Preservation, digitalisation and accessibility of (audio) visual and paper/book heritage were the keywords about two weeks ago. Monday 9 June I a had an interesting discussion about the topic at the Universty Library in Ghent (as part of the research project I’m running for the Antwerp Academy/University Antwerp), and the next day it was the central theme of a workshop organised by the participants of the research project BOM-VL (Bewaring & Ontsluiting van Multimedia in Vlaanderen) at VUB.
The challenges highlighted during the workshop cross with the small research project as there are: which formats should be used when digitalizing, which quality of digitalisation needs to be used according to the purpose of the digitalized work, what about metadata and what about (re) production rights when opening up content to the wider public? How does these challenges work within collaborations between different types of organisations?
4 examples/ 4 speakers explained how they dealt (or tried to deal) with these challenges. Their projects are more than interesting to have a look at. Paul Gerhardt, running at present an independent consultancy named Archives for Creativity, works with public broadcasters and archives in the UK and the US. It was said to hear though that most of the BBC creative archive is off line now and that the project is on hold at the moment…but the idea has spread over the UK and the US now. Tobias Golodnoff is project director of the Dansk Kulturarv. I particularly liked their Bonanza project, in which they invited the public to participate in the preservation project just by voting which material should be digitalized in the first phase of the project. Marius Arnesen, working for the R&D division of the Norwegian Public Broadcast company, gave an overview of experiments with new media on the Internet using their content. Who has not received through facebook or other social network channel the hilarious clip on the medieval helpdesk. And last but not least Geert Wissinck and Johan Oomen, both working as researchers for the Duch images of the Future – project, gave an insight in the challenges while making audio-visual cultural heritage available to a wider public, save that heritage for the future and make room for innovation as well as research on the process. I’m particularly curious how the education pilot will run, a platform, combining different sources and offering teachers the possibility to use the resources to prepare their educational material for class.
The whole session has been filmed so I guess it will soon available on the web somewhere. Maybe check Cultuurlab or the e-cultuur blog?
