On 18th July 2013, the EUscreenXL project was presented as part of the panel ‘Digital Archive Projects: Rethinking Media Studies Methodologies’ at the 25^th International IAMHIST Conference held at the University of Leicester, UK. It was the second time EUscreen was present at the IAMHIST Conference, after the 24^th International IAMHIST Conference themed ‘Media History and Cultural Memory’ at Copenhagen University in 2011.

Report by Berber Hagedoorn, MA (Utrecht University)

The International Association for Media and History (IAMHIST) is an organization of filmmakers, broadcasters, archivists and scholars dedicated to historical inquiry into film, radio, television, and related media. IAMHIST encourages scholarly research into the relations between history and the media as well as the production of historically informed documentaries, television series, and other media texts. The theme of this year’s conference was ‘Childhood and the Media’.

The last decade we have witnessed an explosion of available digital databases and archives, and accordingly, the development of different tools to explore these archives in new ways. The panel ‘Digital Archive Projects: Rethinking Media Studies Methodologies’ discussed the possibilities and limitations of tools to explore digitised television, newspaper and radio archives for media scholars and historians. Each paper presented a particular project, its possible use for future research and a specific case study conducted by means of the tools. The panel was chaired by Luke McKernan (British Library, London).

Berber Hagedoorn from Utrecht University presented the EUscreenXL project, which aims to overcome the fragmentation of the audiovisual heritage sector in Europe and to make a growing collection of contextualised audiovisual content accessible and meaningful for diverse types of users, from the general audience, researchers and teachers, to professionals in the creative industries. Hagedoorn paid specific attention to the opportunities and challenges of the project and EUscreen portal for academic research. As a cross-national database of sources, the portal offers access to a range of audiovisual content in different languages, connected to various historical topics. Hagedoorn focused particularly on how the EUscreen portal and the use of European cultural resources lends itself to doing comparative research on the coverage of particular topics and genres across countries in Europe.

Martijn Kleppe from Erasmus University Rotterdam discussed the PoliMedia project, which showcases the potential of cross-media analysis by linking digitised transcriptions of debates at the Dutch Parliament with newspapers, radio bulletins, newscasts and current affairs programmes. Kleppe explained the workings of the PoliMedia portal and its possible future use for media scholars, discussing how the portal will allow researchers to browse for debates or names of politicians and analyse related media coverage, as well as evaluating debates in which politicians appeared and how they were covered in the press. As Kleppe pointed out, an advantage of the PoliMedia project is that the coverage in the media is incorporated in its original form, enabling analyses of the mark-up of news articles, newspaper photos, and televised programme footage.

Jasmijn van Gorp from Utrecht University presented the project BRIDGE: Building Rich Links to Enable Television History, in which she zoomed in on two tools developed by this project for exploration and contextualisation. MeRDES (Media Researchers’ Data Exploration Suite) enables comparative analysis between two individual items from the television catalogue of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision archives, through visualisations such as word clouds and timelines. Secondly, CoMeRDA (Contextualising Media Researchers’ Data) links different collections, including television programmes, national newspapers and television-related photographs, and enables simultaneous search across these collections. Van Gorp demonstrated how the discussed tools ‘bridge’ or build links between heterogeneous collections, therefore allowing media researchers, historians, and digital humanists to explore, analyse and compare (elements of) Dutch television history.

The discussion session highlighted the necessity of translation, in particular for transnational or European-wide archival projects. This is especially the case for EUscreenXL which, as an audiovisual online archive, is also more dependent on its metadata to allow researchers to explore the archive for relevant content. Translation and subtitling will therefore not only aid in the usability of the audiovisual content, but in improving the searchability of the EUscreen portal, too.

All presentations touched upon how analysing media coverage across several types of media forms or outlets is a challenging task for researchers. New digital tools to explore archives therefore allow researchers to study more and new sources as well as generating novel research questions. The panel enabled a fruitful dialogue with media scholars and historians, emphasizing the relevance for scholars in the Humanities to further engage in digital archival projects.

In July ’13, Berber Hagedoorn (UU) and Willemien Sanders (UU), with assistance from Vera Schoonbrood (UU Research Master student) hosted two focus groups and an in-depth interview to discuss improvements for the EUscreen portal and, more specifically,  to refine user requirements. The aim was to get input from both researchers and students, who also contributed in their role as general user, on what would invite them to use the portal, and which additional functionalities, tools, and contextualization they would need to carry out research effectively.

