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Category: digitization

DH2009: Digital Curiosities and Amateur Collections

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curio-imageSession Title: Digital Curiosities: Resource Creation Via Amateur Digitisation
Speaker: Melissa Terras

Overview: Review of 100 virtual museum websites and multiple flickr groups plus surveys of amateur website creators, memory institutions and Arts & Humanities academics leads to new perspective on digitization and creation of collections online by dedicated enthusiasts.

Session Highlights

Areas of “Amateur” endeavor  have a long history of launching collections, such as:

  • cabinet of curiosities
  • foundation of astronomical research
  • british flora and amateur botanists
  • weather observations
  • open source software movement

Being an amateur doesn’t necessarily mean being bad at what you do!

Within the realm of self-defined museums some common topics often emerge:

  • ephemera (advertising, packaging, nostalgia)
  • comics
  • technology – especially old tech, there is a surprising trend of being fascinated by technology approximately 10 years older than the collector
  • personal and “embarrassing” collections
  • genealogy

For these self-defined museums the scope is self-defined – these are self-delineated collections. Virtual museums can document aspects of cultural heritage considered socially taboo or in some way too sensitive to collect. A great example of this is the Museum of Menstruation which claims to have been created 14 years ago and is currently trying to establish a public permenant display for the public.

Platforms have evolved over the life of the web, starting with static html, then blogs and now Flickr images as a mode of presentation.

This is a list of successful amateur collections online:

Visual Arts Data Service (VADS) is a more traditional site created by a cultural heritage institution. It contains 100,000+ images copyright cleared for use in teaching, learning and research in the UK. VADS is a very detailed static source of images with metadata, but provides no interaction.

Amateurs do provide metadata, but it is intuitive metadata. It might not fit into rigid buckets of data, but that doesn’t meant that the metadata available isn’t useful.

What are the boundaries between amateur and professional? Work vs hobby?

Many of these amateur sites get much more traffic than most standard museum sites. More than 50% of museum digitized images are never visited.

Memory institutions are starting to put things into the wider online community:

Much of amateur research has been driven by advances in technology. A great example of this is the advent of affordable metal detectors led to dramatic changes in archaeology. The internet and Web 2.0 technology are arming a whole new generation of enthusists who can find one another and collaborate more easily than might ever have been dreamed of 20 years ago.

Next Steps & Conclusions

Future research will involve looking at the psychology of collection: archives vs collections. For now it is important to realize that institutions are not the only hosts of “worthwhile” digital objects. Pro-am (aka, pro-amateur) are doing better with using web 2.0 & getting more traffic.

What can memory institutions learn from this?

  • interact with user communities
  • use the ‘grand central stations’ of flickr, twitter, facebook
  • usability of flickr is better than what most memory institutions build for themselves

My Thoughts

This session considers the ways cultural memory institution can take advantage of the web by looking at what the successful enthusiasts are achieving. This research-backed approach confirms what I would have expected. Libraries, museums and archives are leaving a lot on the table when it comes to putting their collections online. Sites run by non-professionals are doing an amazing job of drawing in new audiences, keeping people around and then initiating conversation within that audience.

The Flickr Commons is a big step forward, but it isn’t the only option. There are also varying opinions about how successful the crowdsourcing aspect of the Flickr Commons is for memory institutions. A lot of this goes back to to a core question “how do we know if we have succeeded?”. There is much to be said for setting out clear goals when launching online initiatives. Is your goal increased traffic to your site or crowdsourcing of metadata? A great example of an initiative whose goal is clearly collection of crowdsourced metadata is the German Federal Archives who chose to use the Wikimedia Commons for their photo metadata initiative.

If you are trying to extend your mission of providing access to materials to the public, then how do you measure success? Putting your materials in what Melissa called “grand central stations” (or what I have also heard termed “public crosswalks”) definitely increases the chances of serendipitous discovery by new individuals. That said, we can see from the successful blogs mentioned above that tackling a niche with enthusiasm and consistent posting can go a long way to building a following. JonWilliamson.com seems to have only launched back in November of 2008 with a post featuring a Scotch Tape Christmas ad from 1951. The author posted in May of 2009 that his images in Flickr had surpassed 100,000 views.

