We are delighted to announce that the full programme for the conference, titled From Audience to User: Engaging with Audiovisual Heritage Online, is now available!

Digital access has changed the ways users can consume and interact with audiovisual heritage materials. For audiovisual archives, it is crucial to  engage users in different and meaningful ways. A user-oriented approach helps archives promote valuable online content, increase the visibility of hidden wonders and develop sustainable futures for heritage collections.

The conference agenda draws on the full breadth of knowledge and expertise of the EUscreen network. It has been designed to take the audience on a journey throughout user engagement approaches in audiovisual heritage projects.

While day one offers speakers and case studies from the field, day two focuses on the following interactive workshops:

• Increasing the amount of audiovisual heritage online (chaired by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision),
• Methods for contextualisation (chaired by Utrecht University, Aalto University School of Art and Design and Noterik BV)
• European scholarly networks: Connecting academics who work on the transnational histories of broadcasting (chaired by University of Luxembourg).

The full conference programme is available at: http://blog.euscreen.eu/conference-programme.

Registration for the event is still open and free of charge. Places will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis. For more information and registration for the conference please visit http://blog.euscreen.eu/conference.

Last week we attended the annual Baltic Audiovisual Archival Council Conference in Riga. For the first time we presented a sneak peak of the new portal!

The Baltic Audiovisual Archival Council (BAAC) is a non-profit organisation that aims to foster cooperation between public and private broadcasting and AV archives, libraries and museums in the worldwide Baltic diaspora. Since the Baltic States are represented both in the EUscreenXL collection and in its consortium, we were invited to take part in the yearly BAAC conference. ‘Safe versus Reusable: Ideals versus Real Life’ was this year’s theme; the venue (in many ways reflecting the theme) was Riga’s recently opened National Library of Latvia, the magnificent ‘Castle of Light’.

Maria Drabczyk (NInA), Eve-Marie Oesterlen (BUFVC) and Kamila Lewandowska (NInA) presented on ‘Going EUscreenXL’, sharing the joys/ideals and real life challenges of making European audiovisual content accessible for future re-use. While Maja spoke about the benefits for NInA of being both a content partner newbie and the lead of project dissemination, Eve-Marie offered an inside view into the challenges involved in co-ordinating the delivery of enriched and standardised quality metadata and content from over 18 European providers. The icing on this pan-European AV cake was supplied by Kamila, who presented a sneak preview of the new EUscreenXL online platform, which will officially be launched in October 2014 as part of the EUscreenXL Rome Conference. We received a warm welcome from the audience and a positive feedback regarding the project results.

Our colleague, Marco Rendina from Instituto Luce – Cinecittà (EUscreenXL partner) presented the Presto4U project which aims to foster research in digital audiovisual preservation, e.g. the use of technology by service providers and media owners, as well as to raise awareness in the area of AV preservation. Helle Bech Madsen from the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR), also a EUscreenXL partner, presented a range of projects conducted by DR, illustrating the benefits of adopting a user-oriented approach. Richard Ranft, Head of Sound and Vision at the British Library in London, introduced the Europeana Sounds project, which brings together major European audio archives and web innovators in order to make high-quality audio collections accessible online. This project aims to aggregate over half a million audio metadata records and 200 000 related music scores, images and videos. Jolè Stimbirytė talked about users expectations and how the archivists should try to meet them.

Overall, it was great to share ideas with such a diverse audience of experts. It was impressive to learn about the variety of initiatives undertaken on an international, national and even individual level to both safeguard audiovisual cultural heritage and to ensure its accessibility for future generations.

More information:

EUscreenXL will participate in the Gothenburg Book Fair on 25-28 September. The book fair is Scandinavia’s top literature event with circa 800 exhibitors and 100 000 visitors. For the second year running the book fair sets the stage for a feature called “The Digital Square”. Here organisations presents work aimed at digital access. This year the National Library of Sweden (KB) has joined forces and booth with the Swedish Film Institute (SFI) and Swedish Television (SVT) to showcase their various projects. KB as a partner of EUscreenXL is highlighting this project.

During the fair’s four days the public and professionals will be able to hands on look at the EUscreen portal as well to be able to discuss its aims and goals. On Friday morning a seminar will be dedicated to discuss user expectations on digital archives and EUscreenXL in particular.

If you are visiting Gothenburg pass by the booth! Take part of a competition hosted by Swedish Television, listen to panel discussions or just relax in our comfortable sofa with a programme from one of the participating archives/broadcasters in EUscreenXL (tablets will be available for loan). You can also join us for our reception on Thursday afternoon.

