Connections

The Entertainment Identifier Registry (EIDR) has launched its new Universities, Archives, Museums Initiative (UAM) initiative, a no-cost program that will aid cultural institutions around the world in better identifying their audiovisual collections, making it possible for them to share archives in a standardized way.

The service is being made available to universities, archives and in exchange for documentation on how EIDR is subsequently used by partners in research and curation programs. The Library of Congress, the British Film Institute and The Media Institute at University College London — currently members of EIDR — could be joined by more than 100 organizations around the world to participate in the program.

“Since our founding in 2010, our remit has explicitly included works of cultural and historical importance, whether they are currently (or ever have been) commercially available or not,” said Raymond Drewry, chief architect of EIDR. “We have been very fortunate to work with film archives, universities, libraries, and museums to help them identify works in their own collections and share those identifiers with others.”

Stephen McConnachie, head of data and digital preservation for the British Film Institute said EIDR IDs could serve as a “federated search” function between global archives and collections for the archivist community. “The degree of certainty EIDR registration provides about the uniqueness of our work records is a major benefit,” he said. “[For BFI] EIDR’s tools, resources and expertise have catalyzed it and facilitated it.”

“EIDR provides a valuable mechanism for issuing, recording and resolving unique IDs for moving image content,” said Pam Fisher, executive director of The Media Institute, at University College London. “The Media Institute (TMI) welcomes the opportunity to work with EIDR to support a variety of initiatives and industry sectors for whom the ability to use EIDR will be valuable.”

Will Kreth, executive Director of EIDR, added: “We’re delighted to offer the UAM program to these institutions (such as universities, archives, museums and libraries) under the condition that the organization document their implementation of EIDR, and share that with the EIDR community.

“When we say ‘Beyond Entertainment’ we mean that EIDR’s goal is to become as ubiquitous to the film and television world (in both commercial and non-commercial works) as the ISBN book ID and GTIN product ID (e.g. – UPC bar code) standards are today in their respective areas. With more than two million unique IDs, and more than four million Alternate IDs (contributed by dozens of members of the EIDR participant community), EIDR’s amazing commonwealth of structured and linked open data has already changed and improved the way archivists, academics, and business curators interact with both external partners and internal teams.”

Details on joining the UAM initiative can be found at eidr.com/uam.