Europeana press release. The Hague – May 25^th, 2010.

Europeana.eu, Europe’s digital library, museum and archive, has published the Public Domain Charter. The Charter has been drawn up by the Europeana Foundation, Europeana’s governing body, which is supported by the European Commission. It’s based on the belief that:

Europeana is publishing the Charter because the Public Domain is under threat. As Public Domain information is digitised, it is often becoming less accessible to those who own it: the public. Policy-makers and funding bodies need to consider the implications of removing information from the Public Domain and the knock-on effect this has for creative enterprise, learning, research and the knowledge economy.

When Public Domain material changes format from a book or a picture to a digital file it must not leave the Public Domain. What has been held in trust for the public for generations, often at taxpayers’ expense, should not enter the private sector when it is digitised.

“A healthy and thriving Public Domain is vital for education, science, cultural heritage and public sector information. No society can afford to put up barriers to information access in today’s knowledge-based economies.” – Elisabeth Niggemann, national librarian of Germany and Chair of the Europeana Foundation.

Notes:

What is the Public Domain?

• The out of copyright information that people can freely use without restriction
• Information that rights holders have decided to remove barriers to access
• Much of the world’s knowledge – the paintings of Leonardo, Newton’s Laws of Motion, Diderot’s Encyclopédie – is in the Public Domain.

Why is it important?

• Society constantly re-uses and reinterprets material in the Public Domain and by doing so develops new ideas, inventions and cultural works.
• The internet gives access to the heritage of previous ages on an unparallelled scale. It has accelerated the rate of innovation and the creativity of new ideas and applications.
• Access to Public Domain information lies at the heart of Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits”.

Why publish the Charter?

The Charter is a policy statement, not a contract. It doesn’t bind any of Europeana’s content providers. It recognises the dilemma in which heritage collections find themselves. Their drive to digitise and make Public Domain content accessible is tempered by a recognition of the costs involved, and the need to arrive at the most appropriate agreements with those who are willing and able to fund digitisation programmes – including the private sector.

However, it is necessary to label the rights associated with a digitised item very clearly so that they are understood by Europeana’s users, who will be able to exclude content from their results that requires payment or doesn’t comply with the Public Domain Charter. Rights labelling will become a requirement when submitting content to Europeana by the end of this year.

While Public-Private Partnerships are an important means of getting content digitised, the Charter recommends that deals are non-exclusive, for very limited time periods, and don’t take material out of the Public Domain.

The Public Domain Charter is published in support of the recent Public Domain Manifesto. The Manifesto is a statement made from the content users’ perspective. Communia, who have published it, represent education and research, consumer agencies, technology developers and think tanks.

Europeana, and its governing body, the Europeana Foundation, support the principal aspirations of the Manifesto. The Charter represents the position of the content holders – the organisations that are entrusted with the safe keeping of Europe’s Public Domain content.

The Public Domain Charter is available in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Polish.

By Wietske van den Heuvel

D-Lib Magazine has included a feature about EUscreen in it’s May/June issue. D-Lib is an online journal “with a focus on digital library research and development, including new technologies, applications, and contextual social and economic issues. D-Lib Magazine appeals to a broad technical and professional audience. The primary goal of the magazine is timely and efficient information exchange for the digital library community to help digital libraries be a broad interdisciplinary field, and not a set of specialties that know little of each other.” (D-Lib website)

The article about EUscreen can be found in the “In Brief” section. It describes the main project goals in general, and the connection to Europeana, the development of user requirements and software in more detail. The article can be found here.

By Sally Reynolds

Sally Reynolds from ATiT in Belgium along with Deborah Arnold, VIDEOSCOP, Université Nancy 2, France will be presenting examples of media use in education and training at the next annual European Distance and E-Learning Network (EDEN) conference in Valencia 9 to 12 June. This presentation will feature a selection of examples from higher education as well as other sectors and will include a discussion into what really makes for effective educational media.

The EDEN conference has a particular focus on media this year and is entitled ‘Media Inspirations for Learning’. It is expected to attract plenty of practitioners from the higher education sector interested in finding out more about the ways in which audiovisual and social media can be used to enhance learning. More available from the conference website.

By Sally Reynolds

The 7th annual study from PBS (USA’s national platform for online educational media resources) on media and technology use within the classroom, provides a range of useful insights on the take up of digital media in the US. The study reports the following main findings:

• A majority of teachers are using digital media, with applications including instruction, lesson planning, communications and professional development.
• Teachers who do use digital media value it and believe that it helps them—and their students—be more effective.
• Teachers continue to use video, but they increasingly access video online, rather than from broadcast, cable or videotape. And teachers are becoming more strategic in their media use and savvier about integrating it into their repertoire of instructional strategies and resources.
• Teachers value many different types of digital media, with games and activities for student use in school topping the list.
• Increasing numbers of teachers are joining virtual professional communities—and many are comfortable using social networking tools in their personal and professional lives.

