On May 13, EUscreenXL and the Europeana Foundation organized a strategic workshop on the impact of copyright and ensuing issues for audiovisual archive collections. In this dedicated workshop, EUscreenXL presented its research on IPR and linked it to the most current events in EU policy on copyright.

The programme included presentations and expert responses by leading European IPR experts, specialized in online access to audiovisual heritage. The focal point of the workshop was a dedicated exercise in which we aimed to outline and prioritise the policy actions to be undertaken for the audiovisual domain on a European level.

A full report by Erwin Verbruggen can be found on the all-things-copyright-related 1709 blog. For the presentations, click the links below.

09:30 Erwin Verbruggen (Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision): Improving Access to Europe’s Audiovisual Heritage
09:50 Francisco Cabrera (European Audiovisual Observatory): Recent Developments Concerning Copyright Law in the EU
10:20 Eleonora Rosati (eLAWnora): Bringing Audiovisual Works Online: (No) Sooner Said than Done?
11:10 Réka Markovich (ELTE): Answers, Questions, Legal Issues
11:20 Krisztina Rozgonyi: Legal Deposit of Audiovisual Works – Copyright Matters: The Hungarian Solution
11:30 Julia Fallon, Joris Pekel (Europeana Foundation) & Maarten Zeinstra (Kennisland): Developing an Advocacy Strategy for EUscreenXL

More info

• Learn all about the advocacy work the Europeana Foundation is doing for the cultural heritage sector
• Read what we learned at the Licenses for Europe sessions
• Read our response to the European Commission’s consultation on IPR.

Check out these exciting new events organised by British Universities Film and Video Council! 

Enhancing the learning experience with AV content: licenses, quality and value for money

25 June 2014 (Manchester) and 26 June 2014 (London)

How can you engage today’s students? And how can you ensure that your institution is meeting the needs of different learners? This conference, taking place in London and Manchester, will address the benefits of using audiovisual content in learning, teaching and research. See demonstrations of BoB National, the BUFVC Box of Broadcasts, and how this service can enhance the teaching and learning experience, as well as information on audiovisual resources from the BUFVC, Jisc and beyond. Find out more

Course: Think visual: video storytelling in education

Presented by: Catherine Chambers, Open University Commissioning Producer, 3 June 2014.

This new and innovative one-day course will cover the teaching role of video.  The course will aim to show participants how video can enhance the learning experience, when you might use video as a learning resource and how you would design a good learning video. As Commissioning Producer at the Open University, Catherine Chambers commissions short form content across all subject areas for multiple platforms, including iTunes, YouTube and FutureLearn Moocs.  Prior to this, Catherine worked for the BBC in radio production, as well as producing video for the BBC’s 5 Live YouTube channel, and live streaming the popular Kermode and Mayo film review. Find out more

Course: Copyright Clearance for Print, Broadcast and Multimedia Production

Presented by: Alma Hales and Bernadette Attwell, 9 July 2014

The essential one-day course for those needing to copy, use and provide access to existing third party content in their work, delivered by expert practitioners in the field. Presented by Alma Hales, Head of Intellectual Property at the Open University and Bernadette Attwell, former Deputy Head of Intellectual Property at the Open University and co-owner of Copy-Right Consultants Ltd with Alma Hales, the course will provide participants with an up-to-date and clear understanding of how to approach the process of rights clearance. Find out more

The Talk of Europe – Travelling CLARIN Campus project aims to instigate pan-European collaboration by organising three international creative camps in 2014 and 2015. The creative camp intends to bring together developers and academic researchers, with the goal of making inventive use of the European Parliament’s dataset, exploiting web and natural language processing techniques to add new knowledge and functionality to the dataset. The first camp will be held 6-10 October at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision in Hilversum, the Netherlands.

The event will comprise five consecutive days, which will include 1) presentations by humanities scholars and political scientists on how they use political datasets, 2) presentations by computer scientists showing best practices from other projects and 3) practical sessions for tool development.

