After the 1000th video was uploaded to Open Images last October a new milestone has been reached: the addition of the 1500th video. A few themes can be distinguished among the last 500 video’s, such as winter, traffic and transportation, living, Schiphol Airport, fashion and beauty, sports, Suriname and the Netherlands Antilles, industry and production, countryside and performing arts. On the occasion of the 1500th video we will highlight a few videos from some of these themes.

The 1500th video that was added to Open Images is a report from the Polygoon newsreels on the 60 years existence of Philips in 1951. The electronics company Philips was founded in 1891 by Gerard Philips and his father Frederik Philips. In 1951 Eindhoven was decorated with thousands of light bulbs to celebrate the 60 years existence. There was also an unveiling of a statue of Anton Philips. This week it is 120 years ago that Philips was founded:

The former Netherlands Antilles celebrated a special day on October 10, 2010. On that day Curaçao and Sint Maarten became constituent countries within the Kingdom of the Netherlands, a status Aruba had since 1986. The other islands – Saba, Saint Eustatius and Bonaire – became a direct part of the Netherlands as special municipalities. The status of the former colonies is laid down in the Charter for the Kingdom of the Netherlands, which dates from 1954. The alteration made in 2010 wasn’t the first one. In 1974 Polygoon newsreels did a report on a conference on the Charter for the Kingdom of the Netherlands in The Hague. Subject of discussion was Suriname’s desire to become independent. This would become a reality a year later, when the charter was altered for the first time:

In the countryside of Groningen they had other things to worry about in 1975. There the village of Weiwerd had to be demolished to make room for the expanding industry of the neighbouring Delfzijl. Polygoon newsreels made a report on the demolition of the village. The first houses had already been taken down by then and many inhabitants had left the village. The school in the village only had 14 students and 2 teachers left and the church in the middle of Weiwerd hadn’t had a service in months. Polygoon interviewed a woman who hadn’t moved yet:

More than 20 years earlier workers were doing the exact opposite in the IJsselmeer. There they were busy building a new city, Lelystad. In 1950 they started working on the construction of a ring-dike for the future Flevopolder from the working island Lelystad. In the first months of 1954 they hadn’t reached the mainland yet and the winter caused problems. Because of the ice they couldn’t reach the mainland with a boat anymore. And after the thaw had set in, the ice wasn’t thick enough to provide the inhabitants with food and mail via that route. Thus the sixty inhabitants of the island were provided with the necessary goods via a helicopter:

After the 1500th video the collection of videos on Open Images will keep expanding gradually. Later this year we hope to make the 2000th video available for reuse. Amongst the themes that will be added in the future is a theme on women with subjects like female football, female police officers and the feminist movement.

The rush on Dutch roads is off all time. Indications of the first blockages find their origin in the twenties from the 20th century. They are the heralds of the well-known frustrations in the morning and evening: traffic jams.

Over the years, the demand for motor vehicles grew, resulting in headaches for many civil servants. This led in 1938 to the establishment of the “Legion of  Benevolent Road Users”. An initiative of the Royal Dutch Automobile Club to bring the politeness back in traffic, so that the safety on the street could be guaranteed. Members of the Legion ‘operated’ under the slogan “prepared for politeness on the street.”

Traffic can not just trust in the benevolence of the road users, so in 1965 a number of new traffic regulations got introduced where safety was of paramount importance. Pedestrians in the built-up area should not be hindered during their cross-over by inattentive motorists and mopeds as swift as an arrow. The Polygoon Dutch News shows in a report that the changes of the traffic regulations also restrict the various functions of emergency lanes.

Nearly 30 years after the establishment of the Legion of Benevolent Road Users, the situation on the roads are often still an awful affair. The undesirable behavior of many road users was not yet nipped in the bud. Especially in the busy capitol city of Amsterdam, motorists are a major problem, their pride possessions are anyway. Cars are double-parked at the strangest spots. However, it is not only the citizens where the finger should be pointed to. There is not enough parking space available in the city. The picturesque bridges that connect the canals do briefly serve as parking lots in 1967. It soon becomes apparent that this solution is unnerving to other road users, so the Amsterdam city council sets foot on the street armed with yellow paint.

