UW helping build online media archive

A new digital archive being built in part at the University of Washington could help researchers and educators locate old Hollywood films, Hubble telescope images or documentaries about the South Pole.

The UW, along with Rutgers University and the Georgia Institute of Technology, yesterday announced a $900,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to continue work on an online archive of film, television and digital images.

When completed the online archive of 80,000 moving images will be the largest repository of its kind, drawing images from CNN, HBO, National Geographic, The Smithsonian and other sources.

The Library of Congress, which is the driving force behind the project, is hoping that the archive will help preserve historic video images while at the same time providing researchers with useful information.

The Association of Moving Image Archivists and the National Film Preservation Board also are playing key roles in providing content for the archive, which will be on the Library of Congress Web site beginning next year.

The UW, which has four people working on the project, is creating the video directory. That includes determining if a video collection exists, who the contact is and what types of restrictions there might be on the content.

Jim DeRoest, assistant director of computing and communications at the UW, said the first phase is completed and a prototype will be tested in the next few weeks.

The archive will point users to video collections at other media outlets. A person searching for information about giraffes, for example, could end up receiving video recommendations from National Geographic.

"There are some really large sites who are interested in making their collections known over the Internet, and that is whether the collections are publicly accessible or not," said DeRoest, who is building the catalog on behalf of the Library of Congress.

While the UW is working on the directory, Rutgers is developing the catalog and Georgia Tech is developing the search function.

Some of the images will be available for immediate download while other images, which have not yet been digitized, will only be available by contacting the media outlet or museum.

"Because there are all these different players out there with these collections, we will have to build separate portals for the types of users," said DeRoest.

"There will be a different searching mechanism for educators and students, there will be a different one for video archivists, there will be a different one for video producers and editors so they can interact with the collection in the way they do their jobs."

The archive is being built with Linux on IBM Power technology.

P-I reporter John Cook can be reached at 206-448-8075 or johncook@seattlepi.com

Add P-I Local headlines to