Television Archives Join Linked Open Data Movement

The EUscreen project has recently taken steps to expand the scope of its aim to provide unified access to large integrated digital collections related to European television history. By implementing the Linked Open Data principles and by signing the new Europeana Data Exchange Agreement, the materials that are made accessible through the platform have become more widely searchable, findable, linkable, and thus more connected to the world wide web, its users… and the machines that link them together. Information about EUscreen’s Linked Open Data Pilot can be found at http://lod.euscreen.eu

1. EUscreen opens up to Linked Open Data

On the EUscreen platform, 27 partners (broadcasters, archives and universities) select, curate and provide television materials from their rich vaults that together hold a great part of European audiovisual history. By mapping the schemata that underpin their content descriptions to the EUscreen metadata model, content providers ensure greater visibility and findability of their content in the public realm.
Much work has been done on uniformly processing the different metadata models to one central EBU Core-based model. This model ensures a level of uniformity that surpasses the scattered databases that the different institutions work with. The integrated collections are published on the EUscreen portal and from there on aggregated by Europeana.

With this centralised model in place, it was a relatively straightforward step to implement the Linked Open Data principles, which permit the interpretation and interlinking of the data to various sources outside of the EUscreen domain, and allow for a machine-readable level of access to the content. EBU Core provides mappings to all known audiovisual metadata standards, including the W3C’s Media Annotation ontology. The EBU Core ontology was used to formalise the metadata in the Resource Description Framework (RDF) format and publish them as Linked Open Data.

Johan Oomen, technical director of EUscreen, and Vassilis Tzouvaras, leader of the work package on portal architecture, wrote a paper on the installation of the Linked Open data model: Publishing Europe’s Television Heritage on the Web (PDF). In it, the authors describe how this fits in within the larger technical challenge of creating the different components that make up the EUscreen ingestion workflow. The paper describes the reasoning behind the workflow, the set-up and overview of the process and how these technical developments improve access to our shared television histories to students, teachers and the general audience. You can leave your comments at the end of this article contact us by e-mail for feedback. The authors would like to acknowledge EUscreen consortium partner EBU, specifically mr. Jean-Pierre Evain, for their work in the area of multimedia semantics and Linked Open Data, as their EBU Core Metadata Set has been used to ensure semantic interoperability within EUscreen and beyond.
The Linked Open Data implementation will be presented by Nikolaos Simou (Technical University of Athens, GR) on Thursday, September 29th at the International Workshop on Semantic Digital Archives, which is held in the framework of the International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries in Berlin.

Publishing Europe's Television History on the Web from EUscreen

More information about EUscreen’s Linked Open Data Pilot can be found at: http://lod.euscreen.eu

2. EUscreen signs Europeana’s new Data Exchange Agreement

A second, and related, development is EUscreen’s recent signing of Europeana’s new Data Exchange Agreement, which ensures access and enlarged user involvement with the materials published on the platform. The agreement replaces the current Data Provider and Data Aggregator Agreements and governs what Europeana may or may not do with the data of the different aggregators through its web activities.

The Agreement will come into force on January 1, 2012, but EUscreen is proud to be at the forefront and one of the early adopters in this bold step forward for opening European cultural heritage to wide audiences.

From the Europeana office: The Europeana Data Exchange Agreement is the result of a year-long process of consultations with the whole network of content providers and aggregators contributing to Europeana. The results of these consultations and other documentation can be found on the Europeana Towards a New Agreement pages.

The major revision in this new agreement, is that the metadata provided by the Europeana aggregators will now be released under a Creative Commons Universal Public Domain Dedication. This is in line with the recommendations of the New Renaissance Report of the European Commission’s “Comité des Sages” and the promises of the Europeana Strategic Plan 2011-2015. It will revolutionize the sharing and linking of cultural information and place its producing institutions at the heart of discovery on the internet.

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Conference Report: Competences in Culture

The Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage held an expert conference on behalf of the Polish EU Presidency on 19 and 20 July 2011 in Warsaw. EUscreen was represented by its co-ordinator, professor Sonja de Leeuw.

