Paul Gerhardt at NDF 08

I love the National Digital Forum. It is the most important event in my professional development calender and always fills me up again for the coming year with inspirational and thought provoking speakers.

Unfortunately I missed day 1, but made it to day 2 which opened with Dr Paul Gerhardt as the keynote speaker for the day. Dr Gerhardt leads the UK's Creative Archive Licence Group - a consortium of public and commercial broadcasters and archives developing a shared public access strategy. He was joint director of the BBC Creative Archive. Click here to learn more about the Archives for Creativity.

These are the key 'makes you think' things I noted down:

• Transformative use rather than 'mashup' - a much better term,“These films are about us - they are ours” - response of people who appeared in the BBC documentary made in the 60s which was 'revisited' or used a base for the film: “BBC in the East End – Updated” by Chris Dorley-Brown,
• Digital content expanding rapidly: 6 months of Youtube saw the volumn of digital content created equal to 60 years of BBC production,
• The total digital content is on track to double every 11 hours by 2010,
• it won’t be very many years before all the AV content ever made will be available online.

This staggering stuff! We are on the edge of an explosion of digital content - not just words but audio, still and moving pictures, and informal community content and formal, institutional content too. The opportunities for transformative use are boundless.. what fun!

As usual I came away with a list of things to do:

• Read: “Towards a theory of digital library” by Aharon Auram and Yoram Eshet.
• Research: Creative Archive Licence derived from CC licence.
• Find: A good beyond the basics tutorial on editing video from the bbc site.