Screenshot from Les Kiriki - Acrobates Japonais - 1907 _ Europa Film Treasures
This has been a great week for digitisation with several new archive and collections coming on stream online. Having been involved with developing the Newsfilm Online archive for use by further and higher education within the UK, I was pleased to delighted to come across the Europa Film Treasures a archive of historical European films. The site, with its focus on research and study, contains work from a number of Europe's most prestigious archives. Quoting from the site "although it is probable that already 70% of the images shot during the first fifty years of cinema are definitively lost." This collection provides a glimpse of the full picture. The quality of the streaming videos is good, even at full screen, whilst the terms, are the usual non commercial and personal study/use. Education is not specifically mentioned. Probably worth saying, there are a few clips some might see as 'risque', but these are clearly flagged.
Moving on to images, LIFE's photographic image collection is being digitised and hosted by Google and available online. Over the next few months it is expected over 10 million images will be added, most of them never seen before. To, (roughly,) quote Lev Manovich from the Future of Educational Technologies conference last week: "there are possibly more pictures uploaded to Flickr than there are objects in the museums of the world." A remarkable observation, whilst this collection adds another ingredient into the mix. The online images themselves are good quality at around 1000 pixel size, give or take a few, terms of use not clearly stated or evident, I suspect the usual Google's image search terms apply. There is also the opportunity, to buy 'framed' prints, a good way to monetise such an archive.
Back to the EU again and this is where the 'mostly' caveat come in. I was eagerly awaiting the 20th November, for the official launch of the Europeana project. Obviously, the project had not anticipated the demand, (10,000,00 in the first hour), Europeana now needs to re-engineer the service, which will become available again in a more robust format in mid December. If the promotional video is anything to go by, this is going to be a stupendous resource
So, on reflection, until recently, most information on the web has been textual or data based, but the (multi) media, and by association, cultural elements are becoming just as important, due to the of the inevitable, and unstoppable move to digitise our collective culture.
note: written on train, any typos will be corrected after weekend