Competences in Culture, Polish EU Presidency, Warsaw 2011

Conference Report by Sonja de Leeuw

The conference was titled COMPETENCES IN CULTURE and covered three main themes:
  1. Creative potential of digital archives (Audiovisual)
  2. Management of copyright and related rights in the digital environment (IPR)
  3. Cultural competences – the role of culture and creativity in the building of the intellectual capital of Europe (Culture).
The audiovisual theme of the conference was inscribed in the Digital Agenda for Europe and consisted of three panels, each addressing topical subjects:
  1. The future of digital content
  2. Education through the archives
  3. The wide distribution of digitized archive materials (VOD, Cinema, etc.).
In general the audiovisual panels allowed for exchanging best practices of digital archiving, new emerging business models, as well as building workflows for digital preservation of film and audiovisual archives and mapping out new approaches to valorization of archives that include collaboration with education and research centers, publishers, documentary film makers, and the users.
Photograph by Danuta Matloch
Sonja de Leeuw presented on EUscreen in the panel on The future of digital archives. This panel very much addressed issues of digitisation of the audiovisual and film content and the creative potential of digitized materials, taking into account a user’s perspective. The future of the European digital library was a central issue as well as the developments of partner projects such as the European Film Gateway and EUscreen.In her presentation she anticipated future uses of audiovisual material, television heritage in particular. To that extent she emphasized two features: Linking and Context. Linking relates to Metadata and Content, but is also related to uses in the sense that television online heritage links the present’s past to the user’s present. Explained was the level of interoperability as well as that of user interactivity with the help of the common metadata schema, integration into Europeana and the use case scenarios. Context relates to how EUscreen provides different access routes to the content, notably with the EUscreen platform, with virtual exhibitions on the EUscreen platform and with the establishment of a multimedia e-journal on the EUscreen platform as well.
This one and a half day conference indeed provided a great opportunity to meet colleagues in related fields and to discuss topical problem and solutions. It fitted well into the scope of the Polish Ministry covering Culture and National Heritage equally. It stressed the importance of culture for the social and economic well being of citizens and the need for developing specific competences to take up the challenges offered by the digital cultural landscape.
Photograph by Danuta Matloch

Links

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Conference update: Final programme announced

The Second EUscreen International Conference on Use and Creativity takes place at the National Library of Sweden, Stockholm, on September 15-16, 2011.
Attendance is free, but registration is required at http://euscreen2011.eventbrite.com.

Conference programme final
 After a first successful conference on the contextualisation of audiovisual material in October 2010, the network now organizes a second conference on use and creativity in the audio-visual domain.

After a few updates on speakers, which could be followed on the EUscreen blog pages at http://blog.euscreen.eu, the programme is now in its final stage and participants are encouraged to make their registrations and travel arrangements.

Highlights from the programme
The first day of the conference will present its participants with a varied mix of keynote lectures and case studies by renowned experts in the field. Lynn Spigel from Northwestern University will be speaking about analogue nostalgia, Dagan Cohen will talk about how the Upload Cinema initiative brings curated online video to the big screen and Paul Ashton will talk about the possibilities for online audio-visual media to push education forward and create a teaching platform for professionals.

Aubéry Escande from Europeana/The European Library, Kajsa Hedström from the Swedish Film Institute, Johan Axhamn from Stockholm University and Peter B. Kaufman from Intelligent Television will present different case studies. These contain means for encouraging user engagement on the Europeana portal, for providing online access to film collections through the Swedish filmarkivet website and for devising licensing solutions to the online dissemination of Europe’s cultural heritage.

Jérôme Bourdon will close the first day with a presentation of his research into global media and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in his talk, which is titled “A case of cosmopolitan memory?”

The second day will consist of two workshop sessions. In the morning the topic of a user community will be tackled, focusing on how EUscreen services can be exploited in learning, research, leisure/cultural heritage and creative reuse.
Dana Mustata from Utrecht University will start the discussion with her talk on “Doing Television History outside the Box”, after which Pere Arcas from Televisió de Catalunya, Roland Sejko from Cinecittá Luce and Andreas Fickers from Maastricht University will present case studies in the learning, cultural heritage and research domains respectively.

The afternoon session will focus on funding opportunities and sustainable business models for the digitisation of audiovisual material.
Luca Martinelli from the European Commission will present an overview of funding opportunities at EU level. Marius Snyders from PrestoCentre, Catherine Grout from JISC and Martin Bouda from the Czech TV archive will present complementary case studies on this topic.

Updates & Registration

Please go to http://euscreen2011.eventbrite.com for programme updates and make sure to register in time for this event.

Downloads

Download the full conference programme here!

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Film archives showcase their collections: The European Film Gateway is online

In her report on the 24th International conference on History and Media in Copenhagen, Sian Barber mentioned the European Film Gateway which, in the meantime, has gone live and is now accessible at: http://www.europeanfilmgateway.eu

- Press release -

After nearly three years of preparation and development, the European Film Gateway – EFG –  is now online. The Internet portal to the digital collections of European film archives and cinémathèques offers free access to currently about 400,000 digital videos, photos, film posters and text materials. By September, the number of digital items will increase to 600,000 from 16 film archives.

