EUscreen

Last updated

EUscreen
Type of site
Digital library
FoundedOctober 2009 (2009-10)
URL EUscreen.eu
LaunchedOctober 27, 2011 (2011-10-27)

EUscreen is a website that provides free access to Europe's television heritage through videos, articles, images and audio from European audiovisual archives and broadcasters. Its digitised content covers a period from early 1900 until today. EUscreen "aligns the heterogeneous collections held throughout Europe and encourages the exploration of Europe's cultural and television history by different user groups". [1] EUscreen is also the name of the overarching network of institutions working on providing access European audiovisual collections.

Contents

The EUscreen project and the EUscreen network leaps the gap between people that wish to see old television materials (be it for leisure, for reuse or for education/research) and television archives. Although audiovisual content is in the process of being digitised and made available online in most European countries, access to television archives, remains scattered. This is partly due to digitisation technologies and practices not advancing at the same pace in all European countries but also due to rights legislation. [2]

History

EUscreen is a three-year project that started in October 2009. Within the duration of the project, over 41,000 items that capture Europe's television heritage are made available online through a multilingual and freely accessible portal that was launched on the World Day of Audiovisual Heritage in 2011. [3] In 2012, the Virtual Exhibitions were added to the portal. The project group, a gathering of technology partners, researchers and European public broadcasters, emerged from earlier European projects: Video Active and Birth of Television. The network where the participants to these projects got to know each other, was the International Federation of Television Archives (FIAT/IFTA). In this network also the European research projects around audiovisual preservation named 'Presto' (PrestoSpace, PrestoPrime, Presto4U) had been initiated. In the EUscreen project, the focus lies on exploring Europe's cultural and television heritage via various digitised sources such as audiovisual material, articles, photographs and audio. In 2012, funding was granted by the European Commission for the three-year EUscreenXL project, the successor to EUscreen.

Metadata

To align the information from the different archives and databases, EUscreen has adopted a standard metadata model in the broadcasting domain: the EBUCore Set of Metadata, [4] released by the EBU metadata working group at the end of 2008. [5] This metadata model has been mapped to the European Data Model (EDM). EDM is an advanced version of the Europeana Semantic Elements. EDM is a model that is more open, flexible, and able to follow the paradigms of the semantic web because it is not bound to a specific domain and can therefore be easily implemented in different contexts. [6]

EUscreen is directly connected to Europeana, the online gateway to millions of digitised items like books, paintings and archival records from European archives, museums and libraries. [1]

Content Selection Policy

Most of the content on EUscreen has been selected using a list of historical topics that may offer an insight into the cultural, economic, social and political developments and events that took place in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century. Apart from using the predefined list, content providers also uploaded material that reflected their own strengths and interests. [7]

However, European broadcasters didn’t all start broadcasting on the same day and archiving policies as well as recording technologies have influenced the amount and type of items that have been preserved. Therefore, the EUscreen partners have uploaded a substantially varied collection to the portal.

Financing and organisation

The EUscreen project is funded by the European Commission under eContentplus, the Information and Communication Technologies Policy Support Programme (ICT PSP). Moreover, EUscreen's partners also contribute to the financing of the project. [8] In September 2013, the EUscreen Foundation was registered as a non-profit foundation under Dutch law. [9]

The EUscreen consortium is coordinated by Utrecht University, [1] and consists of the following partners: [10]

ArchivesTechnology ProvidersResearch OrganisationsAssociate Partners
Cinecittà Luce Europeana Foundation Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture BBC
Česká televize European Broadcasting Union ATiTFIAT/IFTA
Danish Broadcasting Corporation National Technical University of Athens British Universities Film & Video Council AthenaWeb
Deutsche Welle Noterik Eötvös Loránd University AAMOD
Hellenic National Audiovisual Archive Maastricht University Politecnico di Torino
Institut National de l'Audiovisuel Royal Holloway, University of London Audiovisual Library of the EC
National Library of Sweden Utrecht University DIVERSE
NAVAMEMORIAV
Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision Ellinikí Radiofonía Tileórasi
Österreichischer Rundfunk National Library of Norway
Radiotelevisione Italiana
Radio Télévision Belge Francophone
Raidió Teilifís Éireann
Radiotelevizija Slovenija
Televisió de Catalunya
Telewizja Polska
Televiziunea Română

