Video, Education, and Open Content - Rick Prelinger
Here are my notes from Rick Prelinger’s (Prelinger Archives and Internet Archive) keynote at CCNMTL’s Video, Education, and Open Content conference:
Title: “Remarks from a recovered archivist” - The promise of educational media.
There have been 1/4 million of (audio/visual) works produced for educators.
- What can we do?
1. Leverage existing resources - we need to free educational materials from obscurity. We need to free educational and public media archives. Can we try to de-monitize an area that is truly import to our culture (to make it more available).
2. Segmentation - cutting the archive into little pieces will make the archives much more accessible. It’s really hard to touch a 12-minute rich media object. Hour archives are filled with lots of content. If we break them into short logical segments with human intervention, we gain a tremendous amount a value. As a result, items (will be) more suited to fit into an encyclopedia
3. Openness - the concept of open production is tremendously exciting. Openness in education is conceptually and practically tied together. But if we want to avoid doing public/educational tv over again we need to strongly conside the idea of openness. We need to think of it as a broad spectrum. Openness means not just seeing the book page, but the text too.
- If you have this (openness), you can take it, mash it up. It’s not just about watching a movie, but being able to download the EDL (edit decision lists), etc. to make it easier for public to access and resuse the material for cretive purposes.
Openness on the web means everyone can crawl, naviagte and index what they find on the web. Also, it is the freedom to remix in an open domain. Everything needs to be editable. Openess is freedom to annotate and share the network with others. We really need to integrate editing tools - the swiss army knife for video, etc.
Openness enables interoperability. People are starting to think about this in the library world. Quilting is an early form of sampling. It relies on interoperabilty to fit into a matrix, etc. Interoperability rests on openess. We need to default to openness and share cultural materials.
4. Moratorium - we need new models and giving them space to flourish. Let’s declare a moratorium. Let’s see what sticks.
Points of departure - There is an opportunity to bridge archiving, video, and education.
Archives are lost to YouTube and we need to figure out how to recoup. If people look at archives as obstacles to access, then we’re in serious trouble.
We always think about re-purposing. This should give us pause. There is a long history of this.
- Should we digitize all the lectures?
- Should we have everything online?
- Do we need to break with the past, or is everything raws material for mashups?
. . . Let’s leave this to the viewers to decide.
User generated content enriches the libraries, but produces a dialogue and will have a profound impact on their shape and design.
