Images for the Future

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Giovanna Fossati
Curator, the Nederlands Filmmuseum

On September 19th 2006 the Dutch government announced that it will fund an ambitious joint project by a number of Dutch archives under the name Images for the Future.

The project aims at preserving, digitizing and making accessible some 285,000 hours of film and video material, and almost three million photos. The digitized content will be accessible for educational use, but also for professionals and the general public. The plan also includes the creation of an infrastructure for distribution and the settlement of copyrights, where applicable, through Creative Commons licenses.

The partners in the project are Nederlands Filmmuseum, Institute for Sound and Vision, Nationaal Archief, Centraal Discotheek, Association of Public Libraries and the foundation Kennisland.

The Images for the Future project is now in the preparation phase. The execution phase will start in the summer of 2007 and is expected to be completed by the end of 2014. The project’s budget, granted by the Dutch government, amounts to 154 million euros.

This presentation will outline the project’s goals and will address, in particular, the strategies that are going to be adopted for film preservation and digitization. It will also promote a discussion on quality criteria and standards needed for such an ambitious project. The discussion at JTS2007 is expected to give precious feedback to the project, whose scope and magnitude will hopefully set an example for the audio-visual sector.

For more info on Images for the Future see:
www.beeldenvoordetoekomst.nl/documents/Beeldenvoordetoekomst_summary.pdf

Giovanna Fossati
Giovanna Fossati is Curator at the Nederlands Filmmuseum in Amsterdam where she works since 1997 and is responsible for restoration projects and for the Filmmuseum's Research & Development activities. Fossati participated in the creation of the MA Preservation & Presentation at the University of Amsterdam where she has been a member of the teaching staff since 2003.

She has published several articles on colour in early film and digital film restoration, and she has curated an educational website on film restoration. Her recent publications include Digital technology entering film archives, in Mieke Lauwers and Bert Hogenkamp (eds.), SAP jaarboek no. 5, KVAN, 2006; The Restoration of Beyond the Rocks, in Beyond the Rocks (USA, 1922), DVD release, Milestone Film & Video, 2006. and Beyond Distribution: Some Thoughts on the Future of Archival Films in Frank Kessler and Nanna Verhoeff (eds.), Film Distribution from 1895 to the 1910s, John Libbey Publishing, Eastleigh, forthcoming in 2007. Fossati is currently working on a PhD dissertation at the University of Utrecht with the title: From Grain to Pixel: Theorising Film Archival Practice in a Time of Transition from Analogue to Digital Technology.