By Christopher Natzén/Mats Rohdin

On 4 March 2010, Sonja De Leeuw and Pelle Snickars presented Video Active and EUscreen at the Department of Cinema Studies, Stockholm University’s research seminar. The presentation attracted attention afterwards in an article in the second largest Swedish newspaper, Svenska Dagbladet, written by Professor Astrid Söderbergh-Widding from the Department of Cinema Studies. The article emphasises the importance of the EUscreen project for creating better access to European television history through a digital portal. EUscreen’s focus on research, learning and viewing just for pleasure is highlighted as well as the comparative aspects between Europe’s television histories. EUscreen’s link to Europeana’s larger context is also described. Furthermore, Söderbergh-Widding compares EUscreen with YouTube and writes that “the absence of a historical framework for interpreting” what is seen in the latter is fatal in the long run as these items are presented without enough contextualisation. The article concludes that “it is sometimes said that images gain ground from the written word”, and if this is true EUscreen is even more crucial as the need to present these images with an accurate framework increases as they grow in importance for everyday life.

Read the article (in Swedish)

The first EUscreen regional workshop has been held in London on February 5 at the BUFVC venue. The workshop was the first in a series of three. During the workshops, archivists from the consortium gather to discuss issues regarding content selection policy, IPR and the metadata schema that will be used in EUscreen. The other two regional workshops will be held in Barcelona on February 15 and Budapest on February 22.

Johan Oomen will give a presentation about EUscreen, together with a number of other projects from the Netherlands Insitute for Sound and Vision on the International Conference, organised by the University of Rouen on January 15. The conference focuses on culture and identity issues in English-speaking, web-connected communities of learning. Slides of the presentation will be available soon.

PARIS, May 14th 2010

This international Television Studies Seminar, hosted by the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA) at their central Paris location will present academic papers based on research conducted in FIAT/IFTA member archives and illustrated by extracts provided by those archives.

Paper proposals should include a brief abstract and details of arrangements made with the television archive at which the research will be conducted. Participating FIAT/IFTA member archives will provide research facilities and extracts on DVD free of charge. Full details of requirements and participating archives are on the Television Studies Commission page of the FIAT/IFTA website.

Proposals should be sent to the appropriate member of the Television Studies Commission by December 31st 2009. The Seminar languages will be English and French, with translation provided.

Proposals can cover any aspect of television history or practice, though the following topics are suggested:

• The transition from black and white to colour
• Cinema on television
• Transnational comparisons of genres or styles (which could use the resource of Video Active)
• Aspects of studying complete days of output, especially comparative studies of those recorded on October 27th 2008 and 2009 by certain FIAT member archives (details on the website)

One of the papers delivered at the Seminar will be chosen for presentation at the FIAT/IFTA Conference in Dublin in October 2010, with its author receiving free registration and full travel and accommodation expenses.

The DISH2009 Conference (Digital Strategies for Heritage) on December 9 and 10 in Rotterdam was organised by DEN (Dutch Digital Heritage). The program included plenary sessions, workshops and paper presentations. Approximately 600 professionals from various countries participated in the conference. Wietske van den Heuvel and Maarten Brinkerink held a presentation about EUscreen and Open Video in the session Open and Legal, which was chaired by Jill Cousins from the EDL Foundation.

Prof. Dr. Sonja de Leeuw presented EUscreen during a workshop at the EVA/MINERVA Conference on November 10 and 11 in Jerusalem. The conference is an annual event for professionals working in the cultural field in Israel and focuses on the application of advanced technologies and the exchange of knowledge and experiences with European colleagues. The workshop with EUscreen also involved contributions from the Forum for the Preservation of the Multimedia Heritage of Israel and the Israel Film Archive.  Other European projects that were part of the conference program were Europeana and AthenaWeb.

The EUscreen project was officially launched on October 8, 2009 at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision in Hilversum during a two-day meeting. The program included plenary sessions by the project coordinator, the technical coordinator, the work package leaders, the liaison office and Mark Röder from the European Commission, working group sessions and showcases with television material from the partner archives.