In addition to addressing anti-social driving and parking, a car-free city centre of Amsterdam is becoming a more prominent issue. In reply to this, the industrial designer Luud Schimmelpennink in the early 70s came with an innovative concept for environmentally friendly transport: the Witkar. A three-wheel electric vehicle for two persons that could go up to 30 kilometers per hour. This electric tricycle is designed for the collective: subscribers don’t have to worry about a parking lot because the Witkar could be ‘hovered’ in a charger at five locations in Amsterdam.

Fourty videos on sports have now been added to Open Images. These items from the Polygoon newsreels give an overview of different sports in the Netherlands. Besides well known sports like football, hockey and cycling, there are also videos on lesser known sports. One of these is a sport that orginated in the USA, pushball. In a game of pushball two teams try to push an enormous ball across the line of the side of the opposing team. A large crowd of spectators in traditional attire watches a pushball game in Volendam in 1927. A report of this match shows how falling players frequently get run over by the enormous ball:

Falling down and getting up again also seems to be the motto during a cross-country of the Royal Military Sports Club. In a report by Polygoon newsreels we can see how the mounted soldiers have to ride a course with ditches, fences and slopes. This doesn’t always go smoothly: horses refuse, go through instead of over the fences or fall down with their rider:

The participants of the 4th Amstel Gold Race in 1969 also had a hard time. The weather conditions were far from ideal. The participants of this cycling classic in the hills of Limburg had to deal with cold and wet weather. Many cyclists had to give up. Only 34 of the 170 cyclists finished the race. Eddy Merckx was the favourite for the win, but his fellow countryman Guido Reybroeck eventually won the sprint:

The water skiers on the Bosbaan in 1962 had better weather. The participants of the Northern European and also Open Dutch Championships Water Skiing particpated in two categories: trick skiing and ski jumping. The 14-year-old Dutch Conny Dane won the Dutch as well as the Nothern European title in the category trick skiing. The jumps of the Danish waterskier Glasner didn’t go as smoothly. He came 9m short of the eventual winner in his first jump. During his second attempt he fell, but luckily he was “not discouraged” according to commentator Philip Bloemendal, but “he was wet”:

As small as the Netherlands may be, as big the freedom has been for the performing artists, most of the time. Throughout the years a free rein has been given to many artists within different art disciplines to unfold their talents in front of a large audience.

As early as in 1958, the 14-year-old violinist Dick Bor was given the opportunity to perform as soloist within the Dutch Youth Orchestra during a concert at the Kurhaus in Scheveningen. This concert was held within the scope of the Holland Festival, an event that is held annually in Amsterdam and acts as a platform for the Dutch, as well as the international performing arts.

The Dutch Youth Orchestra has not been the only breeding ground for performing artists. Since the establishment in 1888, the notable Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra (RCO) has brought forth many talented musicians. The RCO is known throughout the world for being a celebrated symphonic orchestra, so it’s not surprising that international performing artists throughout the years have been eager to cooperate with the orchestra. As early as 1946 the well known German choirmaster Bruno Walter took off to Amsterdam at the age of 71 to rehearse with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. Having been the confidant of Gustav Mahler for years, Walters’ choice of repertoire for the cooperation with the RCO was easy: Mahlers Fourth Symphony.

The harmonious teamwork between different artists inspired not only the sector of the performing arts. The government also understood the significance of the fine arts and by the end of the forties the Raad voor Cultuur (Arts Council) is established with the intention to advise the government on the field of ‘art management’ in the sectors of film art, theatre, music, expressive arts and literacy. In 1956 the council is installed in a celebratory way in The Hague by Jozelf Cals, the minister of Education, Arts and Science. The positions within the board are being occupied by prominent people from the five sectors of the fine arts. Hence ballet dancer Sonia Gaskell became head of the sector of theatre.

On the 11th and 12th of March 2011 a next conference about Video Vortex will be organized in TrouwAmsterdam. Conference themes are: Online Video Aesthetics; It’s not a Dead Collection, it’s a Dynamic Database; Country Reports; Platforms, Standards and the Trouble with Translation; Online Video as a Political Tool; and Online Video Art.