A comprehensive recapitulation of the events at the fair, the EUscreenXL reception, discussions with users, images and so forth will follow after the fair. Stay tuned!

EUscreenXL becomes a partner of the socio-educational ‘Freedom Express’ campaign, commemorating the political transformation of 1989 in Central and Eastern Europe.

On August 25th in Warsaw, the plans for the campaign were announced during a press conference. The Freedom Express is organised by the European Network Remembrance and Solidarity in collaboration with multiple respective European partners including Europeana and EUscreenXL. The campaign is designed to be a reminder of the fundamental meaning that the revolutions of 1989 had on the identity of Europeans living on both sides of the former Iron Curtain.

The tour will take 20 young historians, journalists and artists through European countries following the footsteps of 1989. The expedition already started on 30 August in Gdańsk, Poland. Its participants will also visit Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, Czech Republic and Germany, where the journey will end on 13 September in Berlin. Their journey can be followed on the blog on the project’s website.

An important part of the campaign will be an outdoor, travelling exhibition ‘Roads to 1989 – Year of Change, East Central Europe 1939-1989’. It highlights the political and social processes that led to the division of Europe into two spheres of influence, and then tells the story of the different paths that led Central European nations to freedom and democracy presenting the unique changes that began in 1989.

EUscreenXL contributed to the exhibition by creating a unique and historically meaningful video production. It includes content that shows important and commonly recognizable personalities and events from the political transformation time in Europe and depicts crucial social phenomena also typical for the period. The production has been divided into three short chapters – social movements, first political actions and important personalities & political breakthroughs.

In October and November the first presentations will be held consecutively in Berlin, Budapest and Warsaw. The exhibition in the virtual version will be also available on the campaign website.

Seven EUscreenXL partners – Deutsche Welle, The Lithuanian Central State Archive, RTV Slovenia, Czech Tevision, National Audiovisual Archive of Hungary, National Audiovisual Institute of Poland (in collaboration with Video Studio Gdańsk), and The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision contributed to the project.

The Freedom Express project is unique to the EUscreen consortium as it represents one of the first try-outs of the EUscreen Network activities aimed at reaching new audiences and stepping out of the online world by preparing a physical exhibition. It also opens EUscreen to collaboration with third party institutions – European government bodies, important European memory institutions and creative industry representatives.

Considering the variety of special projects and areas involved in Europeana and the fact that most issues are influenced by legal issues, Europeana has decided to create a working group dedicated especially to IPR. The aim of this working group is to coordinate IPR related deliverables and activity across Europeana’s diverse range of activities. This is a new initiative at Europeana, and there is a hope that, by forming a cross-project coordination group, we will deliver better and more cohesive outcomes.

The first meeting took place in Copenhagen two weeks ago, with several IPR experts from different Europeana-related projects (Cloud, Space, Open-up, Sounds, Photography and EUscreenXL) chaired by Paul Keller (Kennisland) and Julia Fallon (Europeana).

During the first meeting we introduced our projects and discussed some issues in order to create working group plan. For instance, we feel that it is necessary to have a clear and transparent procedure for proposing new rights statements (you can find the current list here: Available Rights Statements). Info sharing is obviously useful for all of us, but we also decided to share relevant deliverables and found some questions we should elaborate during the next meeting. We’re looking forward to it!

The umbilical relation between television and national languages and cultures has made television in Eastern Europe hard to access outside national borders. The fifth issue of VIEW is entirely dedicated to television histories from Eastern Europe and lays the ground for this emerging area of study.

This special issue opens up new perspectives on television histories from Eastern Europe and situates them beyond the political histories of the nation-state, Cold War isolation and East-West antagonism. It invites readers to question what is ‘socialist’ about television in Europe and reflect upon concepts, methods and approaches pertaining to (post)socialist television in Europe.
 
The issue is guest edited at the initiative of The European (Post)Socialist Television History Network.  It continues the series of activities launched by the network with the aim to stimulate research on television histories from Eastern Europe, encourage comparative approaches to television in the region and create a dialogue with European television scholarship.
 
VIEW, the Journal of European Television History and Culture is the first peer-reviewed, multi-media and open access e-journal in the field of European television history and culture. It provides an international platform for outstanding academic research and archival reflection on television as an important part of our European cultural heritage.
 
VIEW is proud to present its fifth issue on ‘Television Histories in (Post)Socialist Europe,’ which is freely available at: http://journal.euscreen.eu/.
 
