We’re excited to announce another round of funding for AudiAnnotate under a new title “AVAnnotate” with a new website: https://av-annotate.org/. The basic (free and open source) infrastructure and goals are the same: to increase the use of archival audiovisual artifacts in research and scholarship.

AVAnnotate is the second phase of the AudiAnnotate project, which was supported by a Mellon Foundation grant awarded in 2020. The AudiAnnotate project included the development of the free and open-source AudiAnnotate web application to easily produce freely available web projects. These projects—which resemble AV-centered “editions” or “exhibits”—are a series of web pages, hosted on GitHub, that feature a linked LAM audio or video recording that can be played in the context of user-generated commentary in time-stamped annotations alongside introductory material and an index of concepts and terms, all of which provide for searching, browsing, and organizing annotations across recordings. The AudiAnnotate team has also produced guidelines, workshops, and proof-of-concept projects with LAM partners to serve as much-needed examples for working with AV artifacts. [i] AVAnnotate builds on the work of AudiAnnotate by developing the application to generate projects with a more interactive and full-featured environment for editing and annotating, with better support for video, and with more reusable software components. Just as importantly, AVAnnotate will elevate awareness and promote sustainability around issues surrounding AV access in libraries and archives; scholarly, pedagogical, and public use of AV and the IIIF standard; and the social and political contexts surrounding AV access and engagement in LAM collections.

More news from the University of Texas at Austin about the project.