“That’s a good result, and we work every day to ensure that the film collection keeps growing and the portal continues to improve,” assured Uwe Rosemann, Director of TIB. Two staff members from the Competence Centre for Non-Textual Materials (KNM) at TIB are in the process of acquiring videos for the portal. An average of 25 quality-tested films are uploaded on the portal each week. Automatic analysis of speech, images and text enable users to search directly for individual film sequences in the portal, which can even be cited.
User feedback implemented: embedding videos into other websites
“Since the portal went online a year ago, we have received a great deal of feedback from our users concerning the TIB|AV-Portal,” stated Margret Plank, Head of KNM. The team, led by Plank, has managed to realise a great many requests in recent months. Margret Plank listed just some of the new features: “There is now more intuitive user guidance, improved filter options in the search for films, and it is now also possible to embed videos from our AV portal into other websites.” The KNM team is currently working to ensure that the metadata of films in the AV portal are made available in different formats for reuse by third parties and that video abstracts can be published in connection with an article.
Ideally make films available under Open Access licence terms
In principle: TIB would like to make films available in its AV portal under Open Access licence terms, which is successful in many cases. Almost half of the films are available to users under Open Access conditions. These include 1,067 of the 11,500 films in all from the film collection of IWF Wissen und Medien gGmbH. These scientific films covering technical and scientific subjects, biology and ethnology, which TIB took over at the end of 2012, are now gradually being included in the TIB|AV-Portal. In order to ensure that the top-quality IWF films spanning almost 100 years of scientific film history can be accessed by the public, TIB has to negotiate beforehand with the individual right holders of IWF films about their contemporary use. Although this is a very time-consuming process, it is worth while because many right holders make the films available under a Creative Commons licence, enabling the films to be comprehensively used in research and teaching, provided that the originator is acknowledged.
