‘What Could Be’: the future of open video collections

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.

This week, Peter Kaufman of Columbia University and Intelligent Television takes us through his thinking on ‘What Could Be’ the future of open video collections. Read last week’s blog here.

What Could Be

The ultimate metric of openness in video – that is to say, how open to download, use (noncommercial, commercial), adaptation, and remix (all for no cost to the user) a clip of video might be – is likely to be whether the nonprofit online free encyclopedia Wikipedia accepts it for publication. Wikipedia, as its boosters note, has a high bar to entry – to pass over it requires rights, permissions, and clearances of the most liberal kind to be in order for the clip in question, but also format choices to have been made where the video codec (the print codex doesn’t, a priori, face this challenge) is itself built from open-source software. More about all that is here:

What if all the video produced and published by cultural and educational institutions, but especially recordings of classroom lectures, were available for such purposes, and the entire world of knowledge production from well-funded, often publicly funded learning institutions were being built on such a principle of free access to knowledge? That world is not here, but it could be, and those of us involved in media production at such institutions might want to consider formulating a kind of code of best practices where goals of this nature might be ratified by management teams who recognize the singular power of the web today in advancing a more modern form of enlightenment.

At Columbia, the major online courses that we are beginning to build around video lectures are taking the definition of open that characterized open courseware of the previous decades and bringing it more in line with its more modern, if more orthodox, Wikipedia-friendly formulation. An entire semester of richly produced (three cameras?!), illustrated, transcribed, and annotated video from a bestselling Columbia historian – Eric Foner – is now available for free automatically for almost the full range of use and reuse, with the notable exception – a frequent stumbling block – of commercial use (that being forbidden without advance contact and agreement). The deed of license on online sites where video can be seen – YouTube included – reads as follows:

“The Civil War and Reconstruction” course series is Copyright © 2014 and 2015, Eric Foner and the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York. Except where otherwise noted. Professor Foner’s course lecture videos in the series are licensed with the Creative Commons license BY-NC-SA 4.0, which means that anyone anywhere may copy, share, adapt, and remix the videos and the videos’ key media components, including transcripts, without having to ask for prior permission, as long as such sharing is done for noncommercial purposes and the original author, work, and copyright and Creative Commons notice above are cited. For more information, visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

More about all that is here.

There are thousands of marvelous lectures available around the world. There are thousands that were never created – Columbia faculty such as Jacques Barzun, Edward Said, Meyer Shapiro, Lionel Trilling (I speak only of humanists; the lists go on . . .) were never systematically recorded in their own time and for posterity. What if the courses that we invest in producing – many watchable through links posted here (http://www.openculture.com/freeonlinecourses) – were open to be open? What a doorway that would be to build! What a house! What a temple!

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.