Note: About six weeks ago infoDOCKET posted this roundup looking at several companies, projects, and tools that can make audio and video content keyword searchable. One of the projects we mentioned was Pop Up Archive that DPLA (Digital Public Library of America) announced a partnership with today (see below).
Btw, if you want to see Pop Up Archive’s technology in action today, head to AudioSear.ch where you can use Pop Up Archive tech to keyword search a number of podcasts and also create keyword alerts (free).
Now, here’s today’s news from the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA):
Libraries across the United States house tens of millions of audio and video recordings, a rich and vibrant body of cultural history and content for the public, scholars, and researchers — but the recordings are virtually impossible to search. The Digital Public Library of America is partnering with Pop Up Archive to offer discounted services to the DPLA network. DPLA Hubs and their partners will be able to take advantage of this discounted rate to make it possible for anyone to search and pinpoint exact search terms and phrases within audiovisual collections.
DPLA already provides a catalog of over eleven million records from libraries across the U.S., including many audiovisual records. Through new service offerings available exclusively to the DPLA’s 1,600+ partner organizations, Pop Up Archive will automatically transcribe, timestamp, and generate keywords for the audio collections.
“As a country, we’re creating so much more digital media with every day that passes. If 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, for libraries to keep up with the pace of audiovisual content creation, they need practices that can radically scale to meet the pace of creation,” said Anne Wootton, CEO of Pop Up Archive.
“Our goal is to connect the widest audience with the greatest amount of openly available materials in our nation’s cultural heritage institutions, and audiovisual material has been both critical to our growing collection and less searchable than other forms,” said Dan Cohen, DPLA’s Executive Director. “We’re delighted that we can work with Pop Up Archive to provide this valuable additional service to our constantly expanding network of libraries, archives, and museums.”
Since it was founded in 2012, Pop Up Archive has fostered partnerships with dozens of partners at libraries, archives, and public media organizations to index over 1,000,000 minutes of recorded sound, including over 10,000 audio items preserved at the Internet Archive. Pop Up Archive was created in response to the need to create access to audiovisual collections through cataloging, search, and public engagement at scale, in spite of a general lack of knowledge and technical capability for handling audiovisual content. Most recently, Pop Up Archive has embarked on a project to bring full-text search and keyword tagging to the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, a collaboration between WGBH and the Library of Congress to identify, preserve, and make accessible as much as possible a digital archive of 40,000 hours of public media dating back to the late 1940s and selected by more than 100 public media stations and organizations with little consistent descriptive data.
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