The Museums and the Web conference is taking place this week – starting tomorrow, April 11th and continuing until the 14th. The conference constitutes a buzzing intersection between museum curators, analysts, strategists and interested folk willing to bring musems (and related instituations such as libraries and archives – the so-called GLAM-community) fully into the digital world. To do so, nascent trends have to be followed up on and discussed, but more importantly, recent and real-world initiatives are reviewed and discussed in a wide array of talks, workshop and debating sessions. Members of the community vote for the People’s Choice award in the annual Best of the Web series, which EUscreen’s predecessor Video Active proudly took home in 2009.

EUscreen is present in a variety of sessions this year, to reflect on television heritage and its place online, on the intersection between webvideo, exhibition content, popular culture and open access. Johan Oomen, technical director of the project, will give a demonstration of the available tools, benefiets and realisations of the project. Furthermore, the special session Linking Europe’s Television Heritage will discuss EUscreen’s Linked Open Data pilot - a topic that is also reflected on in the session Sharing cultural heritage the linked open data way – everyone’s invited.

Last, but not least, EUscreen is one of the contenders for the Best of the Web Awards, so although competition is fierce and there are strong, innovative contenders out there, we do hope to win the hearts and minds of the museum world this year.

Keep your eyes open for the #museweb and conference-specific #mw2012 Twitter conversations or dive in the conference presentations over at: http://museumsandtheweb.org

Links

• Conference paper Linking Europe’s Television Heritage: http://www.museumsandtheweb.com/mw2012/papers/linking_europe_s_television_heritage
• For an overview of events and conferences where EUscreen is discussed or presented on: http://blog.euscreen.eu/?page_id=2728
• Read back on last year’s Museums and the Web twitter conversations to get a better idea of the topics and research here

The piece written by Erwin Verbruggen and Evelien Wolda offers an insight into the Sound and Vision collections and can be viewed here: http://cstonline.tv/sound-and-vision. The article also documents the Institute’s involvement in various digitisation and conservations projects including Images for the Future and showcases fascinating samples of the material contributed to EUscreen including episodes from the Willem Ruis Lotto show and Pippo the Clown.

For the upcoming conference of  FIAT/IFTA (the worldwide organisation that brings broadcasters and television archives together) , the organisation asks itself the question: are our archives Faster, Bigger, Stronger than ever?

FIAT/IFTA examines the archive management of massive events worldwide that thrill and impact on so many people worldwide. How are we “Tagging and Archiving world events” be they international sporting events, all consuming catastrophes or political upheavals? After the Olympics – what do we do with all that content? How was it managed during the Olympics? What are the challenges of digitization and management of large audiovisual collections and new content?

In the year and on the exact location of this year’s Olympic Games, TV archivists will gather from all corners from the world from September 28 – October 2nd.  FIAT/IFTA just issued its call for papers and invites:

• PRESENTATIONS, either in the form of a panel discussion on the indicated theme or a paper in a specified topic.
• WORKSHOPS of approxinately 1 hour duration; must involve a strong element of interaction with the audience.
• POSTER SESSIONS that provide a space where members and conference participants can present their work, activities and projects.

Head over to the FIAT/IFTA website or go straight to the call for papers for more information about how, why and what to submit: http://www.fiatifta.org/wp-content/uploads/CALLFORPAPERS2012.pdf

In honour of its 80th birthday celebration, Australian national public broadcaster ABC has decided to roll out some celebratory footage, was announced by the Wikimedia Foundation this weekend. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation

has launched a new website called “80 Days That Changed Our Lives“, giving 80 pieces of audio visual content from the ABC archives a new lease on life. Today, the ABC has also announced that it has gone a step further by releasing some of these historical news reports to Wikimedia under a Creative Commons free license.

ABC, with the support and encouragement of CC Australia and the ARC Centre of Excellence in Creative Industries and Innovation (CCi), releases some of its landmark historical audiovisual footage to Wikimedia under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Australia licence. This release of highly encyclopedic audiovisual history is not only a first for Australia, it is a first for Wikimedia.

This is the first time a public broadcaster uses Wikimedia to release a package of broadcast materials for free use, however there have been other examples – see our list of 90+ Open Video Web Sources You Might Have Missed, which features Al Jazeera and Open Images.

1940s Mobile studio caravan, provided by the ABC

To see what kind of material was released, you can go to Wikimedia at this instant:

You can view the collection of files on Wikimedia Commons, which all available to use, remix and share, at Category: Files from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Some of the important pieces of Australian history that now have freely licensed multimedia for the first time include:

• The “Tampa affair” (2001)
• The “Waterfront dispute” (1998)
• The release of Lindy Chaimberlain from prison (1986)
• The floating of the currency (1983)
• The introduction of World Series Cricket (1977)
• Intriguingly, an interview with Arthur C. Clarke predicting the Internet in 1974.
• and, the first ever broadcast from ABC Television (1956).

You can check where these files are already being used within Wikipedia articles on the toolserver project. You can also read the press release by the ABC about this project and also the blogpost by Creative Commons Australia (which is hosted by CCi).

We think this is an exciting move, congratulate ABC on it’s birthday and will dive straight in this new resource of historical television material!

Links

• Read the original blog post here: http://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/03/25/abc-joins-wikimedia-in-sharing-historic-footage/
• Read the full news item at CC Australia: http://creativecommons.org.au/weblog/entry/3465

Linked Open Data is gaining traction in the information world – but remains a concept difficult to comprehend for non-technical users.  Europeana recently launched an animation to explain what it is and why it’s a good thing, both for users and for data providers.

