metadata and transcriptions to 16 of the interviews using the gmCreator tool.  Another group of students, also from Texas, worked 11 more interviews during 2007, under the supervision of Professor Gary Geisler.  And to work the rest of the videos, HRC decided to contract the crew of
New Media UFM, given the experience acquired in 6 years of working rich media projects.  

This was a truly enriching experience for everyone, because it implied to apply OCR to text files, to use the gmCreator to analyze videos, create transcriptions, synchronize them, and design procedures to coordinate the team work.  «The project required much detailed attention and several check points to guarantee that all the texts were correct», Rebeca Zuñiga said, director of New Media.  «Pedro España, our webmaster, gave us the technical support while transferring archives to and from Texas, as well as building the GML files with the video and verifying that the synchronization worked.  In the transcriptions the collaborators were Jennifer Mills, Katty Schellenger, Evelyn Orantes, Claudia Leiva, Regina De La Vega and María Lucía Aldana. The creation of the tables of content was headed by Lucia Bahr and Christiaan Ketelaar; whereas Barbara de Koose and Michiel Glaudemans reviewed the use of