Table of Contents

Editorial
Editorial
Dana Mustata

Opening Article
Understanding Socialist Television: Concepts, Objects, Methods
Sabina Mihelj

Discoveries
The Eichmann Trial on East German Television
Judith Keilbach
Intervision. Searching for Traces
Yulia Yurtaeva
Folklore Music on Romanian TV. From State Socialist Television to Private Channels
Alexandra Urdea

Explorations
Exploring Transnational Media Exchange in the 1960s
Heather Gumbert
Connected Enemies? Programming Transfer between East and West During the Cold War and the Example of East German Television
Thomas Beutelschmidt, Richard Oehmig
The Great Époque of the Consumption of Imported Broadcasts. West European Television Channels and Polish Audiences during the System Transition
Patryk Wasiak
Italianization Accomplished. Forms and Structures of Albanian Television’s Dependency on Italian Media and Culture
Paolo Carelli
East and West on the Finnish Screen. Early Transnational Television in Finland
Mari Pajala
Retro Reappropriations. Responses to ‘The Thirty Cases of Major Zeman’ in the Czech Republic
Veronika Pehe
Multiple Faces of the Nostalgia Channel in Russia
Ekaterina Kalinina
The Problem of Personality on the Soviet Screen, 1950s-1960s
Simon Huxtable
Comparing Socialist and Post-Socialist Television Culture. Fifty Years of Television in Croatia
Zrinjka Peruško, Antonija Čuvalo

On June 9th, 2007 the International Council on Archives launched International Archives Day. It was established to raise awareness of the importance of records and archives and highlight the necessity to preserve archives for the long-term.

Archivists and archives all around Slovenia organized numerous events to celebrate the day. On Friday June 6th, the Archives of the Republic of Slovenia hosted an event and leading Slovenian regional archives participated including Historical Archives of Ljubljana, Regional Archives In Nova Gorica, Regional Archives In Koper, Historical Archives Of Celje, Historical Archives Of Ptuj and Regional Archives In Maribor along with Archiepiscopal Archives from Ljubljana. A wide range of events took place like a presentation of the Dalmatin’s Bible (16th century) restoration process and ceremonies honoring the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the First World War.

The archivists from RTV Slovenia presented their view on public sector awareness of the necessity to preserve archives for the long-term. Additionally, they talked about the need to provide access to archives which led to their collaboration and enrollment in the EUscreenXL project.

As the event also commemorated the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the First World War speakers from RTV Slovenia, Katja Šturm and Aleksander Lavrenčič presented clips and other archival material regarding the First World War, available on the EUscreen portal. After a short presentation of the EUscreenXL project and portal, a clip about uncovering mines and explosive devices from WW1 in the Soča riverbed and mountain lakes was showed and discussed:

The archivists from RTV Slovenia showcased other First World War Clip as well as presented clips about archival activity of their institution, e.g. How we started in our Archiving Department:

 Blog written by Katja Šturm, RTV Slovenia.

EUscreen successfully aggregated tens of thousands of cultural heritage audiovisual materials from all across Europe. However, there are more archival films and videos out there, waiting to be found, aggregated and organised in a way that makes it easier for everyone to discover the continent’s rich cultural heritage through moving images.

If two cookies are better than one cookie, what is better than 500,000 aggregated cultural heritage videos? 1.000.000 aggregated cultural heritage A/V materials made findable and accessible through a single entry point all in one place (Europeana), showing the way life in Europe was and continues to be. That is the challenge EUscreenXL has set itself.

EUscreenXL strives to make this possible but needs you in order for this to work. Archives, broadcasters, universities, libraries: the consortium welcomes those with audiovisual collections online who want to contribute to this long-standing endeavor.

Join Our Network

Joining the EUscreenXL benefits multiple parties: your institution, your content and the general public. Here are some examples:

• Help us overcome the fragmentation of Euorpean audiovisual cultural heritage content available online.

• Have your content join the rich collection of European cultural heritage content available on Europeana, Europe’s online cultural hub.

• Have your content be professionally contextualized by EUscreen’s network of academics and media professionals.

• Become part of an interoperable portal which will increase your content’s visibility and accessibility.

• Have your content’s metadata aligned to EBUcore (European broadcasting standard) and EDM (European cultural sector standard).

• Have your institution become part of an expansive network of leaders and experts in the audiovisual cultural heritage sector.

Do any of these benefits strike your interest? Would you like to learn more? We would love to hear from you. Click on over to our Join the Network page or contact us at mailto:info@euscreen.eu.