Digital Library Presentation: Moving Images Archive

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Moving Image Archive

• Alexander P. Merrill

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Internet Archive

• Est. 1996 in San Francisco, CA
• 501(c)(3) non-profit
• Brewester Kahle, founder and director
• Computer engineer, entrepreneur
• Founder of Open Content Alliance
• Co-creator of Kahle/Austin Foundation

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Internet Archive

• Began with archived internet sites
• Alexa webcrawler
• Wayback Machine
• Now archives texts, audio, moving images,
  software, and web pages
• Works with L.O.C. Smithsonian

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Internet Archive Goals

• Build Internet Library
• Universal access to all knowledge

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Internet Archive Goals

• Mission Statement
• Most societies place importance on preserving
  artifacts of their culture and heritage. Without
  such artifacts, civilization has no memory and no
  mechanism to learn from its successes and
  failures. Our culture now produces more and more
  artifacts in digital form. The Archive's mission
  is to help preserve those artifacts and create an
  Internet library for researchers, historians, and
  scholars.

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Moving Image Archive Goals

• Provide easy access to archival films
• Encourage widespread use of moving images in new
  contexts to people who might not have used them
  before.

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Audience

• Researchers
• Historians
• Scholars
• People with disabilities
• General public

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Copyright

• Uploaded movies should be either public domain,
  out of copyright, or be (copyright) owned by the
  uploader

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Technologies

• Data centers
• Petabytes of information
• Preserved in numerous locations
• California
• Alexandria, Egypt

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Technologies

• Video Upload Guidelines
• Highest quality format preferred
• Smaller file sizes and formats automatically
  created by archive
• MPEG2 is easiest for IA to handle
• Questionable file formats may be removed by
  moderators

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Technology

• Compressed, streaming video
• Most videos downloadable

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Contents

• Categorized into
• Collections
• Sub-collections
• (see below right)

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Contents

• Sub-Collections contain numerous user-specific
  sub-sub-collections
• (see right)
• Created by Archive administrators
• Criteria
• 50 items created
• Emailed request to info_at_archive.org

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Sub-Sub-Collection Example
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Contents

• Uploaded by users and organizations
• Ex Newsreels, classic cartoons and
  advertisements, home videos, public domain films

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Specific Video Page Example
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Description Metadata

• Basic description on video page
• Downloadable metadata files

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Retrieval Performance

• Extensive search capability
• Custom fields with operators
• Search JSON, XML (etc.) fields

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Retrieval Performance

• Extensive search capability
• Custom fields with operators
• Search JSON, XML (etc.) fields

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Strengths

• Large
• Searchable
• User-generated
• Well-organized relative to size

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Weaknesses

• No did you mean? Google-style search
• Lack of video description standards
• Copyright issues