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.

** Submission deadline: March 19 **

The Open Video Alliance is now accepting proposals for panels, workshop sessions, demo sessions, and other programming for the inaugural Open Video Conference in New York. Join us and over 400 participants during our groundbreaking two-day conference and make your imprint on the online video space.

Visit http://openvideoalliance.org/proposals/ to make a submission.

Open Video Conference
June 19-20, 2009
New York City
40 Washington Square South (NYU Law School)

The Open Video Conference
The conference is a co-production of the Yale Law School Information Society Project, the Participatory Culture Foundation, Kaltura, and iCommons. The conference will feature talks from internet luminaries, panels and discussions, screenings of video art, and demonstrations of the newest internet video technology. We expect more than 400 participants. Here are some goals for the gathering:

1. Bring together stakeholders in the online video space (video makers, coders, lawyers, academics, entrepreneurs, etc.) for cross-pollination and development of the Open Video movement.

2. Raise public interest and awareness around the Principles for an Open Video Ecosystem, a community effort to define best practices in online video.

3. Raise the public profile of video creators and artists working in the online space.

4. Foster a narrative — why should organizations and individuals value openness? How does it affect their work?

What Types of Proposals are You Seeking?
We are requesting proposals and ideas for panels, presentations, workshops, and other sessions that will address how we can shape online video and the public debates around the medium. Proposals may be intended for the main conference track, or for more focused unconference-style sessions. Proposal topics may be legal, technical, or cultural in focus, though we encourage proposals in all relevant areas. The more complete and fleshed out a proposal, the more likely it will be accepted—but we welcome the submission of all good ideas.

We are also seeking submissions of video art to showcase the creative potential of artists in the open video space.

To submit a proposal or idea for Open Video, please visit http://openvideoalliance.org/proposals/. The deadline for submissions is March 19, 2009. If you have any questions about the Alliance, the conference, or the submission process, please contact Ben Moskowitz at conference@openvideoalliance.org .

Why is Open Video Important?
YouTube and other online video applications are rightly celebrated for empowering end-users; however, online video lacks some of the essential qualities that make text and images on the web such powerful tools for free speech and technical innovation. Email, blogs, and other staples of the open web rely on ubiquitous and interoperable technologies that have low barriers to entry; they are massively decentralized and resistant to censorship or regulation. Video, meanwhile, relies on centralized distribution and proprietary technologies which can threaten cultural discourse and innovation.

Open Video is the growing movement for transparency, interoperability, and participation in online video. These qualities provide more fertile ground for bottom-up innovation and greater protection for free speech online. Many organizations are already taking steps to change the nature of video on the web: Mozilla is moving to support open video formats in Firefox, the Participatory Culture Foundation promotes open source and standards in video publishing and distribution, and Wikipedia has increased its focus on the open Theora codec.

Yet Open Video is more than just having a functional open source video codec. It’s all the legal and social norms surrounding online video. It’s the ability to attach the license of your choice to videos you publish. It’s about media consolidation, aggregation, and decentralization. It’s about fair use. In short, it covers the new media gamut—and that’s why this conference is guaranteed to be very stimulating.

About the Open Video Alliance
The Open Video Alliance is a coalition of leading organizations dedicated to fostering the growth of open infrastructure, tools, and standards for the online video medium. Yale Law School’s Information Society Project hosted a stakeholder meeting on October 31st, 2008; representatives from nearly 30 organizations convened to discuss common goals for technologists, maker communities, and legal experts.

For more information, see http://openvideoalliance.org.

Tomorrow Open Images will attend Walled Garden, a two-day conference in Amsterdam. From their website:

This international working conference will approach the development and future challenges of the current Web 2.0 through exploration, experimentation and exchange of knowledge. Our goal: a blueprint for policy makers, funders and practitioners that works towards a public garden.

Walled Garden will address issues of identity, mobile communities and networks by focussing on the tendency towards online gated and closed communities. How does this affect the accessibility of information and knowledge?

Now is the time to identify success factors and failures of Web 2.0 and to imagine and initiate new tools and strategies for the future Web. Our Walled Garden will be explored through conversations in form of structured group dialogue, open plenary sessions, discussions and face-to-face meetings with artists, researchers, theorists and technologists.

(more…)

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.