To conclude this post I leave you with a list of inspirational digitized collections online that were created by various cultural heritage institutions:

Have a favorite online collection website? Please share it in the comments below.

As is the case with all my session summaries from DH2009, please accept my apologies in advance for any cases in which I misquote, overly simplify or miss points altogether in the post above. These sessions move fast and my main goal is to capture the core of the ideas presented and exchanged. Feel free to contact me about corrections to my summary either via comments on this post or via my contact form.

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mms0131/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

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NARA Outgrows ARC: Researching New Catalog Software Options

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ARC LogoThe Archival Research Catalog (ARC) of the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) needs to be replaced. NARA has put out an official Request for Information (RFI) and plans a “Vendor Day” for April 6th with final responses required by April 24th, 2009.

This is exciting for two very different reasons:

  1. New catalog software!
  2. Getting to read all the gory details about ARC!

If this makes you curious, then go give the RFI a read, but here are some juicy ARC tidbits to consider:

  • ARC’s Logical Data Model – 20 pages worth of data model that I am sorely tempted to print out, tape together and hang on a very large wall
  • ARC was built as a customization of OLIB back in 2003 and has been upgraded along the way
  • ARC currently contains 2,478,259 archival descriptions and 8,810,938 authority records
  • An average of 25,000 archival descriptions are added to ARC each week

The RFI states: “NARA has outgrown the existing ARC system and requires a more robust solution that’s capable of scaling to support at least 250 million archival descriptions and links to upwards of 500 million digital copies over the next 4-7 years.” Why so many records? Because all of NARA’s partners are digitizing records so quickly that they are creating a massive backlog of documents and the future only holds more of the same.

This RFI is only for planning purposes, but I will definitely be following this story as it unfolds.

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Sunshine Week 2009: Archives, Records and Other Online Government Information

Sunshine Week Sunshine Week 2009 is a national initiative spearheaded by journalists to “open a dialogue about the importance of open government and freedom of information”. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) chose to mark Sunshine Week this year by announcing the release their new tool for searching EFF’s FOIA documents. Learn more about EFF’s efforts to make open government a reality in this EFF call to action.

The Sunshine Week blog announced the release of a 2009 Survey Of State Government Information Online. The survey results explains:

Using a standardized worksheet surveyors rated each section on its usability, looking at factors such as whether the information was clearly linked, if full reports or only summaries were available, whether viewing and/or downloading was free, and whether the data were current. The categories for the survey were selected for generally serving the overall public good — the kind of information people need for their own health and well-being and that of the community.

See the worksheet for details on the categories selected for inclusion in the survey and the results for lots of interesting tidbits about exactly which states provide access (or not) to various public information online. A few very randomly selected highlights:

  • Maryland: Nursing home information, mhcc.maryland.gov/consumerinfo/nhguide, got high marks for facilitating online search and for allowing users to “compare data in a variety of ways.”
  • Iowa: The state auditor’s office reportedly offers online more than 5,000 full reports of all its audits dating back to 2001. The audits are easily accessible from tabs on the main Web page, www.auditor.iowa.gov.
  • Colorado: Bridge inspection reports in Colorado are considered public, but they are not published online. Anyone who wants to see the reports is advised to file an FOI request.

All of this made me recall my blog post about the parallel goals of journalists and archivists when considering digital public records and databases. I wanted to celebrate Sunshine Week by looking for other online sources of government information. My first stop was the website of the Council of State Archivists (CoSA). They had a couple of great resources including:

A bit further afield we find GovernmentDocs.org advertised as a “community government document reviewer system”. On their about page we read:

With the GovernmentDocs.org system, citizen reviewers can engage in the government accountability process like never before. Registered users can review and comment on documents, adding their insights and expertise to the work of the national nonprofit organizations which are partnering on this project. This new information then becomes instantly searchable. The text of each document is searchable, as well, thanks to a powerful Optical Character Recognition (OCR) functionality.

