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Sound & Vision hosted FIAT/IFTA's media management seminar last week. 170 delegates from all over the world - including Chile and Mexico - flew in to learn about how metadata can be the cornerstone of digital archiving. After a welcome by Sound & Vision ánd FIAT/IFTA’s president Jan Muller, the attendees were in for a two-day frenzy of seasoned speakers. These hailed from different corners of the archiving realm: producers, librarians, computer scientists, cataloguers and researchers spoke about automated metadata production, standardisation tools and inviting users in to describe archival content.
Several of the cutting-edge technologies that featured on the programme have been developed, tried or tested in research and development projects. Our R&D department presented demo's on a few of these projects over the breaks to give attendees another glimpse on some of the ideas and technologies we are developing. On Thursday, we presented the possibilities of archival materials for second screen technology. The LinkedTV project works on linking television to the web - a development that is on the rise and draws much attention. Aided by Noterik’s chief technology officer Daniel Ockeloen, we also presented on the EUscreen portal. In the EUscreenXL project we are working with archives from 21 countries to expand the portal. We will develop creative pilots - such as the virtual exhibitions that are now available - for users and visitors. We also intend to connect the metadata of all the participating broadcast archives’ online content to Europeana. Visitors from all over can then find broadcast history between museum content, books and the millions of other digital cultural products of Europe.
On Friday, keynote speaker Lora Aroyo talked about how users can generate your metadata - a practice we've been researching with our platform Waisda?. This video game for crowdsourcing challenges players to gather as many points as possible by tagging video clips with sensible, useful information. Amit Bronner showed the AVresearcher, a tool that plots search terms and their presence in video materials on a visual graph and timeline. This allows researchers to visualise and compare social and cultural trends over time. Max Kemman from Rotterdam’s Erasmus University joined forces in presenting the AXES search interface for media professionals. Soon the Erasmus team will be starting tests on a second phase of the project, which covers tools for academic research. You can find an overview of the user testing and findings we've made in the AXES project in our latest project blog post: Zooming in on Public Users.
At our neighbouring stand the PrestoCentre invited new members to their community. Our department is involved in the project Presto4U, which means to bridge the gap between digital preservation needs and existing solutions to them. The way we intend to do so is by setting up communities of practice: an informal online meeting space to map the preservation gaps, knowledge needs and missing tools for audiovisual archives from all walks of life. All in all, it was our pleasure to form part of this lively gathering and meet so many people engaged with new ways of safeguarding and reusing audiovisual archives.
More information:
- You can find the FIAT/IFTA presentations on Slideshare
- Read a visitor's view of the seminar on Ian Matzen's blog for day 1 & day 2
- Read more about Zooming in on Public Users on the AXES blog
- Find the overview of current and finished R&D projects we're working on