“The European Film Gateway creates a central online access to Europe’s film heritage for the first time. Previously, this remarkable record of 20th century European cinema had been dispersed on different national platforms,” says Claudia Dillmann, director of the Deutsches Filminstitut, which co-ordinates the project. “Now the films and information about them are more accessible, not only to scholars, journalists and creatives, but also by a broader audience interested in film.”

“EFG also provides access to material in film archives that was hitherto hardly known, and some is now online for the first time,” says project manager Georg Eckes. These include unique magic lantern slide collections from France, erotic films made in Austria in the early 20th century, advertising films from Norway, newsreels from Lithuania and a comprehensive film poster collection from Denmark. Hidden treasures can be discovered from 15 European countries. Cinecittá Luce from Rome, for example, contributes not only a famous Italian newsreel collection reporting on important film-related events and persons, but also a fine collection of early films by great masters like Rossellini, Antonioni, Comencini, and other famous names of Italian filmmaking. An extensive collection of set photos to films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder contributed by the Deutsches Filminstitut will be available for the first time online from August on.

Users of the portal can search for people, for example Marlene Dietrich, but also by film title or keywords. They get an overview of related digital objects from the film archives which can be viewed directly in the portal. The portal always links back to the website of the relevant archives, and therefore also works as a search engine for selected digital holdings of European film archives.


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IAMHIST 2011 Conference Report

The 24th International conference on History and Media took place this year in Copenhagen on 6th-9th July. EUscreen was represented by Dr. Sian Barber from Royal Holloway and Berber Hagedoorn from Utrecht University, both of whom delivered papers in the same panel at the conference. The theme of the conference was Media History and Cultural Memory and some of the papers given over the course of this four day event were particularly relevant to EUscreen.

IAMHIST report by Dr. Sian Barber & Berber Hagedoorn, MA.

The roundtable discussion which began the conference included representatives from the Imperial War Museum in London, the Holocaust Museum in Washington and the Danish Film Institute. Thomas Christensen from the Danish Film Institute discussed their current programme of digitisation and how their data is to be aggregated with Europeana. He highlighted the challenges of digitisation and the impact such processes have upon the original collections, for example the tensions between the contextualisation of content and the need for preservation. He also referred in passing to projects including EUscreen and the European Film Gateway as conducting similar kind of work.

Raye Farr from theHolocaust museum in Washington spoke about the way in which visitors engage with the museum collections and suggested the complexities for both live museums and online museum environments in meeting visitor and user needs. This is particularly relevant to the development of the Comparative Virtual Exhibitions within EUscreen, which will offer a unique user experience but will need to offer a coherent and simple narrative while at the same time addressing the diversity of material involved. She suggested that the role of museums is to preserve memory but wondered to what extent that could happen online and how the contested issues and boundaries of memory could be adequately addressed.

One of the most interesting papers was the presentation given about the Danish LARM Audio Research Archive. Bente Larsen from the University of Copenhagen is the project manger for this ambitious project which aims to place 1 million hours of Danish radio material online, covering 114 years of audio recording. This newly created digital archive faces many of the same issues as EUscreen - including issues of copyright, streaming and of providing access to cultural heritage. LARM aims to create a user-focused infrastructure which will benefit students and researchers and provide access to this material, but as yet it can only be accessed by users from within Denmark.

In the same panel, Heidi Svømmekjær (Roskilde University) was also discussing radio and in particular the problems and possibilities for re-entering the absent ‘object’ in the (digital) archive. Her case study was The Hansen Family, a programme that was broadcast from 1929 to 1949, of which 2-3 episodes out of 900 episodes remain. Svømmekjær notably drew upon the work of Antoinette M. Burton, Archive stories: facts, fictions, and the writing of history to address the methodological challenges of dealing with missing radio recordings and how the missing object could be reinstalled within the archive when only the basic metadata remains.

The history project based on the British broadcasting trade union BECTU was the focus of the paper given by Andrew Dawson (University of Greenwich). This paper focused on some important questions about conducting historical projects and the importance of oral history. Dawson highlighted the importance of drawing on a range of material to explore the work of the film industry, rather than simply focusing on the recollections of a number of important individuals. He suggested that listening to authoritative and dominant voices can obscure the more detailed history which can emerge from a wider sample. Dawson also wondered about European broadcasters and if different organisations were conducting similar projects about their own film and television industries which draw on oral history.

From EUscreen partner Utrecht University, Berber Hagedoorn presented on Dutch Multi-Platform Television as a Practice of History and Memory. By means of a case analysis of two Dutch cross-media projects, the documentary series In Europa (In Europe) and the youth documentary series 13 in de Oorlog (13 in the War), Hagedoorn discussed the integration and adaptation of television’s past and audiovisual archive materials in a new context of television itself. This challenges the dominant conception that television is a disposable practice incapable of memory. Hagedoorn’s research deals with archival materials from the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision.

