Television, film, broadcasting – where are the open collections?

Blog compiled by Emma Beer

The aim of the Europeana Space project is to create new opportunities for employment and economic growth within the creative industries sector based on Europe’s rich digital cultural resources. The project is developing pilots in six thematic areas (TV, Photography, Dance, Games, Open and Hybrid Publishing and Museums) as a means to explore different scenarios for the re-use of digital cultural content, with a special focus on the re-use of content accessible via Europeana.

So what open collections of film, moving images and broadcast collections are available in Europe and beyond for creative industries and other users?

Open collections are collections which can be (re)used for any purpose, subject only, at most, to the requirement to give credit to the author/s and/or making any resulting work available under the same terms as the original work.  Providing truly open collections in television, film and broadcasting is notoriously complex for myriad legal, technical and cultural reasons.  Some initiatives work towards ‘open’ content or fully open metadata within a particular sector, such as for educational use.  Initiatives such as EUscreen make their metadata openly available. While streaming content for these metadata records is made available online, only a very small subset of EUscreens’ offering is openly available for reuse.  Others provide collections that are only ‘open’ for reusers for non-commercial purposes.   But how many collections are actually fully open for re-use by the creative industries?

We can only hope that initiatives that demonstrate a move towards the principle of ‘open’ or ‘reuse’, including Europeana Space, and research paper’s such as the Yellow Milkmaid, will encourage wholesale open content and open metadata  initiatives in the audiovisual sector to flourish.  We’ve selected a few of these initiatives to highlight here with contributions from the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, the Research and Education Space from the BBC/Jisc/BUFVC, and WGBH and Library of Congress. Aside from the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision example, none of these projects result immediately in open content (according to the open definition) for creative industry reuse (the focus of Europeana Space), but they provide concrete examples of a movement towards more open content and sometimes, adopt an open metadata principle in full.  

In our next blogpost,  Peter Kaufman of Columbia University and Intelligent Television takes us through his thinking on  ‘What Could Be’ for the future of video open collections.

Do you know of other initiatives?  Write in and tell us!  

 

The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision

Experimentation with open distribution of digital audiovisual heritage, within the context of Images for the Future, started with the initiative from Sound and Vision and Kennisland in 2008 to develop Open Images – an open media platform that offers online access to audiovisual archive material to stimulate creative reuse. In April 2009 a first version of the platform was demonstrated at the inaugural Open Video Conference in New York.

Open Images as a media distribution platform utilized a fully open stack: the software components, media formats, metadata standards, content licensing and its API are all open for reuse. Sound and Vision uses the platform to openly distribute over 3,000 items coming from its historical newsreel collection (using either a CC-BY-SA license or, where copyright has expired, marked with a PD Mark). In total the platform contains over 5,000 items, thanks to contributions by other organization like EYE, Dutch public broadcaster VPRO and a selection of partners from the EUscreen project.

Since the launch of Open Images in 2009 the content has been reused for different purposes. Parts of the collection on Open Images have been duplicated to other media repositories, such as Wikimedia Commons, Internet Archive and Europeana.

A recent look into the reuse on Wikipedia showed that the videos are used to provide audiovisual context information to more than 3,000 articles, not only on the Dutch Wikipedia, but also on more than 70 other language versions of Wikipedia. These articles are viewed more than 4 million times a month. The data and videos from Open Images are also a great source for innovative applications. Creative developers have become even more aware of the existence of Open Images as a basis for new apps since the Open Culture Data initiative started in 2011.

With Open Images, Sound and Vision and Kennisland have shown the great potential of opening up audiovisual heritage for reuse. However, apart from some select international experiments, public broadcasting worldwide is still lagging behind in opening up their archival footage when it comes to exploring the potential of opening up their public media productions.

Maarten Brinkerink

• Public Participation and Innovative Access Expert
• The Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision
• Twitter: @mbrinkerink

 

The Research and Education Space

The Research and Education Space is a BBC/Jisc/BUFVC initiative to build a platform that makes a wide range of licensed digital material from a range of significant collections available for research and teaching within the UK. It will do this by bringing together published catalogues that are available as linked open data to offer improved search across collections.

RES does not require the digital assets themselves to be licensed openly, only that they are licensed for educational use within the UK. The catalogues themselves need to be both linked data and openly licensed so that they can be aggregated and held locally where needed, and so that anyone can build on the aggregated data for their own purposes.

Bill Thompson

• Head of Partnership Development, BBC Archives at BBC Television
• BBC
• https://bbcarchdev.github.io/res/
• Twitter: @billt

 

Make Film – Greatest Generation

This project, hosted by the education charity Into Film along with the BFI, BBC Learning and the British Council, invites children aged 7-11 to record interviews with members of the wartime generation and combine the footage with curated Britain on Film archive clips (only available for viewing in the UK, and for download in UK primary schools) to create their own short documentaries.
For more information, visit www.intofilm.org

 

The American Archive of Public Broadcasting

The American Archive of Public Broadcasting is a collaboration between WGBH and the Library of Congress with a long-term vision to preserve and make accessible significant historical content created by public media, and to coordinate a national effort to save at-risk public media before its content is lost to posterity.

The initial collection of 40,000 hours of digitized content from over 100 organizations, mostly TV and radio stations, is available for viewing on location at the Library of Congress and WGBH.  In October, through the website: americanarchive.org, over 5,000 items from about 32 contributing organizations will be accessible and available for streaming online for educational and scholarly research only.  Importantly, however, the metadata will be made openly available.

Much of the content highlights local communities, politics, and social issues across the country in the form of news, talk shows, and public affairs programs. We plan to continue to add more content on an ongoing basis to improve the metadata and assess content and rights beyond the initial launch.

Karen Cariani

• Director WGBH Media Library and Archives at WGBH Educational Foundation
• americanarchive.org
• Twitter: @kcariani

For more information on the Europeana Space TV-pilot, read here.  Read more about the Europeana Space Television Hackathon that took place in May 2015 here and video report on the Hacking Culture Bootcamp here.  Europeana Space is particularly interested in seeing more television/film/broadcast released and reused by the creative industries.