Search descriptions of Flemish archive content at hetarchief.be
Target group:
the general public, scientific researchers, education and professional users.
Together with our partners, we digitise and archive audiovisual content – but making this content easy to find is often a challenge. Fortunately, hetarchief.be offers a solution for anyone who wants to see exactly what content we have in the meemoo archive system, and which partner is responsible for managing it.
A multitude of metadata
Meemoo’s content partners have a wealth of videos and audio recordings that a wide audience would find interesting but which cannot be published online because of copyright or other usage restrictions. Hetarchief.be therefore primarily contains metadata – the information that describes the content.
This metadata allows users to search specifically in various archives without having to go anywhere. So, if you’re looking for specific topics, people, periods, events, creators or programmes, You can search on hetarchief.be by title, description of the content, date and technical data such as the unique identifiers for the content stored in our archive system.
But hetarchief.be is more than just a catalogue of descriptions. You can find out which organisation manages the video or audio content, you have an immediate opportunity to request access to the content, and you can even make an appointment to view and listen to audiovisual archival content on site with some providers – ensuring everyone can have an insight into over 1.5 million audiovisual gems that Flanders is blessed with.
Use the visitor tool to find, watch and listen to audiovisual content on the spot
The intramuros exception to copyright means you can browse through certain providers’ rich audiovisual collections, which are stored by meemoo, actually at those providers’ sites. Hetarchief.be makes it easy to arrange an appointment so you can start your targeted search at your chosen providers’ premises and through the same platform.
Some content partners are already opening their doors, and we will work on expanding this feature so that visitors can browse through even more archival content over the coming years.
By and for our content partners
Our content partners – the organisations that digitise, store and make content accessible through meemoo – can also use hetarchief.be. In addition to reading descriptions and metadata, they can also view and listen to their own and other partners’ audio and video content. They had their own platform for this – Catalogus Pro – until May 2023, but hetarchief.be became their central search portal in June 2023.
More than 140 partners and 1.5 million items on one platform
One of the main advantages of hetarchief.be is its central search function. You can explore descriptions of audiovisual gems from national and regional broadcasters, performing arts organisations, museums, archives, several universities, government institutions, and heritage societies and libraries on this new platform
In total, you can search for information about items from more than 140 partners stored in the meemoo archive system, so you can find out from a single place what content is managed by which partner. Hetarchief.be is so far exclusively available for audiovisual material, but in the future the platform will also provide access to other content – from newspapers to photographic materials. A treasure trove of newspapers (such as those from News of the Great War) will be the first to arrive, followed by over 23,000 images of art and heritage from Flemish collections.
‘Hetarchief.be is a win-win situation for everyone. If you work with archive content, it’s inevitable that lots of searching will be involved anyway. Hetarchief.be makes this work much more efficient.’ - Peter Van Goethem, researcher and film-maker
Even more diverse than the providers is the audiovisual content itself. From music to theatre plays, and TV programmes to propaganda films and documentation. Even though many providers make large parts of their archival content searchable via hetarchief.be, it’s still not possible to find everything there. You will often discover even more if you visit the providers themselves; there is still a lot of content that has not been digitised, has not had metadata added to it, or has not been made publicly accessible yet. Each provider chooses for themselves what is searchable on hetarchief.be.
Metadata is a doing word
Good metadata is the key to unlocking our audiovisual culture. You won’t find any of the content you’re looking for in a digital archive if you can’t see any descriptions. Moving forward, we therefore want to keep focussing on the quality of this metadata – to make searching simpler and even more efficient in future.
> Discover how meemoo is focussing on metadata management, -enrichment and -exchangeability