GovernmentDocs.org adds a powerful layer to government transparency and accountability by indexing documents in a user-friendly manner that is remarkably easy to share. Every page of every document has its own unique url, allowing you and other users to link to that page on blogs, send emails about the documents to friends, and expose the information to a wider audience.

Here is an example GovernmentDocs page taken from a request submitted by CREW (Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington) regarding the Endangered Species Act. Each GovernmentDocs page has a unique URL, full text transcription of the page and supports comments and reviews. The possibility of building up a community around these records is very real. I am curious to see how many citizen reviewers and comments are associated with these documents a year from now.

Please help celebrate Sunshine Week by exploring all these amazing resources!

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Preserving Jewish Memory: Family Photos Join Oral History in Centropa Movies

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Centropa. org features video photo montages that combine Jewish family photographs with oral history. I found my way to Centropa from the Time.com article Old Nazi News Makes Headlines in Germany which includes Kristallnacht in Words and Photographs from Centropa, but Centropa’s mission reaches beyond recalling the Holocaust. Centropa bills itself as “an interactive database of Jewish memory”.

The first oral history project that combines old family pictures with the stories that go with them, Centropa has interviewed more than 1,350 elderly Jews living in Central and Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and the Sephardic communities of Greece, Turkey and the Balkans. With a database of 25,000 digitized images, we are bringing Jewish history to life in ways never done before.

Their fleet of 140 individuals conducted extensive oral interviews and digitized thousands of old family photos. They are quite intent on clarifying that they do not create videos during their sessions with their interviewees. Instead, they record audio of their multi-hour sessions, transcribe these sessions and combine them with the digitized family photos to create their movies.

The juicy center of their website is found in the Centropa Movies which are alternately billed as a “library of rescued memories” and a “digital bridge back to a world destroyed”.  Their movies are also available via iTunes and on the CentropaOffice YouTube Channel. The movie I have included below tells the story of Judit Kinszki and focuses on her father Imre Kinszki, a budding photographer from Budapest, Hungary. From this movie’s Centropa Movie page you can also navigate to Judit Kinszki’s biography , the full family photo album and a study guide for this movie.

The amount of detail provided with each posted interview is really incredible. Biographies, detailed notes on each photo, the study guide, a family tree and a currently grayed out but promising link to “Discuss Movie”. This site has clearly given great thought to how to support teachers and has followed that vision through in the form of tons of supporting materials. Centropa has chosen the path of quality over quantity with the 17 movies currently posted.

Upon further reflection, I realize now that the movies are an outgrowth of the database of photographs and biographies. The detail was not added to support the videos – but rather the videos are the next step of evolution beyond the photos and interview transcripts.

In addition to the movies they offer a Recipe Archive, downloadable eBook versions of some of their interviews as well as Centropa Student, aimed at high schools in Europe, North America, and Israel. For those of you working on your own oral history projects, there is the Centropa Oral History Tool Kit, available in 5 languages. The Centropa Glossaries are less glossary and more a detailed list of people, social groups, events and terms that can be searched by country, type or keyword. Finally, don’t miss the ‘Narrated Stories and Introductions’ featured on the right sidebar on the Centropa Movies page, such as Maps, Central Europe and History or the Introduction to Centropa for US Students.

Reading Centropa’s claim that they are the first to combine the use of family photos and oral histories made me recall the University of Alaska Fairbank’s Project Jukebox. This project launched back in 1988 and aims to ” integrate oral history recordings with associated photographs, maps, and text.” The original was written using Hypercard!

They have a map showing all the communities in Alaska currently included as part of the project. A good example of an individual photo with accompanying narration is Harry Cook in his Garden from the Kiana Village History Project. No – it isn’t as elegantly assembled as the Centropa Movies, but the intention is much the same. They use old photos as a catalyst for helping individuals being interviewed and then combine the audio and images to improve end users’ understanding of the context of individual photos.

I have signed up with Centropa to be notified when they launch the promised ‘Add Your Family Photos’ feature. Until then I will keep scanning my own family’s photos, such as the one below featuring my grandfather (back row on the right), and working my way through all the Centropa Movies and their supporting materials.