Report by dr Willemien Sanders from Utrecht University

Researchers from the Department of Languages, Literature and Communication, the Department of History and Art History, and the Department of Media and Performance Studies within the faculty of the Humanities of Utrecht University participated in the first focus group. Speaking specifically from a researcher’s perspective, they discussed ways to better present, search, and link the content of the site.

A second focus group included students from the Department of History and Art History, and the Department of Media and Performance Studies. Both in their roles as students and as ‘general users’ of the EUscreen portal, they discussed the use of the portal for their student work as well as ways to collaborate and share.

The focus groups were followed up by a questionnaire, informed by the focus groups findings, which is aimed at assessing user requirements in a broader field of researchers and students/general users.

The meetings in Utrecht are part of a series of activities aimed at contextualizing the content of the portal for various users. These activities are carried out by different EUscreenXL partners across different countries.

Our colleagues from the Europeana Awareness project held their second Licensing Workshop in Luxemburg on the 13th and 14th of June. Réka Markovich went to present the efforts EUscreen has taken to bring a massive broadcast collection with different national copyright laws online. She represented the new EUscreenXL project, in which we’ll continue our research and approaches on providing access to audiovisual heritage. 

Report by Réka Markovich from ELTE University, Hungary.

Europeana Awareness is a Best-Practice Network led by the Europeana Foundation. It’s been designed to publicize Europeana to users, policy makers, politicians and cultural heritage organizations in every Member State. The second Europeana Licensing workshop was part of research undertaken for the Europeana Awareness project by the Bibliothèque nationale de Luxembourg, Kennisland and the Institute for Information Law (IvIR). Their research focuses on possible international licensing models for digital heritage and the legal framework for cross-border licensing of copyright-protected works in Europe. In practice, this means that it explores the conditions under which works contained in the collections of cultural heritage institutions could be regulated on a cross-border basis in the context of Europeana.

Models for Cross-Border Licensing

The workshop aimed at gathering information to map the practice and implementation of the Orphan Works Directive and possible alternative contractual arrangements (such as those based on the Memorandum of Understanding on Out-of-Commerce Works). It complements a questionnaire to the European member states about the creation of an international database of Orphan Works. Member States will have to pass legislation implementing the Directive by October 2014. As far as the database is concerned, they will have to play the role of “interface” between beneficiary institutions (libraries etc) and  the office for the harmonisation of the internal market (OHIM), an EU agency with responsibility in the area of IPR, based in Alicante, Spain. The focus of this process is to identify possible loopholes in the cross-border access and re-use of works that is caused by differing national arrangements regarding categories of works, beneficiaries, scope and conditions of use, etc. For those who’d like to get an idea of the wide variety of copyrights clearance regulations in different European countries, the Public Domain Calculator gives you a good idea.

Cross-border access and use depend not only on a clear legal framework, but also on effective data collection and rights management. Therefore the workshop’s first day focused on the practical implementation of data registries, data creation and data exchange processes between the relevant actors. It was interesting to see what kind of organizations work on copyright clearance: e.g. with facilitating rights information management (ARROW) or with developing building blocks for the expression and management of rights and licensing across all content and media types (Linked Content Coalition). While legal issues cannot be easily separated from more administrative issues, day two focused on legal interoperability issues of implementing alternative (contractual) mechanisms.

Rights for Audiovisual Works

Issues of intellectual property rights are crucial when providing access to audiovisual collections. As a part of legislation, copyright law still bears some territorial nature – while a Pan-European audiovisual archive touches upon cross-border legal issues. Some kind of harmonization would be necessary to ensure the possibility of publishing and providing access to our audiovisual heritage. The Memorandum of Understanding on Key Principles on the Digitization and Making Available of Out-of-Commerce Works is sector-specific: it covers books and learned journals only. A dialogue between stakeholders is the way forward to facilitate agreements for the digitization of European out-of-commerce cultural material in other sectors—e.g. on audiovisual works—as well.

EUscreenXL will provide Europeana with 1.000.000 metadata records giving access for online content held by European broadcasters and audiovisual archives and will publish 20.000 contextualized programmes on the EUscreen portal. As the audiovisual content aggregator for Europeana, all the work packages of EUscreenXL take their cue from Europeana’s working groups. In EUscreenXL we are also working on a strategic agenda for access to audio-visual heritage through Europeana. The task is a pan-European research effort. It covers seven topics closely related to the daily reality of audio-visual archives, one of which is intellectual property rights. This activity is essential for Europeana to reach out to the audio-visual domain  and understand what needs to be put in place in order to maximize contributions to Europeana. It was therefor fascinating to hear about the legal issues-related activities of Europeana, to be in touch with the Europeana project working groups and the people behind them.

