Nominated by: B&G – Karin van Arkel and Tim Manders
Nominee: B&G – The B&G Media Managers team
Title: The Daily Fabel: Digitisation in exchange for metadata
In 2015 The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision implemented Media management in the daily workflows. The metadata belonging to all automatically ingested programs were described by the editorial staff of the programs itself. Media management has been a success as a big change program, where documentalists had to transfer themselves into media managers, who no longer annotated themselves but lobbied for better metadata and adjusted to new annotation techniques and practices. After 4 years, Media Management is in the DNA of all media managers and they have a more sensitive nose for getting more and better metadata.
The Daily Fabel (in Dutch: De Fabeltjeskrant), is a very famous, 50 year old childrens program that contained more than 1600 episodes on 16 mm and was broadcasted in 45 countries, but was not digitised or contained any metadata. Because The Daily Fabel was a program that told about several social issues and made a strong connection to the real world, a university researcher wanted to view the episodes to write a book about this series.
Sound and Vision started a project to digitise the episodes by the digitising system Fast Forward. And in exchange for this accessibility, the researcher provided the media managers with metadata about each episode. So far he described more than 1200 episodes.
What makes this project special is that essentially it is a very small initiative with big impact. By sending in this nomination we want to stress that media management doesn’t have to consist of large projects, but can also be bottum-up actions, as long as the media managers have media management in their DNA.
As a result of the fact that one of our media managers connected two dots and asked for metadata in return for access via digitisation, now we can start to give a much broader audience access to this cultural heritage treasure.
