Pdproject

SWISS FOUNDATION PUBLIC DOMAIN

The Swiss Foundation Public Domain is a charitable organization under the supervision of the Federal Department of Home Affairs. The foundation is specialized in the conservation and utilization of public domain music and film material.

We see our mission as rescuing recordings from past decades, produced on sensitive and easily damaged materials, from deterioration and potential oblivion. Our first goal is to have gramophone records and motion pictures, which are an invaluable resource, transformed into longterm readable and usable data files by expert staff, using state of the art procedures (such as FLAC and Theora). Our second goal is the investigation of the copyright status, the cataloging of the description of any work in our database and the upload to Wikimedia Commons.

PUBLIC DOMAIN PROJECT

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  Public Domain Project
  Digitization station with ELP laser turntable No. 1, RME Fireface 800 and Numark TTX turntable
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  Public Domain Project
  Digitization station with ELP laser turntable No. 2 and Motu 828 MK3 Audio interface
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  Public Domain Project
  Inventory of 78 rpm shellac discs (preview, scan and cataloging)
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  Public Domain Project
  Video digitization: MiniDV/S-VHS and Hi8 (left) and DVCpro, Umatic SP and Betacam SP (right) with Blackmagic Analog to SDI Converter and Blackmagic UltraStudio MiniRecorder
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  Public Domain Project
  Keith Monks 'Classic' - RCM MK IIc (left), Self-builded RCM (center) and Keith Monks Archivist Duo MK IX (right)
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  Public Domain Project
  View inside the Media archive, room no. 1
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  Public Domain Project
  View inside a container with cataloged, cleaned and digitized 78 rpm shellac discs
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  Public Domain Project
  Fresh cleaned, cataloged and digitized 78 rpm shellac disc

Under the working title "Public Domain Project" exists since 2009 the digitizing project which is supported by WMAT, WMCH and WMDE. This project, including the MediaWiki and the archives, is available to everyone.

Chronology of key events

• January 2009: Establishment of the Public Domain Project
• December 2009: The Public Domain Radio starts his broadcasting
• January 2010: The MediaWiki of the Public Domain Project goes online
• December 2010: The Public Domain Project is among the winners of the first competition of ideas of Wikimedia Deutschland
• September 2011: Arrival of the provided laser turntable by Wikimedia Deutschland
• February 2012: The ITZ of the Zurich University of the Arts offers the server housing and sponsors bandwidth and rackspace
• August 2012: Martin Osterwalder donates 35,000 gramophone records (phonograph records)
• September 2012: First speech at a Wikimedia conference (WikiCon 2012 in Dornbirn, Austria)
• December 2012: Establishment of the Swiss Foundation Public Domain
• February 2013: The supervision of the foundation is now up to the Federal Department of Home Affairs
• May 2013: The Swiss Foundation Public Domain is now officially a charitable organization (tax exempt) in Switzerland
• August 2013: We attend at the Wikimania 2013 in Hong Kong. The result is a partnership with a digitization project in Uruguay
• January 2014: The Public Domain Project is actively supported by Wikimedia CH in 2014
• February 2014: Integration of the digitization project in the CD recording of the SOS-ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich)
• April 2014: Dominio Público Sonoro Uruguay becomes the official representative of the Public Domain Project in South America
• July 2014: Start of the digitization of the Martin Osterwalder collection. WMCH financed an employee with Asperger syndrome and the SOS-ETH is sponsoring a space for the recording studio
• August 2014: We attend at the Wikimania 2014 in London. Wikimedia Deutschland gives us a literary grant for the procurement of much needed reference books (Copyright investigation)
• September 2014: We attend at WikiCon 2014 in Cologne. Wikimedia CH assumes the cost for another employee with Asperger syndrome. The record cleaning machine is now ready for use. We find a pleasure in the Wiki of Music (WoM) and discuss about a closer cooperation
• December 2014: With the Zurich University of the Arts, we move all our servers into the Toni-Areal. We get an additional office and expand to six jobs
• February 2015: The Public Domain Project is provider at the first Swiss Open Cultural Data Hackathon in the Swiss National Library in Bern
• March 2015: We start to use the GLAMwiki Toolset developed by Europeana for all uploads
• April 2015: At the GLAM-WIKI-2015 in The Hague we exchange experiences with other GLAM staff from Belgium to Malawi. WMCH and WMDE struggling with reduced budgets for the projects, therefore our workforce had to be reduced back to one person. At the moment we have no budget to buy the much needed "Reference Books" (e.g. Mainspringpress.com) for the copyright clearance. Without this data the upload to Commons is reduced to a minimum. The head of WMF Grant committee advises us to ask direct by the Wikimedia Foundation for a credit.
• June 2015: A very warm welcome to our two new team members: Evelyn Eisenhauer (Management consultant) and James Guyot (Fundraiser)
• July 2015: We ask for a microgrant by Wikimedia CH for the acquisition of additional reference books. Co-funding of the new Wikimedia Digitization User Group
• October 2015: We are part of the conference Sharing is Caring: Right to Remix? and the 2015 edition of HACK4DK in Kopenhagen. HACK4DK is an annual hackathon on cultural heritage, organized by major heritage institutions in Denmark
• January 2016: We've got the first time user statistics from Wikimedia Commons for the month of october 2015. We are very happy that all our audio files we provide on Wikimedia Commons were downloaded 40 000 times in that month
• April 2016: At the Linux Audio Conference 2016 in Berlin (DE) nuess0r has held a presentation about the usage of Free and Open Source Software für digital long time archives. The Linux Audio Conference is a annual event of the Linuxaudio Community. Video recording (Download und streaming)
• August 2016: The Public Domain Project was the first time the subject of a research paper.At the Bern University of Applied Sciences a student was working on the topic of digital long time preservation of audio works in general and developing a concept how this concepts could be applied to the Public Domain Project. As a by product an audit was undertaken to determine the current status of the Public Domain Project and its long time preservation strategies
  • Research paper (German)
  • Presentation slides (English)
• January 2017: On the basis of the research paper published in August 2016 a master thesis was done at the Bern University of Applied Sciences. The whole work is freely available and published under the CC By license:
  • Full master thesis report (German)
  • Presentation slides (English)
• June 2017: Delivery of the recently acquired second Laser turntable (ELP LT-2XA) and the Keith Monks 'Classic' - RCM MK IIc
• August 2017: 2017 - H1 Report from the Public Domain Project for Wikimedia CH
• October 2017: Transport of the twin-deck RCM Keith Monks Gemini MK III from Geneva to Rüti ZH. The MK III 'Gemini' speeds up the cleaning process (dries the last record while at the same time washing the next) and is especially useful for studios, libraries and archives, broadcasters and other high volume users, those who want to shuttle between different cleaning fluids on different decks. We attend at the WikidataCon 2017 in Berlin.

Wikimedia Digitization User Group

• 2017 Report & Timeline of the Swiss Foundation Public Domain

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