In order to participate, the TOE organisers welcome proposals describing ambitions for research tools and/or links with other datasets. Submissions should describe the following:

General description of idea (should not exceed 1000 words) including:

• The research tool to be developed.
• The datasets to be used.
• The scholarly research problem or question to be addressed. For inspiration, please see www.talkofeurope.eu/cfp/inspiration.

1. Contact info and a short description of research interests for all participants who would like to attend.
2. A work plan to indicate feasibility of proof-of-concept creation in 5 days.
3. A description of how the tool will be made available after the creative camp.

To submit a proposal, please send a docx or pdf file to kemman@eshcc.eur.nlbefore 20 June 2014. Accepted proposals will be made available on the talkofeurope.eu website.

The project is conducted within the framework of CLARIN (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure), which aims to equip scholars in the humanities and social sciences with easy and sustainable access to digital language data through advanced tools.

The issue 5.1 of the peer review International Journal of Digital Television is now out and you can access it here . The journal aims to describe and explain the transition to digital TV and address the social and cultural questions surrounding the future of television beyond switchover. Content is broad and varied, ranging from a mixture of critical work on technological, industry and regulatory convergence, to the emerging wider socio-cultural and political questions such as audience behaviour, plurality of TV channels and television influence.

In the current issue you can read articles from Toby Miller, Terry Flew, S. Papathanassopoulos, conference reports by I. Katsirea and Darcy Gerbarg, three book reviews, a special theme on ‘Private TV in Europe’ guest edited by Karen Donders and Caroline Pauwels with contributions from Maria Michalis, Tom Evens, Nele Simons and others.

You are all welcome to send ideas for full articles (6-6,500 words), short commentaries (1,500-2,000 words) and conference reports to be considered in the journal to Professor Petros Iosifidis (Department of Sociology, City University London), P.Iosifidis@city.ac.uk. The deadline for submitting them for issue 5.2 is end-June 2014 and for issue 5.3 mid-October 2014.

Potential issues to be addressed in future include, among others: the extent to which new media developments and changing media consumption require changes in regulatory philosophy and business practice; the extent to which globalisation, privatisation and deregulation alter the creative freedom and public accountability of media enterprises; whether digital TV actually increases choice and diversity or just offers more of the same and/or recycled programmes; concentration of media ownership and its effect on pluralism and diversity; national debates about the role of public service broadcasting in the digital epoch; comparative analyses of global TV formats; television for children; sports programming and televised sports rights.

Register now for PrestoCentre’s Preservathon on AV Preservation Storage Solutions, taking place in Turin on 25 – 26 June 2014.

Learn to select the best storage solution for your AV archive
There is no such thing as ‘everlasting’ data storage. Digital preservation requires the indefinite, error free storage of information, together with the means for its retrieval and interpretation, irrespective of changes in technologies, support and data formats, or changes in the requirements of the user community. Any choice of storage solution, therefore, involves careful consideration, needs assessment, long-term cost evaluation and so on. Where and when do vendors become involved and what do you need to know about them and their products before you make your decision?

Target Audience
Library and archive technologists, directors of collection care and IT advisors interested in the various motivations and priorities of storage for digital audiovisual media across different domains.

Learning Objectives
After this Preservathon you:

• Will have a better understanding of the concept of procurement and vendor rating;
• Will be able to map organisational requirements to the market of storage solutions;
• Will have a better understanding of functionality vs technology;
• Will have a better understanding of costs (full costs of ownership).

The Preservathon will take place on 25-26 June at Rai “Museo della Radio”, Turin, Italy. The first day will be a hands-on workshop where teams will learn what is involved selecting the best long-term audiovisual storage solution. The second day will host a mini-conference. This Preservathon is made possible by the Presto4U project.

More information: www.prestocentre.org/events/preservathon/storage-2014

Four European umbrella organizations: European Broadcasting Union, European Composers and Songwriters Alliance, European Grouping of Societies of Authors and Composer and the Global Voice of Music Publishing officially released a recommendation that sets out principles aimed at encouraging the aggregation of rights for the licensing of certain broadcast-related online activities on a cross-border basis.

