+
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.
+
+
