IBM to play lead role in creation of global film database

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September 03, 2003 (Computerworld) -- More than 100 years of motion pictures, TV broadcasts and other images, now scattered in museums and collections around the globe, have never been cataloged in one massive worldwide database.
That will change next year, when three U.S. universities and the U.S. Library of Congress begin work on an online catalog of the world's movie and broadcasting treasures for researchers, historians, educators and the public. The database will initially include information on the images, such as when they were made, who created them and where they are kept, but some of the material will be available for viewing online.
In an announcement today, IBM was named the lead hardware vendor for the database project, which will use the company's eServer pSeries servers using IBM's Power processors.
Jim DeRoest, assistant director of computing and communications at the University of Washington in Seattle, which is helping to develop the database, said the project has long been a goal of researchers and is coming together now with help from a $900,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.
Until now, the only catalogs of films and broadcast images have covered individual private collections or museums, he said, which has hindered knowledge about what remains from the early days of the industry. "There are some large [collections], but there hasn't been this cross-genre type of catalog," DeRoest said.
Also participating in the project are Rutgers University Libraries in New Jersey and the Georgia Institute of Technology. The National Science Foundation grant was commissioned by the Association of Moving Image Archivists in Hollywood through a grant from the National Film Preservation Board of the Library of Congress.
The Moving Images Collection database and Web portal will run on two IBM eServer p630 and two IBM eServer p610 servers under SuSE Linux and IBM Directory Server.
The database will run on SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 on the IBM hardware, along with various open-source applications used to keep costs down, DeRoest said. The Power processor servers were chosen, he said, because each of the participating universities has had good experiences with them. "All of us were fairly satisfied with the scalability," he said.
One problem for Linux on Intel-based hardware, DeRoest said, has arisen when vendors made hardware changes and Linux didn't include the proper device drivers. Using the pSeries servers should solve that problem through a "consistency of hardware," he said.
Barbara Humphrys, who works in the Library of Congress motion picture, broadcast and recorded sound division and who was a member of an early Association of Moving Image Archivists subcommittee for the project, said the database will make it easier for historians and researchers to find images and films. "We're kind of starting at the beginning," she said. "You'd be surprised where some things are held."
Once the database is built, administrators can add links directly to the content so users can view images and movies, Humphrys said. And users who find the listing of images they're seeking will be able to contact the collection owner to try to obtain viewing rights or more information.
In addition to motion pictures, TV broadcasts and other images, the database will feature archives from the Smithsonian museums, including video from the Hubble Space Telescope and other notable or historical images.
The Library of Congress will host the Web site for the Moving Images Collection database after it debuts next year. An early version of the Web site is already online.
The University of Washington and Rutgers University are designing and developing the directory and catalog databases of digital images, and the Georgia Institute of Technology is developing the Web portal for the project.

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