More information

• A good introduction to copyright issues for cultural heritage, with examples from the audiovisual domain, can be found in Dr. Paul Klimpel’s Copyright Law, Practice and Fiction. [PDF]
• All presentations from the workshop have been published on the Europeana Licensing Slideshare.
• More info on European copyright themes can be found on the website Licenses for Europe.
• Lisette Kalshoven’s account of this workshop was published on the Europeana Pro blog.
• See our list of relevant literature on IPR on our IPR reference page or on Zotero.

EUscreenXL Regional Workshops

A report by BUFVC’s Andrew Ormsby.

Content providers from archives and broadcasters across Europe attended EUscreenXL workshops in London, Warsaw and Barcelona during May and June as part of Work Package 2: Aggregating and Enriching Content. The British Universities Film and Video Council (BUFVC), NInA (The National Audiovisual Institute of Poland) and Televisio de Catalunya (TVC3), generously hosted a series of busy and productive meetings, with presentations, demonstrations, discussions and one to one sessions.

Work Package 2 forms the bedrock of the EUscreenXL project: its objective is to add at least one million aggregated metadata records of audiovisual items to Europeana, as well as adding an enriched core collection of 20,000 moving image items to the EUscreen portal.

During the workshops Marco Rendina of Cinecittà Luce spoke about metadata schema, Dr Rob Turnock of Royal Holloway, University of London, presented an overview of content selection policy, and Eve-Marie Oesterlen and Andrew Ormsby, of the BUFVC, outlined a proposed workflow plan for the aggregated content and the enriched core collection. Vassilis Tzouvaras (in London) and Arne Stabenau (in Warsaw and Barcelona), from NTUA, gave technical demonstrations of the MINT tool, showing content providers how to import datasets and map their metadata schemas in preparation for publication to Europeana and the EUscreen portal.

In addition, in London, Eve-Marie Oesterlen spoke about the BUFVC’s work and showed clips from the Roundabout collection. This consists of 600 films from the Technicolor cinemagazine Roundabout (1962-1974) which are now freely available on the BUFVC website. At the Warsaw workshop Karolina Czerwinska explained how NiNa is taking the lead in the digitisation and publishing of archives documenting Polish audiovisual heritage. In Barcelona, Imma Rull very kindly led the group on a fascinating tour of the TVC3 archive.

A series of focused one to one sessions on the final day of each workshop, gave content providers the opportunity to discuss metadata, content selection, IPR issues, technical matters and workflow with the WP2 team. The results of the workshops will now feed into the meeting in Mykonos in September, when the WP2 team will present the finalised metadata schema and content selection policy as well as the finalised delivery workflow, along with guidelines for support and monitoring for the duration of the project.

Third issue of open access VIEW Journal for European Television History & Culture highlights debates on how television fosters the moving borders of national memories.

Cover image © Special collection Bibliothèque Forney

VIEW, the Journal of European Television History and Culture is the first peer-reviewed, multi-media and open access e-journal in the field of European television history and culture. It offers an international platform for outstanding academic research and archival reflection on television as an important part of our European cultural heritage. The journal is proud to present its third issue: European Television Memories. It has been guest-edited by Jérôme Bourdon & Berber Hagedoorn and is freely available at: http://www.viewjournal.eu

In the context of the fast development of memory studies, the third issue of VIEW highlights debates around the moving borders of national memories, fostered by television in the context of European history. The articles in this issue focus on the contribution of European television researchers, covering all three areas of media studies: production, text and reception. They touch upon a broad range of topics, including:

The issue emphasizes the different ethnographic & historical uses of life-stories from television viewers. It hints at the possible changes to memory formation brought about by television in the post-network digital era. Finally, this issue charts the field of European television memories and suggests ways it can be researched further, both nationally and transnationally.

We wish you a pleasant and inspiring journey through European Television Memories!

Table of Contents

Editorial - Jérôme Bourdon,  Berber Hagedoorn

DISCOVERIES

1. ‘Remembering Our First TV Set’. Personal Memories as a Source for Television Audience History - Cecilia Penati
2. “It’s just so hard to bring it to mind”: The Significance of ‘Wallpaper’ in the Gendering of Television Memory Work - Hazel Collie
3. Martin Luther in Primetime. Television Fiction and Cultural Memory Construction in Cold War Germany - Stewart Anderson
4. The Production of Czechoslovakia´s Most Popular Television Serial ‘The Hospital on the Outskirts’ and its Post-1989 Repeats - Petr Bednařík
5. Parallel Stories, Differentiated Histories. Exploring Fiction and Memory in Spanish and Portuguese Television - José Carlos Rueda Laffond, Carlota Coronado Ruiz, Catarina Duff Burnay, Susana Díaz Pérez, Amparo Guerra Gómez, Rogério Santos
6. Looking for What You Are Looking for: A Media Researcher’s First Search in a Television Archive - Jasmijn Van Gorp