These principles are pursued to strike a balance between the stakeholders’ interests and objectives to lead to the cross-border licensing of public service broadcasters. The recommendation aims to simplify the basis on which licenses of musical works in the context of “broadcast-related online activities”, i.e. additional online content related to their regular broadcasting services will be implemented within the European Union. As well as promoting a voluntary re-aggregation of rights, the recommendation also underline high levels of transparency for authors/composers and publishers, fair compensation and efficient, modern and non-discriminatory administration arrangements.

Here you can access the Recommendation for the licensing of broadcast-related online activities.

Blog written by Réka Markovich, ELTE University

EUscreenXL Conference 2014 Rome

CALL FOR PAPERS AND WORKSHOPS

From Audience to User: New Ways of Engaging with Audiovisual Heritage Online

EUscreenXL welcomes You to the EUscreenXL Conference 2014 on October 30-31 in Casa del Cinema in Villa Borghese, Rome (Italy)!

Attracting audiences and engaging users with content has become a key issue for archivists, broadcasters, educators and anyone publishing content online. With growing amounts of digitised content online, heritage projects and collection holders are increasingly aware of the need to engage with their users. Knowing how and why users interact (or don’t) with the resources and their presentation online helps inform what strategies are most insightful for the development of sustainable communities of users to participate in archival projects, enrich collections and disseminate their content. A user-oriented approach is crucial for both promotion and dissemination of online content as well as for developing sustainable future for projects and institutions in the heritage sector.

With the upcoming conference “From Audience to User: New Ways of Engaging with Audiovisual Heritage Online” the EUscreen network wants to address the current challenges for online cultural heritage initiatives and discuss these with archivists, scholars of cultural – and particularly audiovisual – heritage, web designers, data specialists and policy makers.

We invite proposals for papers and workshops that address – among others – the following questions and issues:

• How to read statistics of usage to better understand what users do, want and engage with?

• How to increase usage and and encourage engagement of the users – focus on the user experience (UX)?

• How to build and engage sustainable communities with online content?

• How to extract quantitative and qualitative data in order to be more responsive to the needs of the audience/users and those of the professionals?

• Which marketing strategies, business-oriented approaches can be identified as useful for the future development of audiovisual heritage platforms?

Please submit a paper abstract of 250 words including short abstracts and titles of each prospective paper to events@euscreen.eu. Include name, affiliation, address, and e-mail address of each author/participant.  

All proposals will be evaluated by the Conference Board.

Timeline:

Deadline for applications and abstracts: 21st May 2014

Notification of abstracts acceptance: 9th June 2014

If you have any questions about submissions, please contact Kamila Lewandowska, EUscreenXL communication specialist (kamila.lewandowska@nina.gov.pl).

We all know that good metadata is a love letter to the future – but what makes it good?

At Europeana a Task Force has been set up to look into the tricky question of what defines metadata quality and how it can be improved to ensure maximum discoverability and future re-use. EUscreen, together with selected representatives from archives, memory institutions and other domain aggregators like Europeana Sound, met up with the friendly Europeana Aggregation team at Europeana Foundation in The Hague on the 9th of April to advise on the best course of action.

Topics covered included a definition of quality criteria, factors preventing institutions from providing optimum data, and recommendations on best practice guidelines, tools and training to help providers improve and standardise the quality of their submissions. In this way, Europeana aims to offer better search result to users, enrich the data that is already accessible and thus ultimately to increase research opportunities for the digital heritage domain.

If this isn’t a love letter to the future, I don’t know what is.

For more information on Europeana’s stance on metadata, see also http://pro.europeana.eu/pro-blog/-/blogs/1442749

For an example of what Europeana views as good metadata (Provider: RTÉ Archives/EUscreen) see http://pro.europeana.eu/pro-blog/-/blogs/new-metadata-quality-task-force;jsessionid=850E6BB189DCC5527A8F1DF04DAB898F

Blog written by Eve-Marie Oesterlen, EUscreen WP2 lead, British Universities Film and Video Council