BeeldCanon

Categorizing Video-images from Atomium to Zaanse Schans

More and more image archives are becoming available online, but if the images are not provided with a description Google cannot find them, how to proceed?

Providing access to digital (video) images seems a new trend for archives that curate our cultural heritage. In Flanders, several cities and towns as well as institutions such as universities or museums bring archives with their footage online. In the Netherlands, the National Institute for Sound and Vision released forty years of television history from the Pinkpop rock festival, and the National Archives together with photo agency Spaarnestad published image collections online on emigrants, the Royal Dutch East Indies Army, and the 1928 Olympics. And this is just the beginning. Digitizing and distributing videos is dead simple today, but without textual description or GPS coordinates search engines like Google cannot find any of these images. In the IM-Pact BeeldCanon project, the Catholic University of Leuven and the University of Amsterdam collaborate to study alternative ways for making video archives accessible. They do so based on the image content.