This resource may interest some students... for source material etc...
enjoy
The End User: From France, video for all
Main french site
http://www.ina.fr
English version
http://www.ina.fr/index.en.html
PARIS One of the world's leaders in digital audio and video has opened up its vault to the public, putting thousands of hours of radio and television recordings on the Internet for free.
The agency, the French national audiovisual institute, or INA, has been hard at work for the past seven years digitizing its collection of film and audio, and the "Archives Pour Tous" - archives for all - is the result.
Historic footage of Charles de Gaulle, Marc Chagall, Edith Piaf and Bob Marley, for instance, are available in small excerpts at www.ina.fr in a variety of formats, for both high-speed and low-speed Internet connections.
But since the archives went public three weeks ago, the site has been overwhelmed. The day it opened, the engineers had to bring in emergency servers and computer power to overcome the crashes.
Now, with double the capacity, the site is receiving about five million visits a day - 80 times more than its usual traffic. And for good reason: The sound and visual quality are superb, the range of selections is impressive, and the packaging and navigation are generally well done.
Another reason for its instant popularity, however, is that the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel has erected no digital borders around its treasures. Outside of France, most of those accessing the site, in fact, are from the United States.
Unlike some other national video collectors - notably the BBC in Britain - the French agency believes it has a calling to spread its collection to all comers.
"INA is unique in the world right now," said Sylvie Vormus, director of communications. "For us, it is a mission to open our archives."
"To us at INA," as another agency official put it in a recent document, "preserving archives would be pointless if that was to keep them only for a 'happy few.'
"It is INA's mission to communicate and make this vast wealth of archive images as widely accessible as possible using the latest digital technology, yet preserving them as the nation's heritage for future generations."
It helps that INA is required by law to do so. The agency was created in 1975 as the legal guardian of all audiovisual material broadcast by the French national broadcasting companies.
And, as Vormus noted, its entire budget is devoted to digitization and preservation, whereas the BBC has many other obligations apart from archiving and preservation.
Two drawbacks of the INA site, which also offers footage of the May 1968 student upheaval, soccer highlights and children's animation series, are that the clips are usually short in duration, and although the video is of high quality the display area in the viewer's Web browser is small.
And while much of the Web site is available in French, English and Chinese, the radio and TV sequences themselves are neither translated from the French nor subtitled.
About 80 percent of the collection is free. For copyrighted material, INA charges €1 to €3, or $1.29 to $3.86, for the purchase of a 48-hour viewing window or €1 to €12 for full downloads.
INA has a related archive called Inamedia, which is both a site and a tool for professional users of archives.
In a clever populist offering, "Journal de Votre Naissance," you can find a TV news broadcast made on the day you were born, in any year 1964 - except, oddly, for 1977, 1985 and 1990.
These years and other programming will be added as time goes by. INA is adding about 5,000 hours of broadcasts a month.
This month, the agency is concentrating on making all 470 hours of the trial of Maurice Papon available. Papon was found guilty in 1998 of crimes against humanity after having authorized the deportation of Jews to Nazi Germany.
INA, which is active in many efforts across Europe to preserve and digitize historical recordings from celluloid and magnetic tape, is relatively humble about its efforts. "We didn't imagine it would be such a big success," Vormus said.
Other digital archivists should take note.
PARIS One of the world's leaders in digital audio and video has opened up its vault to the public, putting thousands of hours of radio and television recordings on the Internet for free.
The agency, the French national audiovisual institute, or INA, has been hard at work for the past seven years digitizing its collection of film and audio, and the "Archives Pour Tous" - archives for all - is the result.
Historic footage of Charles de Gaulle, Marc Chagall, Edith Piaf and Bob Marley, for instance, are available in small excerpts at www.ina.fr in a variety of formats, for both high-speed and low-speed Internet connections.
But since the archives went public three weeks ago, the site has been overwhelmed. The day it opened, the engineers had to bring in emergency servers and computer power to overcome the crashes.
Now, with double the capacity, the site is receiving about five million visits a day - 80 times more than its usual traffic. And for good reason: The sound and visual quality are superb, the range of selections is impressive, and the packaging and navigation are generally well done.
Another reason for its instant popularity, however, is that the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel has erected no digital borders around its treasures. Outside of France, most of those accessing the site, in fact, are from the United States.
Unlike some other national video collectors - notably the BBC in Britain - the French agency believes it has a calling to spread its collection to all comers.
"INA is unique in the world right now," said Sylvie Vormus, director of communications. "For us, it is a mission to open our archives."
"To us at INA," as another agency official put it in a recent document, "preserving archives would be pointless if that was to keep them only for a 'happy few.'
"It is INA's mission to communicate and make this vast wealth of archive images as widely accessible as possible using the latest digital technology, yet preserving them as the nation's heritage for future generations."
It helps that INA is required by law to do so. The agency was created in 1975 as the legal guardian of all audiovisual material broadcast by the French national broadcasting companies.
And, as Vormus noted, its entire budget is devoted to digitization and preservation, whereas the BBC has many other obligations apart from archiving and preservation.
Two drawbacks of the INA site, which also offers footage of the May 1968 student upheaval, soccer highlights and children's animation series, are that the clips are usually short in duration, and although the video is of high quality the display area in the viewer's Web browser is small.
And while much of the Web site is available in French, English and Chinese, the radio and TV sequences themselves are neither translated from the French nor subtitled.
About 80 percent of the collection is free. For copyrighted material, INA charges €1 to €3, or $1.29 to $3.86, for the purchase of a 48-hour viewing window or €1 to €12 for full downloads.
INA has a related archive called Inamedia, which is both a site and a tool for professional users of archives.
In a clever populist offering, "Journal de Votre Naissance," you can find a TV news broadcast made on the day you were born, in any year 1964 - except, oddly, for 1977, 1985 and 1990.
These years and other programming will be added as time goes by. INA is adding about 5,000 hours of broadcasts a month.
This month, the agency is concentrating on making all 470 hours of the trial of Maurice Papon available. Papon was found guilty in 1998 of crimes against humanity after having authorized the deportation of Jews to Nazi Germany.
INA, which is active in many efforts across Europe to preserve and digitize historical recordings from celluloid and magnetic tape, is relatively humble about its efforts. "We didn't imagine it would be such a big success," Vormus said.
Other digital archivists should take note.