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German Federal Archives, Crowdsourcing & the Wikimedia Commons

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Wikimedia Commons: Children with Ice Cream 1949, Berlin (Commons:Bundesarchiv)

I spotted the New York Times article  Historical Photos in Web Archives Gain Vivid New Lives via Dan Cohen’s Twitter Feed. The article is a nice treatment of the difference between the Library of Congress‘s 50 photo a week contributions to the Flickr Commons and the German Federal Archives‘ contribution of 100,000 images to the Wikimedia Commons (described as ” the virtual archive for material used in Wikipedia articles”).

I took a look at the details of this project – starting with the homepage of the Commons: Bundesarchiv on the Wikimedia Commons. This passage explains one of the goals of the Budesarchiv Gallery:

Very old photographs have become public domain, and events and persons of today can be photographed by Wikipedians with their digital cameras. But for the time between there is a huge gap in Wikipedia articles. The donation of Federal Archive is important to close that gap, and it is to hope that it can serve as a model to other institutions in Germany or elsewhere.

Also, each individual photo includes this disclaimer:

For documentary purposes the German Federal Archive often retained the original image captions, which may be erroneous, biased, obsolete or politically extreme. Factual corrections and alternative descriptions are encouraged separately from the original description.

There is a special category to call out instances of these types of descriptions – BArch images with biased descriptions. In my exploration, I discovered only a very few with these original image captions translated to English. One example is the photo of a single room home for a family of eleven.

In contrast to the Library of Congress addition of 50 photos a week, the German Federal Archive plans to add “a few thousand images a month”. The Commons:Bundesarchiv To Do list is also interesting reading. The To Do page includes tasks both in German and English (though the wiki discussion page is all in German). I love having the opportunity to read about issues confronting those working on this sort of project. For example – there is a discussion about how to determine if an image should remain Uncategorized. What if only 1 person out of three is tagged? Does it still ‘deserve’ to remain marked as ‘uncategorized’?

New categories created for use in this project need to use a special template so that they show up properly within the sub-categories of the Category:Images  from the German Federal Archive page. For example – the page which sorts images by country has 64 sub-categories at the time of this post. A new country added using this template approach would immediately show up on the  images by country sub-category page.

I will say that the learning curve for classifying images within the Wikimedia Commons in general, and the Budesarchiv project in specific, is much higher than tagging images in the Flickr Commons. There is a handy CommonSense tool (available via the ‘find categories’ tab on any image) that will suggest categories based on keywords, but even that is a bit overwhelming for a beginner.

As an example, let’s look at the image I chose for this post of two boys finishing their ice cream in 1949. Here are the categories currently assigned:

Let’s take a look at what the wiki text looks like to set these categories. First there is the special template for the project which specifies the year and location.  I believe that these are attributes uploaded with the original photograph. This gives us the first two categories in our list (emphasis added mine):

{{BArch-License|
|signature=Bild 183 1984-0202-506
|batch=Bild 183
|year=1949
|month=
|location=Berlin
|PD=
}}

Then we get to the standard Wikimedia Commons categories. These are the categories most akin to tags in Flickr. These are the categories which will promote discovery of these images alongside images from other sources from across the Wikimedia Commons:

[[Category:History of Germany]]
[[Category:Ice cream]]
[[Category:Black and white photographs of children]]
[[Category:Black and white photographs of Germany]]
[[Category:Standing males]]
[[Category:Photographs by Brenner]]

These categories were clearly hand added by someone, since the original caption reads (by my rough translation) At the beach: “Is it already gone?”. I suppose I could go in and add [[Category:Beaches]], but I am honestly not sure if there is enough beach in the photo to warrant such a classification.

I am very curious to see comparison stats of the assignment of categories/tags to images in both the Flickr & Wikimedia Commons a year from now. How will we measure success? How will we grade the accuracy of metadata assigned by the public? Which images will get more public views and usage – those added to the Flickr Commons or those added to the Wikimedia Commons?

