The Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision (Sound & Vision) maintains and provides access to over 70 per cent of the Dutch audio-visual heritage, comprising more than one million hours of television, radio, music and film, making it one of the largest audiovisual archives in Europe. Sound & Vision combines the highest professional standards concerning the release and storage of material, with easy access for its users, by using state of the art systems for asset management and storage. Sound & Vision is the business archive of the national broadcasting corporations as well as a cultural heritage institute. Sound & Vision has brought thousands of hours of archive footage on-line for educational use and also operates a facility for the general public, the Media Experience, which is visited by 200,000 people annually. In 2007, the seven-year Images for the Future programme was launched. The project, funded with a budget of €154 million from the FES Fund, will realise the digitisation of the Netherlands’ audiovisual memory in a process whereby Sound & Vision will conserve and digitise 17,500 hours of film, 124,000 hours of audio, 137,000 hours of video and 1.2 million photos. This material will be made available for (broadcast) professionals, education and the general public. In the scope of this project, Sound & Vision is experimenting with crowdsourcing.
