With the boom of technology and the rapid pace of change that it has brought about, it’s not surprising that careers in indexing and transcription have changed substantially. What is surprising, however, is the number of companies and businesses that continue to outsource some of these services when the technology to do so lies within reach, and in some cases, is in fact, at their fingertips.
So our question is this: Are you indexing your own digital audio and/or video recordings?
What is indexing exactly?
Indexing is essentially a task that enables you to identify the major topics in an interview and the approximate point at which they occur in the recording. In the past, indexing was essential because it prevented excessive rewinding and fast-forwarding on a tape by scanning the content. Perhaps more importantly, indexing allows the user to more easily find a specific place within a recording in order to determine if that recording contains content, which is needed or not.
An index also lists the major topics discussed in an interview and the approximate places in the recording where they occur. This is different from a transcription, which is a word for word replication of the content captured in the recording.
Indexing can be very time consuming on the front end, but without it, research can become time consuming, requiring investigators to spend hours and hours of time searching for specific content and listening to or scanning a good deal of unnecessary content in the process.
What you may not realize is that the time you are spending indexing key interviews and content can be done with software that you may already have. What’s more, if you don’t already own software, which can index your digital recordings, getting access to it may be less complicated than you think!
Outsource…to Your Technology!
If your job requires you to regularly capture digital audio and/or video recordings, you should be utilizing software that not only captures high quality audio and video but that also offers other tools such as indexing. iRecord offers multiple tools that encourage activities above and beyond simply recording.
For example, time-stamped annotations within iRecord’s equipment can be created and directly associated recorded audio/video. iRecord “indexes” can also be rapidly searched in our powerful Evidence Vault to locate specific words, case numbers or phrases and the corresponding audio/video segment instantly played.
iRecord’s superior integration of index notes, combined with simple operation, makes iRecord an ideal choice for interview situations that demand more than just high quality audio/video recording.
If you are still indexing on your own or looking to upgrade to the latest technology, we’d love to share our capabilities with you. Contact us to learn more today!