See also

Related Research Articles

In library and archival science, digital preservation is a formal endeavor to ensure that digital information of continuing value remains accessible and usable. It involves planning, resource allocation, and application of preservation methods and technologies, and it combines policies, strategies and actions to ensure access to reformatted and "born-digital" content, regardless of the challenges of media failure and technological change. The goal of digital preservation is the accurate rendering of authenticated content over time. The Association for Library Collections and Technical Services Preservation and Reformatting Section of the American Library Association, defined digital preservation as combination of "policies, strategies and actions that ensure access to digital content over time." According to the Harrod's Librarian Glossary, digital preservation is the method of keeping digital material alive so that they remain usable as technological advances render original hardware and software specification obsolete.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">European Library</span> Web service providing access to resources of national libraries across Europe

The European Library is an Internet service that allows access to the resources of 49 European national libraries and an increasing number of research libraries. Searching is free and delivers metadata records as well as digital objects, mostly free of charge. The objects come from institutions located in countries which are members of the Council of Europe and range from catalogue records to full-text books, magazines, journals and audio recordings. Over 200 million records are searchable, including 24 million pages of full-text content and more than 7 million digital objects. Thirty five different languages are represented among the searchable objects.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fedora Commons</span>

Fedora is a digital asset management (DAM) content repository architecture upon which institutional repositories, digital archives, and digital library systems might be built. Fedora is the underlying architecture for a digital repository, and is not a complete management, indexing, discovery, and delivery application. It is a modular architecture built on the principle that interoperability and extensibility are best achieved by the integration of data, interfaces, and mechanisms as clearly defined modules.

indecs was a project partly funded by the European Community Info 2000 initiative and by several organisations representing the music, rights, text publishing, authors, library and other sectors in 1998-2000, which has since been used in a number of metadata activities. A final report and related documents were published; the indecs Metadata Framework document is a concise summary.

PREservation Metadata: Implementation Strategies (PREMIS) is the de facto digital preservation metadata standard.

A digital library, also called an online library, an internet library, a digital repository, or a digital collection is an online database of digital objects that can include text, still images, audio, video, digital documents, or other digital media formats or a library accessible through the internet. Objects can consist of digitized content like print or photographs, as well as originally produced digital content like word processor files or social media posts. In addition to storing content, digital libraries provide means for organizing, searching, and retrieving the content contained in the collection. Digital libraries can vary immensely in size and scope, and can be maintained by individuals or organizations. The digital content may be stored locally, or accessed remotely via computer networks. These information retrieval systems are able to exchange information with each other through interoperability and sustainability.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Europeana</span> Digital collection of European cultural heritage

Europeana is a web portal created by the European Union containing digitised cultural heritage collections of more than 3,000 institutions across Europe. It includes records of over 50 million cultural and scientific artefacts, brought together on a single platform and presented in a variety of ways relevant to modern users. The prototype for Europeana was the European Digital Library Network (EDLnet), launched in 2008.

A metadata standard is a requirement which is intended to establish a common understanding of the meaning or semantics of the data, to ensure correct and proper use and interpretation of the data by its owners and users. To achieve this common understanding, a number of characteristics, or attributes of the data have to be defined, also known as metadata.

The Archaeology Data Service (ADS) is an open access digital archive for archaeological research outputs. It is located in The King's Manor, at the University of York. Originally intended to curate digital outputs from archaeological researchers based in the UK's Higher Education sector, the ADS also holds archive material created under the auspices of national and local government as well as in the commercial archaeology sector. The ADS carries out research, most of which focuses on resource discovery, cross-searching and interoperability with other relevant archives in the UK, Europe and the United States of America.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives</span>

The International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA) was established in 1969 to serve as a forum for international co-operation between archives, libraries, and individuals interested in the preservation of recorded sound and audiovisual documents.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Trove</span> Australian online library database aggregator

Trove is an Australian online library database owned by the National Library of Australia in which it holds partnerships with source providers National and State Libraries Australia, an aggregator and service which includes full text documents, digital images, bibliographic and holdings data of items which are not available digitally, and a free faceted-search engine as a discovery tool.

BBC Redux was a BBC Research & Development system that digitally recorded television and radio output in the United Kingdom produced by the British Broadcasting Corporation. It operated from 2007 to 2022 and contains several petabytes of recordings and subtitle data. It is notable for being the proof of concept for the Flash video streaming version of the BBC iPlayer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">German National Library of Science and Technology</span> German national library for engineering, technology, and natural sciences

The German National Library of Science and Technology, abbreviated TIB, is the national library of the Federal Republic of Germany for all fields of engineering, technology, and the natural sciences. It is jointly funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the 16 German states. Founded in 1959, the library operates in conjunction with the Leibniz Universität Hannover. In addition to acquiring scientific literature, it also conducts applied research in such areas as the archiving of non-textual materials, data visualization and the future Internet. The library is also involved in a number of open access initiatives. With a collection of over 9 million items in 2017, the TIB is the largest science and technology library in the world.

