VidLink

The award-winning Vidlink platform was originally developed for the Dutch NTR series Na de Bevrijding (After the Liberation). The platform has also been used as part of Europeana Awareness for Tegenlicht in de Klas, an educational series from Dutch television broadcaster, VPRO.

The source materials of a documentary consist of endless hours of original footage. Careful editing choices leave only minutes for the general public to see.

Vidlink is a tablet-first cultural storytelling web application. Built on HTLM5, it is designed as a timeline that allows users to dig deeper into the rich source materials used in the final version. Users can shuttle back and forth between the timeline of the television broadcast and the second layer of source materials. Vidlink’s back-end is editor-friendly and requires a minimal set-up. Time cues, file locations and descriptions are quickly edited in a shared spreadsheet. Our technical partners link the programme fragments to the archival sources. This low-friction mechanism allows web editors to quickly make changes to the desired length and visibility of the archive clips.

In the context of the Europeana Awareness project, the Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision and Videodock now make Vidlink freely available for selected broadcasters.