Exploring new archiving for multimedia
Logically, the best way to store anything electronically is through a personal archiving system that makes sense to the user. Many archiving software tools feature some sort of hierarchical structure that the user is required to employ or adjust to. While user-friendly to some degree, many of these utilities offer either too much or too little. VExplorer on the other hand, has focused its practical features on storage and retrieval, offering an intuitive and comprehensive "video collection search, organisation, and management tool". It provides the user not only with a feature for storing data according to hierarchical structures, but also according to certain special or temporal structures. It is a unique feature that affords this sort of power to search facilities, as each user would more than likely want to construct their own features by which to conduct archiving and/or searching. Additionally, one of the most important features of the VExplorer is the interface that grants a logical view of the archive. Through this feature all stored data formats are viewable, whether image, audio, visual or textual. Aside from the above-mentioned features, the VExplorer also comes with the VAnnotator that presents an additional means to empower search and retrieval by offering annotative data that can be attached to the files. VExplorer also provides the means to draft a story or sketch through selection and structuring of data. The product is currently available for testing, but should find its way into mass-market availability both for the professional and simple home multimedia archiving.
