Back to Institute News" Streaming video database in support of mental health education and training presentation at the Internet 2 national conference"
Part of the mission of the Louis de la Parte Florida Mental Health Institute at the University of South Florida is to inform professionals of new and effective measures for treating mental illness, to foster closer links between service providers and their clientele, and to clearly represent the mental health needs of the citizens of Florida to the State legislature. In support of these aims, the de la Parte Institute established one of the first World Wide Websites in Florida in 1993. Online access to research library holdings were made available to the public in 1995 and have been subject to continual refinement. Numerous direct-submission technologies were developed at the Institute, which allowed Web browsers to place book renewal requests, register for conferences, etc. before E-commerce became a household word.
In 1998, the University of South Florida was awarded an Advanced Networking Infrastructure and Research Grant by the National Science Foundation (#ANI-9810154). Several meritorious applications were developed by the USF Libraries, one located at the de la Parte Institute. The purpose of the Institute’s meritorious application was to develop a searchable database of on-line video archives capable of being viewed across a number of network bandwidths ranging from 56 kb/sec. up to 1Mbit/sec. The Institute’s interest was in furthering the dissemination of knowledge about various mental illnesses and to lessen the stigma associated with them. To that end, the Institute made the decision to deliver mental health information to the public in a video format which would inform the viewer and provide valuable examples of how to deal with delicate interpersonal situations involving persons with mental health problems. The target audience consisted of the general public, mental health educators and practitioners, legislators, and network researchers who might see, in distributed video, a way to better bring people together by using high speed internet technology.
Low bandwidth versions of the videos were made available through the Internet as a function of either the deliberate choice by the viewer or through an MPEG4 encoding format which supported multiple bit-rates. This product has been in use continuously since 1999, and will be demonstrated nationally at the March 2000 Annual Member Meeting of Internet2 in Washington, D.C.
Download this brochure (4 pages, PDF) or to test drive the video database, please see our streaming video page.