Sian Barber, (Royal Holloway, University of London) presented on the methodological challenges posed by the EUscreen project. In a paper entitled Whose Archive, Whose History? Barber suggested that any online visual material needs to be adequately contextualized in order to give the most detailed understanding possible to end users. Barber emphasized the need for a ‘digital historiography’ to help users, in particular students, develop skills in ‘reading’ online material as historical sources. Portals such as EUscreen offer a great deal of material to the users but unless they interrogate the material carefully and fully understand what kind of material it is, then it will be of limited use to them. Barber outlined what the EUscreen project was doing to contextualise material on the portal and how this was achieved through the content selection strategy, virtual exhibitions and detailed metadata.

This four day event was a great opportunity to disseminate information about the EUscreen project and to hear about other projects which have interesting convergences with our own work.


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Conference update: Two more speakers confirmed

For the Second EUscreen International Conference on Use and Creativity, two more names were confirmed for our speakers list. We’re happy to announce to you that Paul Ashton of the Times Educational Supplement and Catherine Grout from JISC confirmed their participation in the conference.

Paul Ashton has been working at the Times Educational Supplement. He worked as an education officer at the BBC, after which he became the commissioning editor for Teachers TV, a government funded TV and online video service that operated until April 2011. After its closure, the Department of Education signed multiple non-exclusive distribution agreements to ensure that the 3,500 programmes in the archive would still be available to watch on-line. The service enabled teachers to widen their skills, develop their practice, and connect with others in the field by supplying professional development videos and resources. All 15-minute programmes are now freely available at the Times Educational Supplement website.

Catherine Grout works as Programme Director at JISC, where she is responsible for directing programmes and projects in the e-content area, where her activities are to stimulate communication and activity with commercial publishers and e-content providers. She manages the work of the JISC e-content team who work to deliver an e-content strategy for the JISC Community, which includes working closely with JISC Collections and other JISC Services and partners both within and outside the UK.

We’re proud of their recent confirmation to speak at the conference.
Make sure you don’t miss out on their presentations by registering at:http://euscreen2011.eventbrite.com/

The updated speakers list is now:
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First names confirmed for the Second EUscreen International Conference on Use and Creativity

EUscreen will be holding its Second International Conference on Use and Creativity from 15-16 September 2011. Host of the conference will be the National Library of Sweden, which is located in the Humlegården park in Stockholm.

Attendance is free but on-line registration is required at the following address:

http://euscreen2011.eventbrite.com


Conference programme:

At the international conference, EUscreen will discuss the online potential of European television heritage. The conference will explore creative approaches to enhance online accessibility of European television heritage. The goal is to expand methods to reach a wide range of users and to increase their engagement with online heritage materials. The conference programme consists of a plenary session with keynotes and case studies by renowned experts in the field.

On the second day of the programme, attendees will take part in two workshops. The first workshop is about EUscreen’s user community and how EUscreen services can be exploited with the objectives of learning, research, leisure/cultural heritage and creative reuse in mind. The second workshop will be on exploring funding opportunities and devising sustainable business models for the digitisation of audio-visual material.

Confirmed speakers:

Please go to http://euscreen2011.eventbrite.com for programme updates and make sure to register in time for this event!

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Workshop: Public Service Broadcasting in Europe in the Digital Age

Announcement by the Centre for European Governance, University of Exeter

Date: Friday, 1st July 2011
Location: Conference Room 2, Xfi building, University of Exeter

The workshop investigates convergence in the regulation of public service broadcasting in Europe in a comparative context. The focus is the European Commission’s role in policy transfer in particular given that Member States have to clarify the subsidy of public service broadcasting (psb) under state aid rules. We shall be looking at general definitions of public service broadcasting, examining the European Commission’s interpretation of these (and whether the UK model is being drawn upon as a benchmark), and implementation in the different national contexts.

Programme highlights

  • Public Service Broadcasting – theory, general principles and remit
    David Elstein, Broadcasting Policy
  • EU state aid rules: was the BBC public value test an inspiration?
    Anna Herold, European Commission, DG Information Society
  • Reforming public service broadcasting within the EU context: a comparison of the UK and France
    David Levy, University of Oxford, Reuters Institute
  • Germany: the ‘Drei Stufen Test’ and its consequences.
    Roberto Su E1rez Candel, Hans Bredow Institut Medienforschung
  • Public service broadcasting reform in Italy
    Chris Hanretty, University of East Anglia
    Marco Orofini, University of Milan
  • Soft governance promoting policy coordination: the case of psb
    Maria Michalis, University of Westminster

For more information and registration, please contact Dr. Alison Harcourt, http://socialsciences.exeter.ac.uk/politics/staff/harcourt/

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