For now, I am happy to set aside all these thorny questions. I am just so pleased to see a new and ambitious experiment in crowdsourcing image metadata.

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SAA2009: Building, Managing and Participating in Online Communities

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SAA 2009: Sustainable Archives AUSTIN 09It is official – the panel I proposed for SAA 2009 (aka, Sustainable Archives: AUSTIN 2009) was accepted!

Title: Building, Managing and Participating in Online Communities: Avoiding Culture Shock Online

Abstract: As more archival materials move online, archivists must become adept at participating in and managing online communities. This session will discuss real world experiences of this involvement, including putting images into the Flickr Commons and links to archival materials in Wikipedia, as well as guidelines on cultural norms within online communities. We will also discuss choosing between building new communities from scratch vs joining a broader, existing community (such as the Flickr Commons).

I will be serving as session chair and moderator for our group of fabulous panelists (finances and travel plans permitting):

The intention is for this session to begin with very brief presentations showing off the current projects at our panelists’ institutions and follow that up with lots of time for discussion and answering of questions.

We see our target audience as archivists who want to hear about real world experiences of working within existing online communities (such as Wikipedia or Flickr) and building new communities dedicated to cultural heritage materials. The session will target individuals with less experience with Web 2.0 and social media implementations, but the lessons learned should also be of interest to those already in the implementation stages of their own projects.

I will put out a call for questions as we get closer to the conference so that our group can get an idea of what people are interested in learning about specifically, so start making notes now. Hope to see you in Austin!

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Google Tackles Magazine Archives

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Google Book Search: Popular Mechanics Jan 1905 Cover ImageAs has been reported around the web today, Google is now digitizing and adding magazines to Google Book Search. This follows on the tails of the recent Google Life Photo archive announcement.

I took a look around to see what I could see. I was intrigued by the fact that I couldn’t see a list of all the magazines in their collection. So I went after the information the hard way and kept reloading the Google Book Search home page until I didn’t see any new titles displayed in their highlighted magazine section. This is what I came up with, roughly grouped by general topic groupings.

Science and technology:

Lifestyle and city themed:

African American:

  • Ebony Jr!: May 1973 through October 1985
  • Jet: November 1961 through October 2008
  • Black Digest: Named ‘Negro Digest’ from November 1961 through April 1970, then Black Digest from May 1970 through April 1976.

Health, nutrition and organic:

  • Women’s Health and Men’s Health: January 2006 through present. I found it very amusing to be able to scan the covers of all the issues so easily – true for all of these magazines of course, but funny to see cover after cover of almost identically clad men and women exercising.
  • Prevention: January 2006 through the present
  • Better Nutrition: January 1999 through December 2004
  • Organic Gardening: November 2005 to the present
  • Vegetarian Times: March1981 through November 2004

Sports and the outdoors:

They of course promise more magazines on the way, so if you are reading this long after mid December 2008  I would assume there are more magazines and more issues available now. I hope that they make it easier to browse just magazines. Once they have a broader array of titles – how neat would it be to build a virtual news stand for a specific week in history? Shouldn’t be hard – they have all the metadata and cover images they need.

I love being able to read the magazine – advertising and all. They display the covers in batches by decade or 5 year period depending on the number of issues. I also like the Google map provided on each magazines ‘about’ page that shows ‘Places mentioned in this magazine’ and easily links you directly to the article that mentions the location marked on the map.

I think it is interesting that Google went with more of a PDF single scrolling model rather than an interface that mimics turning pages. In many issues (maybe all?) they have hot-linked the table of contents so that you can scroll down to that section instantly. You can also search within the magazine, though from my short experiments it seems that only the articles are text indexed and the advertisements are not.

Google’s current model for search is to return results for magazines mixed in with books in Google Book Search results – but they do let you limit your results to only magazines from their Advanced Search page within Google Book Search. See these results for a quick search on sunscreen in magazines.

Overall I mark this as a really nice step forward in access to old magazines. As with many visualizations, seeing the about page for any of these magazines made me ask myself new questions.  It will be interesting to see how many magazines sign on to be included and how the interface evolves.

