Thousands of clips from the AP Archive can be viewed online by the UK education community thanks to the programmers at re:fine!
The clips are part of an initiative by JISC Collections (Joint Information Systems Committee, a government-funded agency) to provide the UK education community with access to archives of digital images to support all levels of teaching, learning and research.
The images will be accessible through an online database currently in development. Once a school, college or educational institution signs up to the scheme, their staff and pupils will be able to use the images freely, and without further authorisation.
The databases are incredible resources, designed by JISC to maintain the UK’s position as a global leader in education. The AP Archive, rich in its coverage of events, war and conflict, politics, disasters, environment, culture, social history, human interest, science, entertainment and sport is perfectly placed to deliver footage for the resources.
re:fine delivered over 350,000 files and associated metadata. Each clip was transcoded to WMV, MPEG2, MOV and JPEG files. re:fine programmers created a function to automatically insert metadata, enabling the clips to be searched by subject, date and key word or key-phrase.