WITNESS’s video catalog

How we use PBCore

WITNESS is a non-profit organization that collaborates with human rights groups around the world to co-produce and distribute videos that advance human rights causes. We maintain a Media Archive to collect, preserve and provide access to the audiovisual recordings made by WITNESS and our partners to support advocacy and the prosecution of justice, and for truth-telling and the historical record.

We use PBCore as a format to share information from our extensive video catalog, which is built with PBCore’s data structure in mind. Currently, we use PBCore to submit descriptive as well as some technical and structural metadata to our long-term preservation repository at the University of Texas Libraries. Along with a video master, a typical deposit includes a PBCore record, a MODS record and a MediaInfo report, packaged in BagIt format.

We are also planning to use PBCore to transact data between our video catalog and the new WITNESS website, built on Drupal. Data from the PBCore record will be imported to populate the Drupal database, and users will be able to search and view catalog records and video on our site. The structure and consistency of our data will allow us to implement user-friendly features, such as faceted browse, on the user interface.

Why we use PBCore

We use PBCore because its structure supports description relevant to our production-centered video archive, and because there is an active community of users that we can consult.

Contact

Yvonne Ng
Archivist
yvonne@witness.org

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