PAD.MA - short for Public Access Digital Media Archive - is an online archive of densely text-annotated video material, primarily footage and not finished films. The entire collection is searchable and viewable online, and is free to download for non- commercial use.

We see PAD.MA as a way of opening up a set of images, intentions and effects present in video footage, resources that conventions of video- making, editing and spectatorship have tended to suppress, or leave behind. This expanded treatment then points to other, political potentials for such material, and leads us into lesser-known territory for video itself... beyond the finite documentary film or the online video clip.

The design of the archive makes possible various types of "viewing", and contextualisation: from an overview of themes and timelines to much closer readings of transcribed dialogue and geographical locations, to layers of "writing" on top of the image material. Descriptions, keywords and other annotations have been placed on timelines by both archive contributors and users. At the moment, PAD.MA has 567 "events" on video, mostly from Mumbai and Bangalore. This adds up to 11 days 4 hours 58 minutes 11 seconds of fully transcribed video footage, which we expect to grow to more than 400 hours by early 2010.

The PAD.MA project is initiated by a group consisting of oil21.org from Berlin, the Alternative Law Forum from Bangalore, and three organisations from Mumbai: Majlis, Point of View and Chitrakarkhana/CAMP.

PAD.MA is based on the 0xdb framework.