To read more about Google’s foray into magazine digitization and search take a look at:

For a really nice analysis of the information that Google provides on the magazine pages see Search Engine Land’s Google Book Search Puts Magazines Online.

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LIFE Photo Archive Digitized and Put Online by Google

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Martha GrahamIn news that would make any fan of old photographs drool, the Official Google Blog has announced that the LIFE Photo Archive is now available on Google Image Search.  The LIFE Photo Archive’s home page is neatly organized to encourage you to browse for images by decade, famous people and topics.

There really is something for everyone here. I picked this striking image of Martha Graham because I love modern dance, but there are also images of war, fashion, sports, landscapes, architecture and tons more. The images currently posted stretch from the 1750s through 2003 and include many that have never before been published.

It is also worth noting that not everything in this collection is a photograph. I found illustrated pages from books like the Queen Summer by Walter Crane. I also found illustrations like this one of the ancient temple of Artemis in Ephesus, Turkey.

From the text in Google’s blog post, it sounds as if Google is doing the digitizing – while LIFE Inc (or their parent company Time Inc) will profit from the sale of prints. The current posted photos represent 20% of all the photos. Ultimately the photo archive is expected to be about 10 million images and stretch to the present day.

TimeInc: St. Moritz, Switzerland, February 1947TimeInc has partnered with QOOP to sell framed fine art photographs via links directly from each of the LIFE photo pages within Google. Take a look at the page dedicated to selling you a  framed art print of St. Moritz, Switzerland in 1947.

I had not heard of QOOP before, but they seem to have a number of options available for those who want to be their partner. QOOP also wanted me to join their ‘Social Commerce Revolution’. In order to join the revolution I had to create an account (it is free and easy it pointed out). To create my account I had to give them my email address, password and birth date. Not so bad. On the next screen they required that I enter my mailing address and phone number. I don’t really want to give them this information – but I am curious about this revolution I have been promised. And when I was done – a whole lot of nothing happened. I think that I am supposed to use QOOP to create and market products. Is it an affiliate program? Is it an artsier CafePress? Do I need to contribute my own images or can I use those of others? I am still not sure.

I do like their integration with the LIFE images, but I think that there is clearly more work to be done before they are going to foster a ‘Social Commerce Revolution’ anytime soon.

Time Inc’s press release includes the following details:

The LIFE Photo Archive featured on Google will be among the largest professional photography collections on the Web and one of the largest scanning projects ever undertaken. Millions of images have been scanned and made available on Google Image Search today with all 10 million images to be available in the coming months.

“For 70 years, LIFE has been about one thing, and that’s the power of photography to tell a story,” says Andy Blau, LIFE’s President. “LIFE will now reach a broader audience and engage them online with the incredible depth and breadth of the LIFE Photo Archive from serious world events, to Hollywood celebrities to whimsical photographs.” Time Inc. EVP, John Squires adds: “We’re delighted Google recognized the rich value of our photo archive and worked with us to bring it to millions of consumers. Consistent with the launch of the TIME Archive, PEOPLE Archive and the SI Vault, this initiative continues our efforts to build valuable new revenue opportunities from our rich heritage.”

All keywords are translated into 16 different languages. LIFE’s Photo Archive will be scanned and available on Google Image Search free for personal and research purposes. Copyright and ownership of all images will remain with Time Inc.

Google uses a special notation to support search across the LIFE collection – all you do is include source:life as one of your search terms within the Google Image search box. Each photo has a rich set of metadata including a description and the keywords mentioned in the press release above.

When you click on one of the keywords (which are actually called ‘Labels’ in the Google interface) it submits a search within the LIFE collection – but does NOT restrict that search to only the keywords. Rather, it seems to search across all the text associated with each image. For example – the label ‘Feathers’ on assorted images links to this URL: http://images.google.com/images?q=Feathers+source:life. This search returns many images, including one of Debutante Marilyn Lowe wearing a dress made from feathers which is not in fact assigned the label ‘Feathers’, but obviously does include the word feathers in the description.

