By the European Film Gateway (EFG)

In order to bring archival materials held in film archives online and giving access to them, rights clearing is a central topic in the framework of the EFG project. EYE Film Institute, one of EFG’s project partners, has established a report on Guidelines for Copyright Clearance and IPR Management. This report can be downloaded now from the EFG website.

The report includes:

• an overview of legal frameworks in EU countries for the film sector
• guidelines how to successfully clear rights related to film works
• copyright basics (moral rights vs. exploitation rights, orphan works etc)
• diligent search guidelines for rights holders

More information can be found here.

By Christopher Natzen

On February 10 the new web site Filmarkivet was launched by the National Library of Sweden and the Swedish Film Institute. On the site you have the opportunity to see unique archival moving image material that otherwise is rarely accessed. The web site contains mainly shorts, non-fiction films, news-reels and commercials: films that reflect the transformation of Swedish society over the last century. Some 300 films are now available, a figure that will be doubled before the end of 2011.

Press release from Europeana

Work begins this week to add over 5 million digital objects, ranging from Spanish civil war photographs to handwritten letters from philosopher Immanuel Kant, to Europeana from 19 of Europe’s leading research and university libraries.

The project is called Europeana Libraries and it will put many of these treasures online for the first time. It will also add extensive collections from Google Books, theses, dissertations and open-access journal articles to the 15 million items amassed in Europeana to date. Providers include some of Europe’s most prestigious universities and research institutes, including the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, Trinity College Dublin and Lund University.

The assembled objects span centuries of European history. Manuscripts from Serbia date back as far as 1206 and relate to the Ottoman Empire’s European territories. Written in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish and Persian, they are being digitised by the University Library of Belgrade. There will also be significant film additions. Footage of talks from 10 Nobel prize winners will be contributed by the University of Vienna and the Wellcome Trust Library in London will add 900 clips from medical science films produced over the past 100 years.

Europeana Libraries is notable not only for the content it will make available online but also because this project brings together national, research and university libraries under one umbrella, to make their materials available via Europeana.

The Europeana Libraries initiative is supported by key international library associations: the Conference of European National Librarians (CENL), the Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL) and the Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche (LIBER).

Louise Edwards, General Manager of The European Library and project coordinator said: “This project will offer wonderful new resources for Europe’s humanities and social science researchers. Unique source materials that were known only to small numbers of scholars will now become widely accessible, promoting new understanding and cross-border study.”

Paul Ayris, President of LIBER, said: “Europeana Libraries will create a service that aggregates the digitised content from research and university libraries. By the end of the project, in two years time, we will have created a robust, automated delivery system which any library can use to deliver its digitised content to Europeana, The European Library, and other services for researchers.”

Marian Lefferts, Executive Manager of CERL, welcomed the start of Europeana Libraries, saying: “It signals a commitment by the different parts of the library sector to work together to deliver the greatest possible benefit to users. We will be able to extend our reach to international research audiences with new content and innovative services, and in doing so, help to develop the European knowledge base.”

Press release from Utrecht University

Date: February 4
Place: Utrecht

The dissertation “The Power of Television: Including the Historicizing of the Live Romanian Revolution” by Dana Mustata’ will be available soon after her defense on Friday, February 4 at Utrecht University. Mustata also works for EUscreen as a researcher where she focuses on contextualisation and the use of online television content in academic research. Her dissertation is a first history of Romanian television, dealing for the first time with the history of television under a former communist regime. It shows that despite the oppressive regime, television was not necessarily and not always an instrument of political control.

The dissertation develops an innovate method for understanding television in a coercive regime. The method studies television as an agent of power. Based on this method, the dissertation reveals brand new data on the televised Romanian Revolution in 1989: the event was not a spontaneous public outburst, but a decade-long rehearsed process that took place in the private spaces of television viewers and which was silenced, controlled and manipulated by the Securitate, the former Romanian secret services.

Being a first television history of a former communist country, the dissertation opens up this field of research in Eastern Europe, making a significant contribution to European television history. The dissertation is based on so far undisclosed and classified documents of the Romanian communist secret services.

Read more

By Dana Mustata

The German journal ‘Rundfunk und Geschichte’ will publish in their upcoming issue of February 2011 an extensive report on the results of the first EUscreen Conference that was held in Rome in October, 2010. Aimed at an academic audience, the report makes an overview of the main discussion points at the conference and emphasizes the challenges, inspiration and added value that the online availability of audiovisual sources brings to historical research.

