The 27th of October the World Day for Audiovisual Heritage took place, an UNESCO initiative to celebrate and recognize the value of audiovisual collections for future generations. In light of this day Sound & Vision organized a “video-challenge” to encourage the use of video - in the form of audiovisual heritage - in articles on Wikipedia.
Over the summer Sound & Vision uploaded new open video content using the GLAMwiki Toolset whereby the total number of videos had doubled to nearly 4.000 items on Wikimedia Commons. Although the community of Wikipedia warmly welcomed this new reusable video content, we wanted to see it reused in Wikipedia articles, in order to present the items to a wider audience in a relevant context.
We put up a projectpage (in Dutch) on Wikipedia and provided eight free tickets to our museum as small prizes. Within one week almost 200 videos from the collections of Sound & Vision were added to articles on the Dutch Wikipedia. This result was achieved with minimal communications efforts, short notice and only four subscribed participants. After the week had ended, some volunteers continued to use videos and currently almost 400 video’s have been added to articles!
The videos now serve as illustrations to many articles, among which the article of marine vessel De Ruyter, active in World War II.
An other article that now features no less than three videos from our archives, is the Dutch article about the Brokopondo-reservoir in Suriname.
Most of the material used in this video challenge comes from a collection of Polygoon newsreals with Dutch commentary, which makes usage on the Dutch Wikipedia more likely. There is however also material that can be used on other language versions of Wikipedia in the collections of Sound & Vision For instance the 600+ videos of birds in the collection of Nature footage.
As was argued in an earlier blogpost, video deserves a bigger place on the free online encyclopedia. Sound & Vision will continue to make more content available and stimulate its use. Hopefully the 2015 World Day of Audio Visual Heritage will be an occassion for archives holding audio-visual collections to join forces and make this day into a yearly highlight for video on Wikipedia.