Who can access the Media Suite, and what can you access?

Who can access the Media Suite?

Only researchers and students **working or studying at secondary vocational-, higher education and research institutions in the Netherlands can log in using the credentials provided by their institution. When logging in, the CLARIAH infrastructure authenticates you using the ** SURF federated identity management service for IT in Dutch education and research. Here is a list of institutions (called “IdP” - Identity provider) that are part of this federation. Your organisation should be on the list in order for you to be able to log in. If your organisation is not on the list, you could point your ICT Department to this link that explains how to get connected.

After logging in, you will be able to use all features of the CLARIAH Media Suite, and access all data and collections available. Without logging in, you can still search and browse collections that have no copyright or privacy restrictions and are publicly available. However, you cannot use the research tools and features such as creating projects, building a corpus of items from different collections, and making annotations.

Limited access to the Media Suite can occur when:

• You cannot find your institution in the Media Suite login procedure, but your institution is part of SURF : This happens when you are prompted to the login page of The Media Suite; you search for your institution in the search box, and your institution is not listed there even though your institution is part of SURF. This most likely means that your institution is not connected to the Media Suite yet. This issue needs to be solved by your institution. In this case, you have to ask your local ICT helpdesk to establish this connection. Every institution has one or more SURFcontext maintainers/responsibles who should be able to do this for you. To start, you can find information here: SURFconext wiki ; and Surf Trust and Identity website .

• When you don’t have a Dutch institutional affiliation : This happens when you find the institution in the SURFconext list, but you don’t have valid credentials to log in. It is currently impossible to use the Media Suite without institutional credentials. We are working towards a solution for this situation in future versions. A possible alternative solution may be to ask a Dutch host institution listed by SURFConext to grant you a temporary institutional account.

What can you access in the Media Suite

The Media Suite provides access to data from different institutions (see here for an overview of institutions ), but does not host all the media resources (e.g., videos, images, documents) available in the collections of these institutions. When you find a resource that is not viewable/playable this may be due to the following reasons:

• The resource has not been digitised yet : you can inspect the record’s metadata, but not the actual content. These cases are marked with a “closed eye” icon in the result list of the Search tool . Look at the item’s metadata in the Resource viewer to find out whether an item has actually been digitised. Should you need to view the item in question, the best way to solve this is to contact (or visit) the institution that preserves it.

• The resource is digitised, but the institution prohibits play-out via the Media Suite (because, for example, of privacy or copyright restrictions). This scenario mostly applies to items in the DANS oral history collection containing sensitive content.

• The resource’s content is available, but requires additional authentication or access request . Again, this scenario applies mostly to some collections from DANS. You can use our Contact information , or the contact information pages of the data providers if you find issues in viewing the content. Please check before if this is not due to a common technical problem (see the Troubleshoting section ).