It would be easier to locate the movie you want to watch in
-the Internet Archive, if the
-metadata about each movie was more complete and accurate. In the
-archiving community, a well known saying state that good metadata is a
-love letter to the future. The metadata in the Internet Archive could
-use a face lift for the future to love us back. Here is a proposal
-for a small improvement that would make the metadata more useful
-today. I've been unable to find any document describing the various
-standard fields available when uploading videos to the archive, so
-this proposal is based on my best quess and searching through several
-of the existing movies.
-
-
I have a few use cases in mind. First of all, I would like to be
-able to count the number of distinct movies in the Internet Archive,
-without duplicates. I would further like to identify the IMDB title
-ID of the movies in the Internet Archive, to be able to look up a IMDB
-title ID and know if I can fetch the video from there and share it
-with my friends.
-
-
Second, I would like the Butter data provider for The Internet
-archive
-(available
-from github), to list as many of the good movies as possible. The
-plugin currently do a search in the archive with the following
-parameters:
-
-
-collection:moviesandfilms
-AND NOT collection:movie_trailers
-AND -mediatype:collection
-AND format:"Archive BitTorrent"
-AND year
-
-
-
Most of the cool movies that fail to show up in Butter do so
-because the 'year' field is missing. The 'year' field is populated by
-the year part from the 'date' field, and should be when the movie was
-released (date or year). Two such examples are
-Ben Hur
-from 1905 and
-Caminandes
-2: Gran Dillama from 2013, where the year metadata field is
-missing.
-
-So, my proposal is simply, for every movie in The Internet Archive
-where an IMDB title ID exist, please fill in these metadata fields
-(note, they can be updated also long after the video was uploaded, but
-as far as I can tell, only by the uploader):
-
-
-
-- mediatype
-- Should be 'movie' for movies.
-
-- collection
-- Should contain 'moviesandfilms'.
-
-- title
-- The title of the movie, without the publication year.
-
-- date
-- The data or year the movie was released. This make the movie show
-up in Butter, as well as make it possible to know the age of the
-movie and is useful to figure out copyright status.
-
-- director
-- The director of the movie. This make it easier to know if the
-correct movie is found in movie databases.
-
-- publisher
-- The production company making the movie. Also useful for
-identifying the correct movie.
-
-- links
-
-- Add a link to the IMDB title page, for example like this: <a
-href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0028496/">Movie in
-IMDB</a>. This make it easier to find duplicates and allow for
-counting of number of unique movies in the Archive. Other external
-references, like to TMDB, could be added like this too.
-
-
-
-
I did consider proposing a Custom field for the IMDB title ID (for
-example 'imdb_title_url', 'imdb_code' or simply 'imdb', but suspect it
-will be easier to simply place it in the links free text field.
-
-
I created
-a
-list of IMDB title IDs for several thousand movies in the Internet
-Archive, but I also got a list of several thousand movies without
-such IMDB title ID (and quite a few duplicates). It would be great if
-this data set could be integrated into the Internet Archive metadata
-to be available for everyone in the future, but with the current
-policy of leaving metadata editing to the uploaders, it will take a
-while before this happen. If you have uploaded movies into the
-Internet Archive, you can help. Please consider following my proposal
-above for your movies, to ensure that movie is properly
-counted. :)
-
-
The list is mostly generated using wikidata, which based on
-Wikipedia articles make it possible to link between IMDB and movies in
-the Internet Archive. But there are lots of movies without a
-Wikipedia article, and some movies where only a collection page exist
-(like for the
-Caminandes example above, where there are three movies but only
-one Wikidata entry).
-
-
As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
-activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
-15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.
-
