The “Institut National de l’Audiovisuel” (INA) in collaboration with the International Federation of Television Archives (FIAT/IFTA) and the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) organizes the FRAME seminar from 21st June to 2nd July 2010.

FRAME, Future for Restoration of Audiovisual Memory in Europe, is designed for the European professionals of the media industry who are involved in management and use of archives and address the issue of new technologies applied to the restoration, digitalisation, preservation and use of television and film archives.

The session will focus on issues and tools available for film and TV archive management, so as to enable participants to choose the technologies best fitted to their needs and to the strategy defined for their archives.

Read more on the  FIAT/IFTA site

By Christopher Natzén

During the autumn of 2009, The National Library of Sweden (KB) launched its own YouTube-channel. Upon its release, the channel contained 34 items selected from the Audio Visual Department’s web exhibition and lecture series “News!” (available until 26 April 2010). The exhibition contains news clips from the National Library’s large collection of audiovisual material, and its aim is to show how the news service has changed in Sweden during the 20th-Century. This rather arbitrary selection of Swedish news reports covers 100 years that has in common their “news worthiness” at the time: from the boat Göta Elf’s capsize on 15 April 1908 in Gothenburg when 26 people died to a clash between neo-nazis and common people in Växjö on 13 April 1985 and the crash of the Swedish fighter plane JAS 39 Gripen during a flight exhibition in central Stockholm on 8 August 1993. All items are contextualised with extensive metadata and tags but otherwise no publicity campaign was made except on the major web page of the National Library. Despite this KB had over 112 000 views during the first three months on the YouTube-channel, and it seems that most viewers found their way there through Google, which shows that the interest of the audiovisual cultural heritage is large.

Europeana released it’s Public Domain Charter to protect the Public Domain. According to Europeana it is:

“a statement that calls for the Public Domain to be kept freely accessible to Europe’s citizens. Europeana believes that material held in trust for the public for generations, often at taxpayers’ expense, should not enter the private sector when it is digitised.” (Europeana news letter)

Digitalisation of cultural heritage that is already part of the public domain sometimes creates new and exclusive rights which restrict access to the digital version. The Public Domain Charter takes a strong stand against this development by claiming in the charter that:

• Europeana belongs to the public and must represent the public interest.
• The Public Domain is the material from which society creates cultural understanding and knowledge. Having a thriving Public Domain is essential to economic and social well-being.
• Digitisation of Public Domain content does not create new rights over it. Works that are in the Public Domain in analogue form continue to be in the Public Domain once they have been digitised.

The Charter is created in support of the recent Public Domain Manifesto by COMMUNIA. You can share your view on the Public Domain and the Pubic Domain Charter on the Europeana Facebook group.

By Claude Mussou

From 8 to 11 April 2010, the Permanent Conference of Mediterranean Audiovisual Operators (COPEAM), has met in Paris under the patronage of Mr Nicolas Sarkozy, President of the French Republic. Co-organised by Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (Ina) and supported by France’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Culture and Communication, the 17th General Conference presented three flagship projects :

• The Channel for the Mediterranean: A multi-lingual and multi-cultural Mediterranean satellite television channel.
• MeD MeM: an Internet portal for the Mediterranean audiovisual heritage, supported by the Euromed heritage programme.
• The Mediterranean Audiovisual University:  a network of universities and schools training in audiovisual media and cinema within the Mediterranean region.

700 attendees from all European Mediterranean countries made the conference successful. INA CEO, Emmanuel Hoog, was unanimously re-elected as COPEAM President for the next 2 years. A call was launched to support the creation of the multi-cultural, multi-lingual Mediterranean Channel that will broadcast in all countries around the Mediterranean, addressing over 770 millions inhabitants. Many countries will contribute and the programmes will combine North and South perspectives.

The MEDEA Awards team have re-launched the MEDEA website for this year’s competition with a closing date of 31 July. This site includes a media gallery with best-practice showcases including interviews with the 2009 award winners, finalists and participants in the Highly Commended category.

The MEDEA team has also launched a MEDEA YouTube Channel which contains excerpts from 2009 winners and interviews with the representatives of Know IT All for Primary Schools, Daisy and Drago, Traditions across Europe, Eyes on the Skies, Planet SciCast, INgeBEELD and Neu in Berlin. Members of the EUscreen consortium took part in former editions of the MEDEA awards as jury members.

By Sally Reynolds

The amount of interest in educational repositories is on the rise and practically every European country now offers some form of repository for teachers and others to use. One very active group of people who are exploring this topic are members of the EdReNe thematic network which was funded under the eContentPlus programme, like EUscreen. EdReNe brings together people responsible for European web-based repositories with content owners and other stakeholders within education and its members include practically all the large-scale repositories run by agencies like Becta (UK), Kennisnet (The Netherlands), EduLearn (Portugal) and Skolverket (Sweden) for European ministries of education. EdReNe recently held their 4th strategic seminar on repositories of learning resources in Barcelona where they launched a discussion about 4 key areas of their work which sparked off a number of interesting discussions provoked in part by the reports produced by EdReNe on these topics which are: identifying repository strategies which work, identifying the best ways to engage users and producers, standardisation and Rights Issues. More information, including these reports are available from the EdReNe website.

A workshop on user requirements has been held on March 31 in Amsterdam at the venue of Noterik. The workshop was attended by members of the working group on new services development and business models, technical partners and task leaders of Work Package 5, Use Case Development. The meeting was led by András Bálint Kovács from ELTE University and work package leader of WP5.

Aim of the workshop was to gain more insight in the user requirements for the various user groups of EUscreen. Preliminary to the workshop, focus groups and surveys have been held amongst the different user groups. The results of this research have been discussed during the meeting and provided the basis for the list of user requirements. The next step will be to translate these requirements into a first design of the EUscreen portal, which is scheduled to be online in January 2011.

The workshop also provided input for the market survey that is conducted by The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. Parts of this market survey will become available online on www.euscreen.eu in the course of May 2010.

Memoriav, one of the associate partners of
EUscreen, has signed a contract in March with the
Swiss Federal Office of Culture which secures
federal funding for the archive during the period 2010-2013. A supplementary amount of 1.2 million CHF (€ 830,000) will be dedicated to the further development of the online services for audiovisual content. To reach this goal, the
Fraunhofer Institute in Germany will conduct a
study on how the online services of Memoriav
could be improved.