Group Admins
Description
The Clipper project will demonstrate and provide hands-on access to its latest toolkit prototype to elicit feedback and discussion. Participants will be given access to the live online toolkit to trial during the workshop and will be given accounts to access the toolkit afterwards. Participants will be involved in discussing some existing scenarios and developing new ones based on their own ideas. The toolkit will be able work with both closed and open collections of any size and will feature a ‘licence picker’ to allow users to choose how they licence and share their own user-generated content. The workshop will feature a discussionon about how the toolkit can facilitate a ‘sharing continuum’ of content – with closed and personal at one end and totally open with Creative Commons licences at the other end.
The essence of the project revolves around using the latest advances in HTML5 together with user-generated metadata to control the playback of the media – no content is copied or altered – we think it has strong potential, as it is being compliant with copyright law. This should reassure rights owners and collection managers that their content is not going to be misused yet also widen the scope for access to cultural heritage collections.
The Clipper toolkit enables users to specify virtual clips from audio-visual resources and insert rich text annotations ‘pinned’ to points on the timeline of the clip, the annotations can contain web links, images etc. Clips can be collected together into ‘Cliplists’. A simple but significant innovation in Clipper is the use of HTML as the native file format, users create clips and annotations with the data being stored in HTML / Json documents in web directories and in a database. This approach enables the use of URI’s to enable the granular sharing of annotations, clips and cliplists. This also facilitates easy integration with social media web services. Another benefit of using HTML as our native file format is that it provides a good format for long-term archival of information together with the related media files.
The ambition for Clipper is that it provides a powerful toolkit to ‘breath life into’ large cultural audio visual collections by providing tools to enable users to easily create their own clips and annotations and share them on the web – while respecting the content owners rights and permissions policies. We anticipate that the toolkit will itself provide a platform for user innovation by overcoming some of the traditional constraints associated with audio-visual media. We are particularly excited about the possibilities for citizen research, deep access to archives for story telling, the implications for creative practice, the role of the author, research data management and new publishing models.