EXPLORATIONS

1. Television as a Hybrid Repertoire of Memory. New Dynamic Practices of Cultural Memory in the Multi-Platform Era - Berber Hagedoorn
2. Why Should We Study Socialist Commercials? - Anikó Imre
3. Window to the West: Memories of Watching Finnish Television in Estonia During the Soviet Period - Annika Lepp, Mervi Pantti
4. The Life and Afterlife of a Socialist Media Friend. On the Longterm Cultural Relevance of the Polish TV Series ‘Czterdziestolatek’ - Kinga S. Bloch
5. Chronology and Ideology. Temporal Structuring in Israeli Historical Documentary Series - Bosmat Garami
6. Great Escapes from the Past. Memory and Identity in European Transnational Television News - Andreas Widholm
7. Memory, Television and the Making of the BBC’s ‘The Story of Wales’ - Steve Blandford, Ruth McElroy

Publishing info

VIEW is published by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision in collaboration with Utrecht University, Maastricht University and Royal Holloway University of London. It is supported by the EUscreenXL project, the European Television History Network and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research.

By Johan Oomen – technical director EUscreen and Europeana Network Officer – @johanoomen

Europeana has become the unifying entity that brings together collections from all domains: libraries, archives, audiovisual collections (both television and film) and museums. Alarmingly, Europeana’s future is under threat. In the next few weeks, Member States are expected to decide the EU’s budget for 2014-2020. The way the budget of the EU’s Connecting Europe Facility is allocated will determine how Europe’s rich heritage can be enjoyed, studied and repurposed. With this post, EUscreen would like to extend its full support to Europeana’s #AllezCulture campaign to secure EU funding after 2015.

The innovative hadron collider for the Cultural Sector

Europeana has evolved from a temporary project to a full network organisation. To date, it has successfully standardised and connected data from over 2,200 organisations, which cover all European countries and 29 European languages. An important, unifying asset for Europeana is that it serves as the innovative ‘hadron collider ‘ for Europe’s cultural sector. It does so by leading the movement towards open access, by harnessing the power of participatory culture and by implementing emerging IT standards in working systems. With a critical mass of content available online, the exploration of new applications by the creative industries are now taking shape. By making collections available online, interest is raised in both the public and commercial sectors. EUscreen for instance has already seen an increase of footage sale requests from the content that is made available through the portal.

EUscreen and Europeana: part of the same ecosystem

Without support from the European Union, EUscreen would not exist today. EUscreen and its sister projects such as the European Film Gateway have been granted financial support within a wider EU policy on providing unified access to Europe’s audiovisial heritage. Today, Europeana provides access to over 181.000 audiovisual items, a number to grow exponentially over the next years.

EUscreen and Europeana are connected in many ways; they are part of the same ecosystem. Not only in terms of technical standards to make unified access possible. The vision is, and has to be, much more ambitious than that. In an online context where sharing is the norm, it becomes almost a necessity for memory organisations to make their collections available online in order to retain and support community interest. Collections and their users now share the same information space. As a result, organisations rapidly need to adapt to maintain their relevance in this changing environment. We already see how, in the current economic climate, public libraries and public broadcasters are put under pressure to continuously demonstrate their added value, also in terms of their direct economic impact. This can be difficult to measure, also given the changing context in which these organisations find themselves in. Memory institutions need to receive the necessary support to forge their future missions and services, collaboratively. The Europeana Network will play a key role here, as it has broad support across memory organisations, has deep understanding of various stakeholders and also the critical mass to make necessary policy recommendations heard.

EUscreen’s support for #AllezCulture

Over the years, EUscreen has become the leading network of television collection holders with a united vision to share the wealth of their collections to a wide and diverse audience. With support from EBU, FIAT-IFTA, PrestoCentre, IASA and other key stakeholders, EUscreen is making this vision a reality each day. Currently, 29 archives from 25 countries are connected to EUscreen. EUscreen provides free and non-commercial access to Europe’s history as captured in moving images. This collection will continue to grow, and so will the services offered through the EUscreen portal. For instance, by further supporting multilingual access through subtitles, or expanding the material on the open access portal. This summer, the EUscreen Foundation will be established, providing the legal framework that will govern the EUscreen network as it expands well into the future.