On Thursday the 10th of March, the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (in collaboration with INC and NIMk) organizes two workshops at NIMk. These workshops offer participants the opportunity to gather hands-on experience with online video. Participants can work in different creative workshops and play with a range of online video tools and technologies. Facilitated by experts, the topics are: remixes and re-use of open video collections and participatory video production.

On Saturday evening the 12th of March, performances and video projections will take place during an evening program.

More information:
http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/videovortex/6amsterdam

Tickets for the conference:
http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/videovortex/6amsterdam/info/tickets

This conference is taking place within the SIA-RAAK Publiek program Culture Vortex. Culture Vortex is an innovation program to encourage public participation in online cultural collections.

Consortium Partners: University of Amsterdam, MediaLAB Amsterdam, Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, Netherlands Media Art Institute, Virtual Platform, VPRO, Amsterdam City Archive, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, IDFA, and the International Urban Screens Association.

Economies of the Commons 2: Paying the Costs of Making Things Free
International conference, seminar and public evening programs
Amsterdam and Hilversum
November 11 – 13, 2010

Economies of the Commons 2 is a critical examination of the economics of on-line public domain and open access resources of  information, knowledge, and media (the ‘digital commons’).  The past 10 years have seen the rise of a variety of such open content resources attracting millions of users, sometimes on a daily basis. The impact of projects such as Wikipedia, Images of the Future, and Europeana testify to the vibrancy of the new digital public domain.  No longer left to the exclusive domains of digital ‘insiders’, open content resources are rapidly becoming widely used and highly popular.

While protagonists of open content praise its low-cost accessibility and collaborative structures, critics claim it undermines the established “gate keeping” functions of authors, the academy, and professional institutions while lacking a reliable business model of its own. Economies  of the Commons 2 provides a timely and crucial analysis of sustainable economic models that can promote and safeguard the online public domain. We want to find out what the new hybrid solutions are for archiving, access and reuse of on-line content that can both create viable markets and serve the public interest in a competitive global 21st century information economy.

Economies of the Commons 2 consists of an international seminar on Open Video hosted by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision on November 11 in Hilversum, a two day international conference and two public evening programs on November 12 and 13 at De Balie, centre for culture and politics in Amsterdam. The event builds upon the successful Economies of the Commons conference organised in April  2008.

Confirmed speakers include:
Charlotte Hess (Syracuse University – Keynote), Ben Moskowitz (Open Video Alliance), Simona Levi (Free Culture Forum), Bas Savenije (KB National library of the Netherlands), Yann Moulier Boutang (Multitudes), Peter B. Kaufman (Intelligent Television), Harry Verwayen (Europeana), James Boyle (Duke University), Jeff Ubois (DTN), Sandra Fauconnier (NIMK), Dymitri  Kleiner (Telekommunisten), Nathaniel Tkacz (University of Melbourne), a.o.

EUscreen started in October 2009 as a three-year project funded by the European Commission’s eContentplus programme. Over the project’s duration more than 30,000 items representing Europe’s television heritage (videos, photographs, articles) will be made available online through a freely accessible multilingual portal. As part of the project Open Images will function as a platform for European broadcasters to experiment with open content distribution of television heritage.

The portal will be launched in 2011 and will be directly connected to Europeana. The EUscreen consortium is co-ordinated by University of Utrecht and consists of 28 partners (comprising audiovisual archives, research institutions, technology providers and Europeana) from 19 different European countries. In October the project will organize its first international conference:

Date: 7-8 October 2010.
Location: Casa del Cinema. Largo Marcello Mastroianni 1, Rome, Italy.

EUscreen has organized a two-day conference on content selection policies and contextualisation in the audiovisual domain, to be held in Rome on October 7 and 8 2010. The conference will focus on contextualisation of audiovisual material, especially in the academic field. The conference programme is still under construction, but the first day includes a plenary session focussing on contextualisation of audiovisual material with keynotes and presentations of use cases. The second day comprises two workshops: one on European IPR legislations in the audiovisual sector and the impact on the exploitation of audiovisual and television archives, and one on best practices and guidelines for digitising audiovisual heritage. Attendance at the conference is free but online registration is required.

