April 22, 2008
Yes, Virginia, There Is PBS on Your Colleges' Web Sites
You’re one of those people who, for whatever reason, can’t get enough public television, right? (After all, you read The Chronicle, and PBS really is a fellow traveler.) Maybe it’s the gee-whiz science of NOVA, or the savoir-faire of David Brancaccio on NOW, or maybe you just really like to watch pledge drives.
Well, we have good news for you, at least if you are at a college in Virginia. VIVA, the Virtual Library of Virginia, is now providing access to PBS resources for all of its 70 public and private members in higher education. The organization, a consortium of college and university libraries, has licensed 500 hours of PBS programming, in video form, for streaming over the Internet.
But how to keep out interlopers, and ensure that only members get to watch? Seventy colleges with ever-changing populations of students are hard to police. And smaller campuses simply don’t have enough bandwidth for lots of video. So the consortium has begun using InCommon, an “identity management” program developed by Internet2, the university-networking organization.
InCommon acts sort of like a bouncer at a nightclub, checking IDs at a central location and keeping out the riffraff. This allows the University of Virginia, which does have a fair amount of computer power, to host the videos on its servers and stream them out to only the VIVA members. —Josh Fischman
Posted on Tuesday April 22, 2008 | Permalink |Commenting is closed for this article.
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