Again, EUscreen and Europeana are part of the same ecosystem, aiming to:

• Make Europe’s culture available for everyone. Through search interfaces, but also online exhibits, crowdsourcing campaigns and so on;
• Support economic growth, by supporting re-use of content by the creative industries;
• Connect Europe’s citizens. To understand the past and to appreciate cross-cultural differences and commonalities.

#AllezCulture!

Europe has collectively invested over 1.2 billion euros in digitisation. Europeana is the only platform that brings this data together and offers it for unlimited use. We have just begun to unlock its potential. We, therefore, urge the EU to allocate sufficient funds in the ‘Connecting Europe Facility’ to allow the Europeana Ecosystem to further expand and live up to its ambitions vision.

We encourage all audiovisual archives to express their support. Capture the attention and imagination of the people who influence decisions on CEF funding – raise your voice and share the successes and value that you have helped create via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and any other channels you can think of.

Please visit the #AllezCulture! Campaign page and see how you can help.

More information

• Download the Factsheet detailing how Europeana will work under the Connecting Europe Facility
• Download the Allez Culture leaflet
• On this Facebook group you’ll find information and materials that you can use to support our shared cause.
• Header image remixed from the National Media Museum’s EMI CPS Emitron Camera Head, 1950 on Flickr Commons.

EUscreen’s Virtual Exhibitions entered the second round of one of the most prestigous competitions in the audio-visual archiving domain: FIAT/IFTA’s Archive Achievement Award 2013. It presents the most exciting audiovisual projects of the year and invites you to choose your favourite and vote for it.

The EUscreen Virtual Exhibitions have been shortlisted in the category Most Innovative Use of Archive. We’re most happy to say that we compete wagainst two projects that are close to us: EUscreen partners RTÉ Archives & Sound and Vision have been nominated with respectively The School Around The Corner and The Sound of the Netherlands.

Exhibiting EUscreen

To help users get the most from the EUscreen material, researchers, experts and members of its partner broadcasters and audiovisual archives have created a series of online exhibitions. They cover historical events, political debates and everyday life in Europe. Designing the VE tools has included various activities. Virtual Exhibition builder prototypes have been developed and tested incrementally in order to reflect the needs of the different users and to improve the ease of use.

The tools designed for these exhibitions allow for the insertion of multimedia materials from all the project’s content providers. The clips link back to the original items on the site, where users can find out more about them, share the links or get in touch with the providers themselves. 23 exhibitions with multiple strands have been produced in 2012. In the new EUscreenXL project, we’ll be working on pilots to get the tools ready for everyone to start creating their own exhibitions.

Archive achievements

The worldwide organisation FIAT/IFTA has been handing out Archive Achievement awards since 1994. A professional jury decides on the winners, but in certain categories voting is open for the wider audience. The votes from all over the world are collected by August 12th, 2013 and a winner will be announced on October 26th at the Archive Achievement Awards Ceremony during the 2013 FIAT/IFTA World Conference in Dubai. Enough time. we’d say to take a look at the various inspiring archival projects and to give your vote to the project you like best.

More information:

• Find the full list of award winners at the FIAT/IFTA Archive Achievement Awards webpage

• Take a look at our virtual exhibitions and tell us which ones you like best

• Find out how the exhibitions were set up and developed through this presentation.

“Meet someone you don’t know – with problems you do know”

Key Topics of the conference include:

• Sector-based responses to the changing technological nature of media assets in our collections and archives
• Sector-based trends in preservation technology
• Institutional responses to how collection and preservation mandates are realised and stretched by the digital
• Media preservation as a sound investment; new methodologies for valuing our media assets
• The psychology of preservation; our motivations and dynamics in practice
• Maintaining a vision in a culture of operational alliances and partnerships
• Acknowledging and advocating for difference; understanding the impact of sector-based and institutional distinction on preservation strategies and solutions

Featured Speakers include:

• Matthew Addis (Arkivum Ltd.)
• Sam Gustman (USC Digital Repository and Shoah Foundation)
• Rob Hummel (Group 47, LLC.)
• Michael Moon (GISTICS Inc.)
• Kara van Malssen (AudioVisual Preservation Solutions)
• Mark Schubin (SMPTE Fellow)
• John Zubrzycki – conference chair (British Broadcasting Corporation)

The Early Bird Registration for the Screening the Future 2013 Conference has been extended until April 15. Don’t miss your last chance to benefit from this discount and register now at http://2013.screeningthefuture.com. For more information about the conference and registration please visit: http://2013.screeningthefuture.com