Tag Me While You Can: Making Online Recorded Meetings Shareable and Searchable

In this paper we report on the design and implementation of a collaborative recorded meeting sharing system, with the goal of facilitating discovery and rapid access to information contained in recordings. The system, which we originally developed as a video sharing system behind the firewall - a sort of YouTube for the enterprise - evolved into a meeting capture, transcription, and annotation system. This evolution was driven by the high frequency and availability of recorded web-conference meetings with remote attendees joining via a common telephone bridge. The Collaborative Recorded Meetings system supports indexing and search not only in videos but also in any slides the attendees shared during the meeting. Recordings are automatically transcribed and indexed using speech-to-text technology and users can add annotations such as micro-tags ( i.e. tags on segments of the meeting ) and comments on the timeline. User generated tags can be shared via weblink with a colleague, who can then view just the segment of the recording associated with the tag. All attendees have the ability to edit the tags and transcription to improve the quality of the searchable data. We discuss the use of the system, along with findings from a 14 month video sharing trial within a large corporation.