Submissions/The Public Domain Project - a community project to preserve historical audio records

From Wikimania 2013 • Hong Kong

This is an accepted submission for Wikimania 2013.

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Submission no.
2004
Subject no.
B4
Title of the submission

The Public Domain Project - a community project to preserve historical audio records

Type of submission
Presentation
Author of the submission
Christoph Zimmermann, Carl Flisch
Country of origin
Switzerland
Affiliation
Swiss Foundation Public Domain
E-mail address
nuess0r@pdproject.org
Username
ChristophZ, Pdproject
Personal homepage or blog
http://publicdomainproject.org
Abstract

The Public Domain Project is a independent community driven project to make historical audio and film records available to everybody.

A lot of traditional archives make the same two failures: First they don't work with the records, they just store them and second they make it hard for you to listen to it and to use it.

We correct both, we digitize our records and we provide easy access to it! That's our natural understanding how an archive should work.

Detailed proposal

The Public Domain Project is a independent community driven project to make historical audio and film records available to everybody.

A lot of traditional archives make the same two failures: First they don't work with the records, they just store them and second they make it hard for you to listen to it and to use it.

We correct both, we digitize our records and we provide easy access to it! That's our natural understanding how an archive should work.

All our digitized records are available via Wikimedia Commons and also directly on our FTP server.

In this lecture I would like to give some insights what the Public Domain Project is, what we do, how the project is organized and very important how can you get involved in the project.

I will give also an introduction to the legal term "public domain" and it's relation to copyright law in different countries. This term is very important to understand for our project and many other projects doing similar things with other types of work like Project Gutenberg and IMSLP.

Demonstrations of different works in different conditions we digitized and examples of historic medias will also be included.


The rest of the lecture will be filled with information about:

  • Historic recording medias. What kind of stuff do we handle
  • Our recording setup with a laser turntable for gramophone records
  • The audio format we use and the importance of patent free and lossless audioformats: FLAC


URL of our project:
http://publicdomainproject.org


Our contributions to Wikimedia Commons:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:ListFiles/Pdproject

Track
Cultural and Education Outreach
Length of presentation/talk
25 Minutes
Language of presentation/talk
English
Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?
Hopefully yes.
Slides or further information (optional)
Slides from the Wikimania presentation: Talk_Wikimania13.pdf
Special requests


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