Markus Målsäter and Ragnar Schön
Today, large amounts of videograms are published with the use of online video services. The term videogram is used here to denote the audiovisual work itself, regardless of storage media. Videograms published on the internet are a part of a digital cultural heritage, which needs to be preserved. The National Library of Sweden is, according to law, responsible for the preservation of Swedish cultural heritage. Presently there is no strategy at the National Library to preserve these videograms and therefore there is a risk that part of the cultural heritage may be lost. It is the purpose of this study to, in collaboration with the National Library of Sweden, find a suitable method to preserve these videograms and also investigate how metadata can be saved and used in this process.
For this purpose four interviews with personnel from the National Library and a case study of Youtube were done. Youtube was chosen as it is the biggest online video service. The results of the interviews showed that there are four main methods of collection: legal deposit, harvesting, acquisition and active collection. The interviews also showed the difficulties and possibilities of each method. The case study showed that Youtube contains material that may be a part of the Swedish cultural heritage and that this material could be saved along with metadata of high quality. The advantages and disadvantages of the different methods of collection were investigated with SWOT analysis inter alia. It was found that the best alternative was to use the harvesting method but with more narrow criteria than those used in the Kulturarw3 project. In this way, videograms may be saved together with relevant metadata, which also may be used as search criteria.