Video Data Bank

Founded in 1976, the Video Data Bank is a resource making video art, documentaries made by artists and taped interviews with visual artists and critics available.

Collection Principles
The VDB collections present a sampling of video work made by artists from an aesthetic, political or personal point of view. Associated with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, selections are meant to represent seminal works that, seen as a whole, describe the development of video as an art form originating in the late 1960's and continuing to the present. The Video Data Bank maintains three collections of video consisting of over 1,600 titles produced from 1968 to the present. These collections are organized as follows: Early Video Art, Independent Video and Alternative Media, and On Art and Artists. According to the VDB, "75% of the work in the collections is experimental video art and artist produced documentary, much of it available as part of anthologies or curated programs, and 25% consists of interviews with artists." There are clips of some of these resources online - others are available only through rental or purchase.

Object Characteristics
The site was designed to be used with Quicktime Player. When a camera icon appears next to a title of a video work, this indicates that there is a short clip available for viewing that will open in a new window. The clips range in length from 6-30seconds. The size of each clip ranges from 500K to 1MB.

Metadata
I found the website incredibly difficult to search. The artist search, title search, and subject search functions are currently non-functional. If you click on compilations and scroll through the different compilation group titles, you can find several video clips. Alternately the home page, or "spin page," is a virtual wall that the VDB staff periodically programs to present random curation from a selection of work. Each image or animated gif links to information about an artist and their work. I found this process of searching/browsing to be irritating to say the least. When you finally locate a video clip, the associated metadata includes title of work, artist/creator, length, date of creation, and a 1-2 sentence description of the work and why the work is important to the development of video as an art form. If you are lucky enough to somehow locate the main page about an artist, such as Nam June Paik, then a short bibliography of the artist's life and works is provided in conjunction with video clips and links to anthologies or other videos available for purchase through VDB.

Audience
I originally located this site through a simple google search for Nam June Paik video art. So, although the site seems impossible to navigate if you are looking for a specific work or artist, the site has been well indexed and has the potential for better usability overall. The VDB is supported in by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Illinois Arts Council. As such, the VDB as a whole seems to be aimed at preserving and distributing video art works and associated videos. The VDB website appears to function as a way to provide limited access to these materials and other supplemental resources such as bibliographies. According to the VDB mission, the intended audience appears to be museums and galleries, cultural and educational institutions, broadcasters, community organizations and individuals.