On Friday, 13 March, Internet Archive Europe welcomes MIT’s Peter Kaufman to our Amsterdam HQ for a conversation about the medium that now carries most of human knowledge: video.
Event details
📅 Date: Friday, 13 March
⏰ Time: 3:00 – 5:00 PM CET
📍 Location: Internet Archive Europe, Oudeschans 16, 1011 KZ Amsterdam
🎟 Registration: Required via Luma
The event is free and open to anyone working in publishing, education, libraries, archives, or simply curious about where the moving image is taking us next.
Why video, and why now
Two-thirds of the world’s internet traffic is video. Americans get their news and information from screens and speakers more than through any other means. And yet, for most writers, educators, publishers, and archivists, video remains something of a foreign country: present everywhere, understood unevenly, and preserved poorly.
Kaufman’s new book, The Moving Image (MIT Press), is the first authoritative account of how we arrived here, and the first practical manual for those who want to navigate the medium with confidence. Drawing on decades as an educator, publisher, and producer, Kaufman covers the full lifecycle of video: how to produce it, distribute it, clear rights to it, cite it, and, crucially, archive and preserve it. And in a gesture entirely consistent with its argument, the book is now available as an open-access edition under a CC BY-SA licence, released with support from MIT Libraries exactly one year after its original publication. You can read it here.
What the afternoon covers
The book ranges across politics, law, education, and entertainment, tracing video’s role in public life 130 years since the birth of film. Kaufman offers detailed guidance on finding and using archival footage, securing rights and permissions, developing distribution strategies, and addressing the preservation and storage questions that libraries and archives know all too well.
For an organisation like Internet Archive Europe, that last part matters enormously. Preservation is not a technical afterthought: it is the condition under which access to moving image culture becomes possible at all.
Modelled in part on Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, The Moving Image is, by all accounts, also a genuinely enjoyable read, which is not always what you get from a definitive manual.
About Peter B. Kaufman
Peter B. Kaufman is Associate Director of Development at MIT Open Learning and founder of Intelligent Television, a video production company that works with cultural and educational institutions around the world. He is also the author of The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge, making this latest book a natural continuation of a career spent arguing that knowledge, in whatever form it takes, belongs in the commons.