See www.euscreen.eu for more information on the final programme and for registration.

Confirmed speakers

• Prof. Andrew Hoskins, Professor of Cultural Studies at Nottingham University on media, digitization and memory.
• Dr. Lilian Landes, scientific co-ordinator of the recensio.net project at Bavaria State Library on creating a European Open Access infrastructure for historical reviews.
• Dr. Alec Badenoch, from Utrecht University on Making Europe, virtual exhibits on European cultural heritage.
• Johan Söderberg, lecturer and filmmaker from Sweden on using and reusing archival material in his works, like the series “Read my lips”.
• Dr. Tibor Hirsch, from Film Studies at ELTE University on using digitized material in a creative way to help students understanding the language of film and television.
• Dr. Andreas Fickers, from the Art and Social Sciences at Maastricht University on audiovisual source critique in the age of the web 2.0.
• Peter B. Kaufman, President and executive producer of Intelligent Television. He is also the author of “Marketing Culture in the Digital Age: A Report on New Business Collaborations between Libraries, Museums, Archives, and Commercial Companies”.
• Prof. John Ellis, Professor of Media at Royal Holloway – University of London.

Polygoon newsreels were shown in Dutch theatres from the 1920’s onwards. Subjects of the daily life in the Netherlands supported with compelling visuals were central to its (nowadays) typical format. To keep the audience interested Polygoon had to renew itself throughout the years. The latest inventions on communication, technology and innovation served the newsreels well as interesting subjects. Further, attention was paid to the mass consumption of the Dutch people in the ‘age of automation’. Innovations and developments which offered new opportunities in solving problems concerning the increasing use of energy, often found their way to the Polygoon newsreels.

These new techniques and innovations were often announced with great optimism. Take for example the introduction of a new sort of an electricity factory, the atomic power station in Dodewaard, announced with quit some enthusiasm. As where nowadays nuclear energy generally appears in an unfavourable light, in a news item from 1966 no attention was paid to the possible dangers entailing nuclear energy. The emphasis lay on the new possibilities: the station would supply the people with all the conveniences they needed in a time of mass use of energy.

Not only new methods to meet the growing need for energy among the Dutch were searched for. The need for better communication techniques became relevant in an age of mass communication. More and more people found their way to Schiphol airport and air cargo traffic grew continually. These developments put much pressure on the air traffic controllers. With the introduction of the radar, the Dutch airspace could be mapped in great detail so that the air traffic controllers had a better overview of air traffic approaching and leaving the Dutch air space. A Polygoon newsreel from 1951 shows how an air traffic controller from Schiphol ‘talks an airplane down’ with the assistance of a at that time new radar technique.

Attention was also paid to remarkable ‘close to home’ innovations which would make life much easier. As early as in 1963 Polygoon made a news item on the precursor of the contemporary late-night shops: the automatic store in Boxtel.

The ever more industrializing Netherlands provided its inhabitants not only with more energy, but also with new consumer goods. Many of these products came onto the market thanks to new technological innovations. New techniques were often shown in the Polygoon newsreels, and in retrospect can now give an indication on how fast new technologies follow each other up. For example, in 1978 a precursor of the contemporary DVD, the videodisc, was shown in a Polygoon news item. As was often the case with Polygoon news items, this particular item had a highly educative character, but with a comic flavour. In the item is demonstrated how with videodisc equipment connected to a regular television, among other things, images can be winded back in slow motion. Thanks to this new technique the bottom of a model walking on the catwalk can be seen again in slow motion. Putting the news in this ‘visual’ way, Polygoon continually captured the attention of its viewers.

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:

Today we’ll give an exclusive preview of the Open Images platform at the exiting Open Video Conference in New York City. This preview is part of the Birds of a Feather session on Audiovisual Archives we are co-hosting. Read more about this session here.

Other interesting cases presented during the session are:

• Al Jazeera Creative Commons Repository
• American Archive
• MediaBurn

You can read our introduction here.