micala is a comprehensive lecture archiving system, including components for recording, processing, archiving and disseminating multimedia web lectures.
micala has evolved since 2000 from multiple projects of the U-M ATLAS Collaboratory Project and CERN, and is now used in production at both of those institutions. Part of its development was funded by the US National Science Foundation.
Project Links
Presentation
Micala is used by the University of Michigan and CERN
The following institutions have lecture archiving services that are powered by micala.
The CARMA lecture archiving service at the University of Michigan uses micala.
The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) uses micala.
Sample content produced by micala
Screen shots
Getting the software
You can download a recent tar file of v0.3 from the Sourceforge project page. The documentation in doc/ is partially out-of-date; for installation instructions, read the Trac wiki.
To get the most up-to-date software, you'll need to install git and pull from the repository. Please follow the Installation instructions for developers.
Versions
- v0.3 - current version, development will be finished in early December 2010.
- v0.4 - we will start working on this in the first week of December 2010, and finish sometime in 2011
- v0.5 - will be finished sometime in 2011
Current team
- Jeremy Herr (herrj@umich.edu) - Project Manager - Wrote processing scripts, set up monitoring database, set up git repo, got the open source project started.
- Nicola Tarocco (nicola.tarocco@cern.ch) - Currently the main developer. Wrote the web-admin interface, translating Perl scripts to Python, making many improvements and fixes.
- Thomas Baron - Wrote the Windows recording interface used in permanent room installations at CERN that uses Adobe FMLE.
Former contributors
- Jim Irrer - Wrote software for and set up the lecture recording cart, including camera control software.
- Tushar Bhatnagar - Created the camera control web interface for recording chalkboard images, as well as the Linux recording interface.
- Curtis Hiller - Created the Flash web lecture viewer.
- Mitch McLachlan - Improved many aspects of the software and worked on a DVD-creation script.
- Jay Novak - Wrote a Java library for camera control.
- Eric Myers - Wrote an early version of the lecture archiving software.
- Giosue Vitaglione - Wrote an early version of the processing scripts to create RealPlayer web lectures.
- Charles Severance - Created an early version of a web lecture capture and viewing system.
License
The code is available under the Educational Community License version 2.0. This is a very permissive license. We are considering also releasing it under the GNU Public License version 2.0, because it would be a shame if a GPL-licensed project wanted to re-use our code and couldn't.
History
micala is an acronym for University of Michigan and CERN Automated Lecture Archiving
In 2000, Professor Homer A. Neal at the University of Michigan founded the U-M ATLAS Collaboratory Project, whose mission is to "study and advance the technologies and practices required for the organization and execution of modern, large-scale collaborative research experiments." This has included developing technologies for videoconferencing and lecture archiving.
