Sound and Vision makes Thesaurus available to the Nationaal Archief
The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and the Nationaal Archief (National Archive) have entered into a unique five-year cooperative alliance concerning the use of the Joint Thesaurus Audiovisual Archives (Gemeenschappelijke Thesaurus Audiovisuele Archieven), GTAA. Both institutes are already working together in the framework of Images for the Future.
Documentalists use the GTAA to uniformly and efficiently describe AV productions, thus allowing visitors viewing the catalogue to find the material they are searching for as easily as possible. The data are incorporated in the categories: ‘themes’ (including a classification), ‘genres’, personal names’, ‘makers’, ‘geographic names’ and ‘other proper names’.
The GTAA was developed in conjunction with EYE (formerly: Filmmuseum) to make audiovisual material as accessible as possible to a broad target group.
Making the GTAA available to third parties takes place by means of techniques developed in the context of CATCHPlus, a government-aided programme that develops software to optimize research into cultural heritage data. The Nationaal Archief has opted for Sound and Vision’s GTAA to describe its photographic collection owing to the wide range of applications and the technical opportunities offered by the system. The Nationaal Archief can itself also have agreed key words added to the GTAA. Sound and Vision continues to manage the thesaurus.
In the future, other institutes can also make use of the GTAA for their audiovisual collections. As a result of the use of a single thesaurus, the findability of objects from a diversified range of collections improves considerably. By making use of the Linked Data principles, links can be made between terms in the GTAA and other data sources such as Wikipedia and newspaper databases.
The GTAA is made available by Sound and Vision under the so-called Open Database License, a globally used license which, under limited conditions, grants permission to use part or the entire databank. The cooperative agreement fits in with the aim of Sound and Vision to function as a knowledge institute for the AV sector.