At EUscreen, we’re avid supporters of this open way of semantically connecting the web:

• check out our demo page, where you can  Sound and Vision developer Jaap Blom’s timeline visualisation of the EUscreen dataset
• scroll through our expanded list of relevant sources on Open Cultural Data
• expand your technical grasp of how Linked Open Data is implemented on our LOD page

Europeana and Linked Open Data

Europeana facilitates developments in Linked Open Data by publishing data for 2.4 million objects for the first time under an open metadata licence - CC0, the Creative Commons’ Public Domain Dedication. The concept of Linked Open Data is attracting Europe’s major national libraries: the Bibliothèque nationale de France recently launched its rich linked data resource, while the national libraries of the UK, Germany and Spain, among many other cultural institutions, have been publishing their metadata under an open licence.

Support for Open Data innovation is at the root of Europeana’s new Data Exchange Agreement, the contract that libraries, museums, and archives agree to when their metadata goes into Europeana. The Data Exchange Agreement has been signed by all the national libraries, by leading national museums such as the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and by many of the content providers for entire countries, such as Sweden’s National Heritage Board. The new Data Exchange Agreement dedicates the metadata to the Public Domain and comes into effect on 1 July 2012, after which all metadata in Europeana will be available as Open Data.

Europeana is making data openly available to the public and private sectors alike so they can use it to develop of innovative applications for smartphones and tablets and to create new web services and portals. This support for commercial enterprise in the digital sector is central to Europeana’s business strategy. Metadata that is openly available is re-usable by anyone. Linked to external data sources, such as GeoNames, it’s enriched and can also be re-used by its providers as the basis of improved services to users.

 Links

Today, the EUscreen project releases the first peer-reviewed, multi-media and open access e-journal in the field of European television history and culture. The aim of this e-journal is to provide an international platform for outstanding research and reflection on television as an important part of our European cultural heritage.

The Journal of European Television History and Culture builds on recent digitisation initiatives in European archives and audiovisual libraries and addresses the need for critical study of the cultural, social and political role of television in Europe’s past and presence with the help of television material that has now become available at a large scale.

The first issue of the journal is a prototype, created in the open access publishing platform Open Journal Systems. The second version, due to appear in September 2012, will add important technical functionalities that will turn it into a true multimedia platform for online storytelling.

The Journal of European Television History and Culture has the ambition to speak to both the academic and the professional community but will address a larger audience interested in television as a cultural phenomenon, says Sonja de Leeuw, EUscreen’s project coordinator and editor-in-chief of the journal.

Broadcast historians, media studies scholars, audiovisual archivists, television professionals as well as the large group of enthusiastic fans of “old” television will have the opportunity to dive into the history and presence of European television by means of multi-media texts.

The journal is the result of a cooperation between the EUscreen platform and researchers from the European Television History Network (ETHN), which was launched in 2004 to promote a transnational perspective on the history and culture of television in Europe. It is published by the Utrecht University Library (Igitur publishing) in collaboration with Utrecht University, Maastricht University and Royal Holloway College / University of London and will be continued with funding from the Dutch National Research Board.

Visit http://journal.euscreen.eu to dive into Vol 1, No 1 (2012): Making Sense of Digital Sources

Links

• Press release by EUscreen
• Press release by Maastricht University
• Press release by RHUL / University of London
• Press release by Utrecht University

Europeana sends out a monthly newsletter, with a hand-picked, curated overview of what’s new on the portal. This month, the newest addition on the site is EUscreen – the content of which has been made available on Europeana thanks to the hard work of our consortium partners and the Europeana upload team.

Read all about it in their newsletter:

Conference: Screening the Future 2012

May 21-23, 2012, Los Angeles

Inspired by the success and enthusiasm of the Screening the Future conference in 2011, PrestoCentre presents Screening the Future 2012: Play, Pause and Press Forward. This year’s conference is organized by the PrestoCentre Foundation in collaboration with the University of Southern California, Shoah Foundation Institute and Digital Repository.

Screening the Future serves the global community of stakeholders who keep audiovisual content alive. This annual international conference brings together archivists, small and large archives, production companies, film makers, TV producers, service providers, vendors, funders, policymakers, and educators who are developing solutions to answer the most urgent questions facing audiovisual archives. With Play, Pause and Press Forward as the theme of this year’s conference, we explore the current status of audiovisual archives; the main challenges that archives and producers face in terms of IT, institutional position, and changes in use and market; and their future readiness.

Conference Themes

• For the record: Should we talk about data or media?
• Meeting the demand: How can we match users’ expectations with institutional capabilities?
• “I am big, it’s the pictures that got small!”: What we can learn from each other

Master Classes

• Archiving in production – the position of archives in the rapidly changing AV production climate.
• Managing the cost of archiving – budgeting, forever cost and endowment pricing.
• Infrastructure, repositories and services – the options and limits of archival systems in a variety of institutions.
• Archiving future data – the attributes and requirements of future generated AV data.
• Trusting the future archive – trusted auditing and certification of audiovisual archives and repositories.

Timing, Venue and Conference Rate

The conference takes place from May 21-23, 2012 at the University of Southern California Ronald Tutor Campus Center, Los Angeles, USA. Discounted conference rate is available for PrestoCentre members.

For more information about the conference, registration and member discount visit http://2012.screeningthefuture.com or send an email to events@prestocentre.org