Many heads are better than one 
Thijs van Exel, Knowledgeland, The Netherlands
Lieke Heijmans, Knowledgeland, The Netherlands
Johan Oomen, Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, The Netherlands
Maarten Brinkerink, Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, The Netherlands
Ever since Images for the Future took off in 2007, much effort has been put into its infrastructure. From its backbone of data centres to trained personnel – much of this work has been as valuable as it is invisible. In the end, however, audio-visual heritage is only of true value when it is accessible for people who can use and reuse it as they choose. Identifying these audiences and their needs is a first and necessary step before developing projects to accommodate them.
On the other hand, we like to regard our audiences as valuable sources of information as well. Many heads are better than one when it comes to sourcing information about audio-visual heritage. Therefore, in many projects we try to engage these crowds as much as possible in our effort of gaining knowledge about our materials.
In an interactive workshop setting, we would like to go deeper into these developments and start a dialogue about whether our thoughts are up to speed with other people’s views on these matters. We are organizing our workshop around short presentations (5-10 min) of our past and present projects, which we think are typical of our concerns with access, openness and (creative) reuse. Which projects worked out well and which did not? What are other people’s experiences with similar activities? Listed hereunder are some of our own projects we want to discuss.
Projects | past:
- Celluloid Remix – a remix contest in which participants gave their vision of progress, reusing a collection of early Dutch cinema (1917 – 1932)
- "Waisda?" / What’s that? – a crowdsourcing game for collecting user-generated metadata for audio-visual content
- WikiLovesArt/NL – free content photography contest among 45 Dutch museums and cultural institutions aimed at illustrating Wikipedia articles.
Projects | present:
- Open Images – an open media platform that offers online access to a selection of audio-visual archive materials to stimulate creative reuse.
- T-Visionarium Open City – a spectacular video installation that allows visitors to explore and edit a multitude of stories in 3 dimensions, on a 360°, full surround screen.M
Projects | future:
- Augmented Reality / travelling exhibition
Mini-Workshop: Many heads... [development]
Keywords: heritage, audiovisual content, open, innovation, user, enduser, archives, archive, image