The European Film Gateway (EFG) is a single access point to the digitized holdings of historical European film documents from numerous film archives and cinematheques, including over 600,000 individual objects from over 60 collections. The European Film Gateway gives access to images, textual materials, and moving images. The vast contents include film stills, set photos, posters, set drawings, portrait photographs, scripts, correspondences, film censorship and visa rulings, out-of-print books, film programs and reviews, as well as newsreels, documentaries, commercials, and feature films. The portal facilitates access to the archives which hold the original materials.

The Association of European Cinematheques is an affiliation of 49 European national and regional film archives founded in 1991. Its role is to safeguard the European film heritage and make these rich audiovisual records collected and preserved by the various film archives accessible to the public. ACE is a regional branch of FIAF Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film / International Federation of Film Archives. ACE members are non-profit institutions committed to the FIAF Code of Ethics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Europeana 1914-1918</span> Project to digitise and publish primary and secondary historical sources on the First World War

Europeana 1914–1918 is a major project to digitise and publish primary and secondary historical sources on the First World War. It is coordinated by Europeana, as part of a broader program to digitise European cultural heritage.

AthenaPlus is a CIP best practice network started in March 2013 which aims to facilitate access to networks of cultural heritage, enrich metadata, as well as improve search, retrieval and re-use of Europeana’s content by enhancing multilingual terminology management and the export/publication tool. By the end of the project, AthenaPlus will contribute more than 3.6 millions of metadata records to Europeana, from both public and private sectors, focusing mainly on museums content. In addition to enabling access to cultural heritage, AthenaPlus is also focused on creative use of content, and adapting data to users with different needs by means of tools that support the development of virtual exhibitions, tourist and didactic applications.

Lightweight Information Describing Objects (LIDO) is an XML schema for describing museum or collection objects. Memory institutions use LIDO for “exposing, sharing and connecting data on the web”. It can be applied to all kind of disciplines in cultural heritage, e.g. art, natural history, technology, etc. LIDO is a specific application of CIDOC CRM.

Keeping the foresight of rapidly changing technologies and rampant digital obsolescence, in 2008, the R & D in IT Group, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India envisaged to evolve Indian digital preservation initiative. In order to learn from the experience of developed nations, during March 24–25, 2009, an Indo-US Workshop on International Trends in Digital Preservation was organized by C-DAC, Pune with sponsorship from Indo-US Science & Technology Forum, which lead to more constructive developments towards formulation of the national program.

Unlocking Film Heritage (UFH) was one of the biggest film digitisation projects ever undertaken and it encompassed the BFI National Archive together with national and regional audiovisual archival institutions in United Kingdom. Between 2013–2017 around 10,000 titles, capturing 120 years of Great Britain on film, were digitised and made free-to-access in a variety of ways. Many archival clips can be watched for free online via BFI Player.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "About EUscreen".
  2. de Leeuw, Sonja (2012). "European Television History: History and Challenges". Journal of European Television History and Culture. 1 (1): 3–11. doi: 10.18146/2213-0969.2012.jethc002 .
  3. Mustata, Dana (April 2011). "Europa zet televisie-erfgoed online. Video Active en EUscreen". 609 – Cultuur en Media: 13.
  4. "EBU Technology & Innovation – Metadata Specifications". Tech.ebu.ch. Retrieved 27 February 2013.
  5. Oomen, Johan; A. Christaka; V. Tzouvaras (2009). "Television Heritage and the Semantic Web: Video active and EUscreen". International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications: 97–105.
  6. Rendina, Marco. "The Europeana Data Model (EDM)". filmed by Anna Dabrowska.
  7. Vassilis, Tzouvaras; Marco Rendina; Nasis Drosopoulos; Johan Oomen (11–14 April 2012). "Linking Europe's Television Heritage". Museums and the Web Conference.
  8. "EUscreen – projectsgegevens". den Kenniscentrum Digitaal Erfgoed. Archived from the original on 22 October 2018. Retrieved 26 October 2012.
  9. "Stichting EUscreen". Listing in The Chamber of Commerce.
  10. "Project Partners EUscreen". Europeana. Archived from the original on 3 September 2012. Retrieved 26 October 2012.