Get Ready to GIF It Up

Get Ready to GIF It Up

The National Library of New Zealand’s GIF IT UP challenge is back. DigitalNZ and the Digital Public Library of America are calling for the best animated GIFs reusing historical material from libraries and archives from across the world.

GIF IT UP encourages all ages to search through the amazing collections of copyright-free heritage material available online and make an animated GIF, the endlessly looping file format which was prominent in ‘90s web design.

Event creator Thomasin Sleigh says “I won’t be surprised if we get a lot more interest this year as GIFs are making a come-back with many people now using them in instant messaging applications and on Twitter.”

In 2014, the inaugural GIF IT UP received entries from all over the world as DigitalNZ and the Digital Public Library of America worked together to make historical and archival footage available and easy to search on their websites.

“I am looking forward to seeing the calibre of this year’s entries. It’s exciting because you never know where people will get inspiration from.”

The GIF, a file format first developed in 1987, has been described as ‘the shortest of all stories’ and libraries, museums, and archives are full of digitised public domain material just ripe for remixing, colouring, and animating.

GIF IT UP 2015 will be judged by an international panel of judges: Sarah Schaaf from Imgur, Rebecca Onion from Slate Vault, and Alessandro Scali & Marco Calabrese from Okkult Motion Pictures. A special sub-section of prizes for New Zealand students, sponsored by Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand, will be judged by GIF artist and illustrator Toby Morris.

The GIF IT UP challenge is open to all ages and runs from 12 October to 21 November. It is coordinated by DigitalNZ and the Digital Public Library of America, and supported by search portals Europeana, based in the Netherlands, and Trove, in Australia.

All information including prizes, rules, content pools and submission form can be found here: http://digitalnz.org/gif-it-up

All the entries from GIF IT UP 2014 can be browsed here: http://digitalnz-dpla.tumblr.com/

ENDS

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