DPLA need for media content hub Peter Kaufman and Karen Cariani February 5, 2014 The DPLA

needs to develop a moving image media hub. This will help make the DPLA more popular and interesting for younger scholars and the public. In the United States, each of us engages in on average 4 hours and 31 minutes of TV viewing per day, plus we each engage in 5 hours and 16 minutes more of viewing on one kind of device or tablet or another! By the end of this year, according to Cisco, which has a rather substantial vested economic interest in the issue, some 15 billion networked computers, phones, and other devices will be in operation around the globe, 11 billion square feet of screens will be in operation worldwide (enough to encircle the Earths surface 50 times over) and video will exceed 91% of global consumer traffic on the internet. All the excitement about digital books notwithstanding, people want moving images and sound. Netflix accounts for over 50 percent of Americas Internet traffic every evening after dinner these days. There are great libraries and archives of moving image content ready for partnership. Theer are major organizations the Association of Moving Image Archivists (http://www.amianet.org/), the International Federation of Television Archives (http://fiatifta.org/) among them who stand ready to work with the DPLA. There are innovative ways of solving rights issues associated with digitization for any and all moving images and their component parts. There are volunteers like Kaufman & Cariani who will help see it through. What is needed for a media hub? A content hub just aggregating metadata, the issues around media as part of the collection arent so different as other digital objects. You wont need to worry about streaming servers because the content will be streamed through the originators. Some of the metadata may be different (like formats), but mostly people will be searching on the same metadata as other objects. So the aggregation of data would be the same. DPLA may however want to think about tools on the DPLA site to help curate media materials. And tools to help enhance the metadata with the media materials. Currently that is what is really lacking in being to find media on the web is poor descriptive data. If DPLA could enhance that data it would be a big help to the archives that have this media and will make the content more accessible. If it is a service hub around media, the DPLA could support digitizing of media materials, and help push best practices for describing those materials. A hub for digitizing would be fabulous for the many small organizations that have media materials but don't have the means to look at the formats, much less digitize them. Or a network of collaborative digitizing stations. Materials would need to be shipped, which isn't always great for the items, and having to set up a vendor like relationship that can handle many formats. Or

you just focus on one or two formats. Many media formats are now obsolete and the best way to access this stuff is to get it digitized. The American Archive of Public Media could serve as a hub for media. Stations participating in the AA could help serve as digitizing stations in various regions across the country. They will however need resources to fulfill this work. The AA website could be the aggregation point for streaming video and metadata. However the focus of the content may need to be public media unless other resources are given to expand the content.