For those accustomed to hotlinked tag-like terms only retrieving content that also is assigned that term (see all the images in the Flickr Commons tagged with ‘snow’), this might be a bit confusing. Also in contrast with the Flickr Commons, Google does not offer the opportunity for users to assign additional labels/keywords to the images. If you have signed on with a Google account, you can assign images within the LIFE collection a star rating. I don’t see how this is used right now, but I expect that over time they will leverage these ratings to sort the Google hosted image search results.

Since I spend a lot of time these days organizing controlled vocabularies, seeing the keywords assigned to these images makes me wish I could see Time Inc’s full and organized set of terms. My favorite spotted so far? Lines of People – as typified by this photograph of Models wearing checked outfits from 1958.

It will be interesting to see what other partnerships crop up in the next year to digitize other major collections. I am also very curious to know if people actually buy framed fine art prints at the current cost of $79.99 for an 8″x12″ inch print in a 13″x16″ frame. Who knows if Time Inc will be forthcoming with their degree of success on this front – but it will likely be an good test case for other major collections looking to recoup some of the cost of their digitization efforts and find a new revenue stream.

Image Credit: The copyright of both of the images shown above belong to Time Inc. Please click through to view details about each image, including the photographer’s name and the option to purchase your own print of the image.

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Video News Archives: Digitization as Good Business

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Flickr: OSU Spring Game 2006 Media Lineup by Chris MetcalfMy work now includes more SEO (Search Engine Optimization) work and so I have added SEO focused blogs to my RSS feedreader. Today I spotted Search Engine Land‘s post Business Opportunities For Video News Archives. Stephen Baker calculates that 35 years worth of archive footage equals 51,100 hours of content per station. With approximately 20 stations per broadcast group he estimates a cost of $30 million per group to digitize each broadcast group’s archive of news footage. See the original article for more details on his calculations.

He then proposes 3 approaches to monetizing these efforts and leveraging the resulting digitized video:

  1. Media-Centric Wikipedia – complete with an expectation that social media contributions would provide “scalable way for creating editorial metadata, such as descriptions and story summaries that would be costly to otherwise create”. This makes me think of Flickr Commons for video.
  2. Education Site – akin to NBCU’s iCue site I mentioned in my post about NBC News Archive footage on Hulu. “Efforts like this provide educational/subscription opportunities as well as sponsorship/advertising opportunities—what advertiser doesn’t want to get in front of 13 – 18 year olds?”
  3. News Site Extension – described as “bolting the news archive onto the existing site”. The major benefit of this is that “more content provides more SEO opportunity and, hence, larger audience reach.”

Baker concludes:

In a market where traditional media is struggling to create unique and compelling online experiences and business models, the archive represent a differentiator that can jump-start audience building and monetization initiatives. Not only is it an important representation of world history that must be saved for “preservation-sake”, the archive represents a large, untapped online opportunity.  Who will be first to realize its potential?

The ultimate goal of all three of these scenarios is to offset the extreme expense of digitization of thousands of hours of news footage. I think it is refreshing to see a perspective from outside the cultural heritage corner of the world that still sees video archives as rich resources worth preserving. I also like seeing ideas that are pitched in manner that should catch the attention of those making budgets and struggling with finding funding for large digitization efforts.

Image Credit: Flickr photo OSU Spring Game 2006 Media Lineup by Chris Metcalf

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Political Campaign Ads from the NBC News Archives Find New Audience on Hulu.com

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Thinking about politics, but waxing nostalgic for the good old days of movie stars and snappy jingles? Surf over to Hulu.com’s new gallery of Historic Campaign Ads. These are from iCue, which bills itself as “A fun, innovative learning environment built around the video from the NBC News Archives“.

And what would a political video blog post be without a political video? If you don’t see the video below, you can click through to view the I Like Ike ad from 1954 I chose for your viewing pleasure.

This is a great example of finding new audiences for material from archives. In this case, I had to dig for a while to discover that these were from the NBC News Archives. The Hulu iCue network/studio home page doesn’t really tell me anything – but you can imagine using a page like this to supply more information if you wanted to stress the archival origin of a set of videos.

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