Based on the talks held in Rome, the report entitled ‘Contextualization and the Critical Use of Online Audiovisual Archives’ acknowledges the changes that the field of the humanities and history and media studies in particular, are undergoing in the face of the growing availability of online audiovisual sources. As several key-note speeches suggested, these changes bring along a series of challenges to traditional ways of doing research and conventional methods of interpreting history. The report reflects on the conference talks that proposed possible solutions to such challenges. Challenges regarding online audiovisual material are experienced not only by researchers using these online sources, but also by the content providers making these sources available as well as by audiovisual heritage platforms such as EUscreen. The important concern at stake here is how to present online material to different categories of users, an issue discussed by several speakers at the conference and reiterated in the report. Borrowing from several discussions throughout the conference, the report also puts forward ways of stimulating creative re-use of online audiovisual material among different users.

The report constitutes a step further in disseminating the discussions held at the first EUscreen International Conference among other academic platforms. We hope that such dissemination will increase awareness among the academic community concerning the added value that online audiovisual collections offer to doing research and concerning practices of using digital audiovisual material to research purposes.

Press release by Europeana

The report of the Comité des Sages (high-level reflection group) on Digitisation of Europe’s cultural heritage was delivered to Neelie Kroes, European Commission Vice-President for the Digital Agenda, and Androulla Vassiliou, Commissioner responsible for Education and Culture.

Among its top recommendations are that Europeana should become the central reference point for Europe’s online cultural heritage. Member States must ensure that all material digitised with public funding is available on the site, and bring all their public domain masterpieces into Europeana by 2016. Cultural institutions, the European Commission and Member States should actively and widely promote Europeana.

The report urges EU Member States to step up their efforts to put online the collections held in all their libraries, archives and museums. It stresses the benefits of making Europe’s culture and knowledge more easily accessible. It also points to the potential economic benefits of digitisation, including through public-private partnerships, for the development of innovative services in sectors like tourism, research and education. The report endorses the Digital Agenda’s objective of strengthening Europe’s digital library Europeana and suggests solutions for making works covered by copyright available online.

The Comité des Sages on Digitisation comprises Maurice Lévy, Elisabeth Niggemann and Jacques de Decker (see IP/10/456). The report’s recommendations will feed into the Commission’s broader strategy, under the Digital Agenda for Europe, to help cultural institutions make the transition towards the digital age.

Neelie Kroes said: “I sincerely thank the three “sages” for their constructive suggestions on how we can trigger a “Digital Renaissance” in Europe. Bringing our museums’ and libraries’ collections online not only shows Europe’s rich history and culture but can also usher in new benefits for education, for innovation and for generating new economic activities. It will put high quality content on the net for many generations.”

Androulla Vassiliou added: “The Group has balanced the interests of creators with the imperatives of a changing environment in the digital era. We need to find ways and means to do so in all the areas where the cultural and creative industries are confronted with the challenges of moving into the digital age. Culture and heritage in the digital era represent a set of opportunities for European economies and societies.”

Called “The New Renaissance”, the Report’s conclusions and recommendations also include:

• Works that are covered by copyright, but are no longer distributed commercially, need to be brought online. It is primarily the role of rights-holders to digitise these works and exploit them. But, if rights holders do not do so, cultural institutions must have a window of opportunity to digitise material and make it available to the public, for which right holders should be remunerated.
• EU rules for orphan works (whose rights holders cannot be identified) need to be adopted as soon as possible. The Report defines eight fundamental conditions for any solution.
• Member States need to considerably increase their funding for digitisation in order to generate jobs and growth in the future. The funds needed to build 100 km of roads would pay for the digitisation of 16% of all available books in EU libraries, or the digitisation of every piece of audio content in EU Member States’ cultural institutions.
• Public-private partnerships for digitisation must be encouraged. They must be transparent, non-exclusive and equitable for all partners, and must result in cross-border access to the digitised material for all. Preferential use of the digitised material granted to the private partner should not exceed seven years.
• To guarantee the preservation of collections in their digital format, a second copy of this cultural material should be archived at Europeana. In addition, a system should be developed so that any cultural material that currently needs to be deposited in several countries would only be deposited once.

The recommendations of the ‘Comité des sages’ will feed into the Commission’s broader strategy, under the Digital Agenda for Europe to help cultural institutions make the transition towards the digital age and to search for new and effective business models that accelerate digitisation while allowing fair remuneration for rights holders where necessary (see IP/10/581,MEMO/10/199 and MEMO/10/200). The recommendations will also be useful for the Commission’s plan to develop a sustainable funding model for Europeana by 2012.

