Sound and Vision has been preserving, digitalizing and opening up Dutch audiovisual heritage together with 5 other institutions since 2007 for the Images for the Future project. In 2010 the central theme for Images for the Future will be Indonesia. Therefore almost 50 items with this theme from the Polygoon collection have been added to Open Images.

Polygoon newsreels did several reports on the former Dutch East Indies and Indonesia over the years. In these reports the Dutch viewers got an impression of the day-to-day life in the Dutch East Indies, for example of the market in Batavia in 1946:

Besides the day-to-day life, Polygoon newsreels also captured the difficult road to independence. Reports were made on the politionele acties (police actions) as well as the diplomatic negotiations. One of these was the signing of the truce agreement on the American ship ‚Renville’ in 1948 (from 00:46):

In the Netherlands there was also interest in the rich Indonesian culture. In 1948 the youth of Zeeland, Brabant and Limburg could get acquainted with the Indonesian culture at a traveling exhibition, showing a.o. wayang puppets and the gamelan:

After the independence of Indonesia, reports about the life in Indonesia were still made. For example a report about the opening of a new research institute for tea and cinchona with development aid from the Netherlands and the World Bank in 1975. In this report are shown beautiful images (in color) of the tea and rice fields in West Java:

The National Archive (Nationaal Archief), the largest Dutch archive, has put a selection of their collection on Flickr The Commons . It’s the first Dutch heritage institution to join Flickr The Commons, a project intitiated by the US Library of Congress and international photo-sharing website Flickr.

Click here for the pictures on Flickr The Commons

Parts of the special collection ‘Labour Inspectorate’, digitized in the Images for the Future framework, are placed onto the Flickr website. Users are invited to add tags and comments to the photos. As a result of the new collaboration between the National Archive and Spaarnestad Photo, photographs of this archive have been added to the Flickr collection as well.

On the 4th November, there is a seminar about the value of social tagging, with among others, delegates from Flickr and the National Maritime Museum. In the first two days, the photo’s have been viewed over 300.000 times and more than 400 comments have been added.

The Nationaal Archive is proud to be a member of The Commons on Flickr. Photographs of the Nationaal Archive that are part of the Commons on Flickr have “no known copyright restrictons”, this means that there are no copyright restrictions on the works designated, either because the Nationaal Archief owns the copyright of the photographs and authorizes others to use the work without restrictions, or because the copyright may have expired.

As part of Images for the Future the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and Knowledgeland are developing Open Images. The aim of this project is to offer online access to a selection of archive material for creative reuse. Reuse includes remixing of archive footage in new videos. Open Images also supports interlinking with other data sources (like Wikipedia), allowing the easy creation of mashups. Access to the content will be based on the Creative Commons model which proposes a middle way to rights management, rather than the extremes of the pure public domain or the reservation of all rights. The ‘open’ nature of the project is underscored by adapting open formats and using open source software. Software resulting from Open Images will also be released under a open source license.

The development of the project started with a kick-off meeting at Knowledgeland in Amsterdam, earlier this month. The aim-of-the-day was to map the (open source) digital video solutions that are available today and to get feedback. Eight experts in the digital video field where invited to this informal brainstorm session. After an introduction of Images for the Future and the Open Images project plan, the invited experts gave inspiring presentations of their current work. At the end of the day there was a general discussion about the project plan and the first steps that ought to be taken.

Please find a report of this day below. Open Images aims to launch a Beta release by the end of the year.

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