This report also provides interesting research findings on the specific use of video and the increased use of short video segments in place of full video programmes. The most popular length of video segment found in this study was between 5 and 10 minutes. The full report on this study is available here.

23-24 June, Mykonos, Greece

EUscreen has organised a two-day workshop on metadata schemes and content selection strategies in the audiovisual domain, to be held in Mykonos town, Greece on June 23 and 24. The workshop will focus on the presentation and analysis of metadata schemes and content selection policies within major European projects in general and EUscreen in particular, and will present some state of the art applications in multimedia retrieval and reuse.

The first day’s programme will be devoted to developments within the EUscreen project. This includes the presentation of the project’s content selection strategy, a demonstration of the EUscreen back-end, and a preview of the EUscreen portal, to be launched in January 2011.

The second day provides an overview of experiences and state of the art European projects in the audiovisual domain. This includes presentations by projects and organisations such as the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), the European Film Gateway (EFG), Europeana and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). More information about the workshop, along with the full program, can be found here.  Attendance is free, but online registration is required.

Press release by the European Parlement

“The EU’s on-line library, museum and archive – Europeana – needs content from more Member States and further EU funding, according to MEPs. Access to the portal’s material without downloading should be free but copyright must be respected, says a resolution adopted by Parliament on Wednesday.
Online since November 2008, Europeana now contains about 7 million digitised works, including books, maps, film clips and photographs. Almost half of the contributions to it (47%) come from France; other big contributors are Germany (16%), the Netherlands (8%), and the UK (8%). In 2011 Europeana.eu will be more multilingual and include semantic web features. The Europeana office is hosted by the Dutch Royal Library in The Hague.

More contributions and funding needed

MEPs support the goal of having 10 million objects in Europeana by this June and call for a target of at least 15 million by 2015. They urge governments and cultural institutions to speed up digitisation and provide more files, especially audiovisual material, “paying special attention to those works which deteriorate easily”. The resolution urges the Commission and Member States to make Europeana “one of the main reference points for education and research purposes”.
While encouraging public-private partnerships, MEPs also argue that a substantial part of the costs of digitisation should be covered by a separate budget line in the next EU long-term budget after 2013. MEPs also propose a funding and advertising campaign entitled “Join Europeana”.

Copyright and access

At the same time, Europeana should fully respect intellectual property rights, although without creating any new copyright or privatising access to digital content, stress MEPs. According to the resolution, “access to the Europeana portal and viewing documents without downloading must be free of charge for private individuals and public institutions” and any charges for downloads and printouts of copyright materials “should be socially acceptable”. MEPs also stress that “the portal should take into account the needs of disabled people”.
According to the EP, Europeana should be able to offer in-copyright as well as out-of-print and orphan works (whose authors cannot be identified), for example, through extended collective licensing. MEPs “endorse the Commission’s intention to establish a simple and cost-efficient rights clearance system” working in close co-operation with all the stakeholders. They also call on the Commission to introduce a legislative proposal on the digitisation, preservation and dissemination of orphan works, and to develop their database.”

Johan Oomen will give a presentation about the Open Images platform, which will also be involved in EUscreen, during the Joint Technical Symposium 2010 (JTS2010) in Oslo. JTS is a gathering for professionals working in the field of audiovisual heritage and takes place between 2-5 May. Many important stakeholders are involved, like FIAT/IFTA, AMIA, FIAF and IASA.

The presentation about Open Images and EUscreen is scheduled on the 4^th of May. A part of the paper abstract is displayed below:

“In September 2009, the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision launched Open Images, an open media platform that offers access to a selection of archive material with the aim to stimulate creative reuse. Footage from audiovisual collections can be downloaded and remixed into new works. Users of Open Images also have the opportunity to add their own material to the platform and thus expand the collection. Access provision to the material on Open Images is based on the Creative Commons licensing model. The „open‟ nature of Open Images is underscored by the use of open video formats (Ogg Theora), open standards (HTML5, OAI-PMH) and open software components.
(…)
The collection will grow substantially over the coming years, as new items will be uploaded continuously. This year, also material from the Dutch Filmmuseum will be added. Also, Open Images is working with the EU funded project EUscreen  and will invite other broadcast archives to supply data. Non-professionals are also encouraged to create new programmes based on Open Images fragments and items from other online repositories of archive material. (…)”

Download the entire abstract.

The seminar will be held on May 14 in Paris. This international Television Studies Seminar, hosted by the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA) will present academic papers based on research conducted in FIAT/IFTA member archives and illustrated by extracts provided by those archives. Paper presentations cover various aspects of television history and practice. EUscreen’s predecessor, Video Active, will serve as the main source for papers focussing on transnational comparisons of genre and style. Registration for the seminar is free.

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