The gateway to European audiovisual heritage

Search in:

ABC shares historic footage on Wikimedia

In honour of its 80th birthday celebration, Australian national public broadcaster ABC has decided to roll out some celebratory footage, was announced by the Wikimedia Foundation this weekend. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has launched a new website called “80 Days That Changed Our Lives“, giving 80 pieces of audio visual content from the ABC archives a new lease on life. Today, the ABC has also announced that it has gone a step further by releasing some of these historical news reports to Wikimedia under a Creative Commons free license.

ABC, with the support and encouragement of CC Australia and the ARC Centre of Excellence in Creative Industries and Innovation (CCi), releases some of its landmark historical audiovisual footage to Wikimedia under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Australia licence. This release of highly encyclopedic audiovisual history is not only a first for Australia, it is a first for Wikimedia.

This is the first time a public broadcaster uses Wikimedia to release a package of broadcast materials for free use, however there have been other examples – see our list of 90+ Open Video Web Sources You Might Have Missed, which features Al Jazeera and Open Images.

1940s Mobile studio caravan, provided by the ABC

To see what kind of material was released, you can go to Wikimedia at this instant:

You can view the collection of files on Wikimedia Commons, which all available to use, remix and share, at Category: Files from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Some of the important pieces of Australian history that now have freely licensed multimedia for the first time include:

You can check where these files are already being used within Wikipedia articles on the toolserver project. You can also read the press release by the ABC about this project and also the blogpost by Creative Commons Australia (which is hosted by CCi).

We think this is an exciting move, congratulate ABC on it’s birthday and will dive straight in this new resource of historical television material!

Links

Title
Date
Provider
Description