What kind of data is available via the Media Suite?

The Media Suite aims to provide access to data collections at cultural heritage and knowledge institutions in The Netherlands . To access such collections, in the past scholars were typically required to visit the various institutions and work with the data in a reading room setting. With the Media Suite, scholars can stay behind their desktop and have online access to:

  • an overview of potential interesting data sets in the Netherlands at various institutions in the Netherlands, including Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, Eye Film Institute, National Library, DANS, Meertens Institute and National Archive.

  • a set of tools to work with the data and to store personal work such as annotations, queries and private virtual collections.

Multimedia data

The Media Suite is geared towards working with multimedia data sets: audio, video, images and text. Individual collections are typically “single media” (of one media type, for example audio) but some collections are multimedia, such as Eye’s Jean Desmet collection that has film (video), poster (images) and digitized papers (text). The Media Suite makes it possible to view and annotate each media type. We are developing several methods to do cross-media search and analysis, for example to research correlations between news reports on television (video) and in newspapers (text).

Access restrictions

We bring tools to the data , because for reasons of copyright or privacy these data can not be brought to the tools by simply downloading them. Read here for more information on access restrictions.

Collections in the Media Suite

The Media Suite aggregates metadata from audiovisual collections and related multi-media contextual sources that are maintained at cultural heritage and knowledge institutions in The Netherlands. For detailed information about the collections, see the Media Suite data registry .

Some collections contain links to external data sources. For example, the Sound and Vision collection has links between many of the persons in its thesaurus and information about those persons in WikiData. Check the collection description in the Media Suite data registry to see if links are available and how these have been created.