Many early demonstrations of Artificial Intelligence (AI) programs and many lectures of the field's pioneers explaining basic AI topics have been captured on videotape and film, but few of these have been preserved in archival form or have been accessible from a common web portal. This historical record is threatened and vulnerable to loss as time passes because of format incompatibility and deterioration of original materials. For videos that have already been digitized, much work is needed to index and edit materials, so that they are useful to students, teachers, and the public at large, and that the relevant materials can be accessed with much more ease than is the case today, where materials, even if available on the web, are not catalogued or organized in a coherent manner.
This project will explore the feasibility of a low-cost plan to collect and preserve the video record of significant scientific events in the history of AI. Information will be collected in a "virtual archive" that will contain original tapes and movies critical to the intellectual history of the field. It will be integrated with the current AAAI AITopics portal, which at present contains information on central AI topics (e.g., machine learning, knowledge representation, speech, robotics). AITopics will be re-designed so that both the new video pages and the existing document pages have the same look-and-feel. The project will exploit the 'wiki' model of knowledge sharing to collect information about AI-related videos and to move original videotapes and movies from the hands of individuals into long-term archival storage. In doing so, the project will develop a set of procedures for preservation, and for the growth and use of the website by the community of AI scientists and students.