Today europeana.eu already offers access to more than 15 million digitised books, maps, photographs, film clips, paintings and musical extracts, but this is only a fraction of works held by Europe’s cultural institutions (see IP/10/1524). Most digitised materials are older works in the public domain, to avoid potential litigation for works covered by copyright.

The full report can be accessed here.  

Press release from PrestoPrime

The new AV Competence Centre  ― entitled PrestoCentre ― is a membership driven, non-profit organisation that will serve stakeholders in audiovisual digitisation and digital preservation in Europe. It will continue and expand the work of the EU-funded ‘Presto’ projects and will launch at the Screening the Future Conference in Amsterdam on 14 & 15 March 2011.

The conference will connect small and large archives, service providers, vendors, funders, policymakers and educators developing solutions to the most urgent questions facing audiovisual archiving. AV stakeholders in Europe and beyond are invited to attend the conference and to join the celebration of the launch of PrestoCentre.

More information
For registration and information visit: www.prestocentre.eu
E-mail: events[at]prestocentre[dot]eu

About PrestoCentre
PrestoCentre is an initiative of five large national audiovisual and broadcast archives in Europe:

• British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC);
• l’Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA);
• Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (Beeld en Geluid);
• Österreichischer Rundfunk (ORF);
• Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI).

For more than a decade, these archives have worked together in the EU-funded ‘Presto’ projects to bring together expertise and experience in AV digitisation and preservation in Europe. The goal of PrestoCentre is now to make sure that the knowledge and dedication that was built up in these projects persists and does not ‘fade away’.

Press release by Europeana

The German National Library, Oxford University and Europeana have signed an agreement to digitise family papers and memorabilia from the First World War in order to create an online archive about the people involved in the conflict.

Oxford University began the initiative when it asked people across Britain to bring family letters, photographs and keepsakes from the War to be digitised. The success of the idea – which became the Great War Archive – has encouraged Europeana, Europe’s digital archive, library and museum, to bring the German National Library into an alliance with Oxford University to roll out the scheme in Germany. The collaboration will bring German soldiers’ stories online alongside their British counterparts in a 1914-18 archive.

There will be a series of roadshows in libraries around Germany that will invite people to bring documents and artefacts from family members involved in the First World War to be digitised by mobile scanning units, and to tell the stories that go with them. There will also be a website allowing people to submit material online if they are unable to attend the local events. Everything submitted will also be available through Europeana, where it add a new perspective to collections of First World War material from institutions across Europe.

Dr Elisabeth Niggemann, the German National Librarian, said, “We are proud to be part of this alliance. These artefacts and their stories have survived and we must record them while they are still part of family memory. Little of this material will ever have been on public display, or been made available to historians. What the 1914-18 War demonstrates, especially at the personal level, is the futility of war, and the pity of it for the men and their families.”

Stuart Lee, an Oxford University academic and Director of the Great War Archive said, “Working together with the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek and their partners in Germany to extend this initiative will give it new resonance. The Centenary in 2014 of the first year of the war will prompt many people to discover more about it and find out about family members involved. The 1914-18 archive will bring them close to those who witnessed it at first hand, showing the souvenirs that they kept throughout their lives and telling the stories that they handed down the generations.”

“One such story that was submitted to the Great War Archive during the British project exemplifies what we want to do. It concerns RAF man Bernard Darley who was commended for putting out a fierce fire in a workshop containing petrol tanks. At his side throughout was a German prisoner of war, Otto Arndt. The two became friends and Otto made a matchbox from a shell-casing as a memento which he inscribed and presented to his friend. This story shows the human side of the war – in this case an unlikely friendship between normal people caught up in a war not of their making.”

Jill Cousins, Executive Director of Europeana, says that the organisation is well placed to bring together such partnerships: “Europeana acts as the facilitator in an extensive cross-European network of libraries, museums and archives. We aim to create partnerships with organisations from other theatres of the First World War, such as Belgium, France and the Eastern Front, so their stories can be included.”

“The 1914-18 online archive will reflect the reality of the lives of the soldiery on different sides of the conflict. As a people’s history it will offer a vivid testimony that school students will find compelling, and we are keen to work with educational organisations to create teaching resources. We are also planning exhibitions and information services that provide a pan-European focus on activities around the 1914-18 centenary.”