Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision

Profile of the organisation

The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision maintains and provides access to 70 per cent of the Dutch audio-visual heritage, comprising approximately 800,000 hours of television, radio, music and film and web video, making Sound and Vision one of the largest audiovisual archives in Europe. Sound and Vision is the business archive of the national broadcasting corporations and is also engaged in large-scale digitization efforts of its analogue holdings. Sound and Vision has brought thousands of hours of archive footage on-line for various end-user services, including dedicated services for the educational market, footage sales, creative reuse, mobile access.

The Research and Development department focuses on a number of key research topics, including: digital durability ensuring long-term access, understanding user requirements, new annotation approaches, (semi)automatic or using crowdsourcing, contextualization, semantic interoperability and visualisation. Sound and Vision R&D is an experienced partner in national and European research projects and active in the international organisations FIAT/IFTA, IASA, EBU and UNESCO. Recent research projects include AXES (FP7), LinkedTV (FP7), LiWA (FP7), CoSyne (FP7), DigiBIC (FP7), PrestoPRIME (FP7), EUscreen (eContentplus) and Europeana V2 (ICT-PSP). Sound and Vision is host to the EU PrestoCentre competence centre for audiovisual digitisation and digital preservation, and technical co-ordinator of the EUscreen Best Practice Network on access.

Role in the project

In Europeana Space, Sound and Vision is responsible for co-ordinating the EuropeanaTV pilot.

Key personnel

Johan Oomen is head of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision R&D Department and researcher at the Web and Media group of the VU University Amsterdam. He is mainly working on externally funded research projects (FP7, ICT-PSP, CATCH) that focus on providing access to digital heritage on the web. Oomen holds an MA in Media Studies. He has worked for the British Universities Film and Video Council and the RTL Nederland.

Roeland Ordelman is senior researcher and senior project manager R&D at NSIV and researcher in Speech & Language Technology and Multimedia Retrieval at the University of Twente (PhD 2003). He is co-founder of XMI (Cross Media Interaction), a company that provides services for automatic, speech-based annotation of audio data. He has been working on a number of national and international projects in the area of multimedia retrieval and speech and language technology.

Erwin Verbruggen works at the Research & Development department of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. He is in charge of communications for EUscreen and oversees the technical development of the Journal of European Television History and Culture. He also works on a number of projects related to digitisation and search in audiovisual archives.