British Universities Film & Video Council

moving image and sound, knowledge and access

Earth in Vision

1.Team Photograph: from left to right: Zdenek Zdrahal, Kim Hammond, Joe Smith and George Revill

1. Team Photograph: from left to right: Zdenek Zdrahal, Kim Hammond, Joe Smith and George Revill

We have held workshops with: our Advisory Board; film makers and television and media people at the iDocs festival in Bristol; Press Fellows at Wolfson College, Cambridge; school pupils in Milton Keynes; colleagues at The Open University’s Knowledge Management Institute, and with Open University students who, as the UK’s most demographically diverse student population, act as ‘proxy publics’ of potential future digital citizens. We have workshops planned for the Belfast social sciences festival later this year, for other student and academic groups, and we are interviewing individuals who are using, developing or otherwise working with DBAs in specific contexts.

Among these groups it is clear that there is a strong appetite to work with DBAs, and we are building a complex picture around how people want to work with these materials, and their user’s needs and tools. Some participants have worked with story-telling exercises that draw on samples from the BBC DBA; these have been popular and illustrate the power and creative opportunities of re-using the broadcast materials. Feedback suggests participants find the workshops interesting and stimulating, and leave re-thinking how they use/could use DBAs.

Technical and cultural challenges and opportunities
The rights regime around broadcast archives stands out as a central concern for those institutions that will be expected to have responsibility for, or will work with, DBAs (schools; universities; museums; media organisations). Whilst institutions such as the BBC owns its own archive, many of the programmes have significant underlying third party rights (e.g. scriptwriters, actors, music etc.) which require clearance for public/specific use and can be costly. For affordable full open public access to such DBAs, some speculate on the need for a change in legislation. Alternatively, crowd sourced funding via small download payments may be a way forward. In an increasingly digital age, this can be seen as both a challenge and an opportunity for public service broadcasters such as the BBC.

The creative opportunities afforded by DBAs are immense, and we are only just beginning to understand some of the potential benefits and hazards ahead. A clear challenge for those institutions developing DBAs is the technical development of dynamic, contextualised and user-responsive online interfaces. Drawing on our partners and relevant networks, we are developing an industry oriented report which will identify what the elements of a gold standard for DBAs might be. This will be pursued according to principles of co-production, where participants will be invited to feedback on drafts of the e-book and also participate in the final conference in 2016.

Get Involved!
In the spirit of co-production, we welcome your views on how you would like to use DBAs, and what tools you would need for those uses. We also welcome invitations to run a workshop at your institution, or to collaborate in other relevant ways

Team: Principal investigator: Joe Smith; Co-investigators: George Revill and Zdenek Zdrahal; Research Associate and Project Manager: Kim Hammond. The team is based in the Dept. of Geography/Open Space Research Centre, The Open University, with the exception of Zdrahal who is Senior Research Associate in the OU’s Knowledge Media Institute.

Contact: project manager kim.hammond@open.ac.uk / 01908 274066

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