The first EUscreen Open Workshop has taken place in Mykonos City, Greece, on June 23 and 24. The programme of the first day was filled with presentations about the practices within EUscreen whereas the programme of the second day contained presentations about the developments within other European projects.  A detailed report of the workshop as well as the presentations will be online shortly.

This workshop has been the first of nine workshops which will be organised during the course of the project. Every workshop will focus on one or two aspects of the EUscreen project. This one focused on metadata schemes and content selection policies. Over 60 participants have travelled to Mykonos to attend the workshop. The next EUscreen event will be the 1^st EUscreen International Conference on Content Selection Policies and Contextualisation in Rome. More information about this conference will be announced later this week.

By Wietske van den Heuvel

Date: 23-24 June 2010.
Location: KDEPAM Conference Centre, Mykonos City, Greece.

Only one week to go before the EUscreen Open Workshop starts next Wednesday at the KDEPAM Conference Centre in Mykonos City, Greece. The conference programme promises to be very interesting, with on day 1 presentations about the development the EUscreen project has made since its start in October 2009 and on day 2 an update on the latest developments within other major European projects.

On the first day, workshop participants will get a preview of the EUscreen portal and the mapping and annotation tools. Also, the handbook on content selection guidelines and metadata definition will be released.

On the second day, two sessions will be held: one about metadata and one about applications. The metadata session contains presentations about EBUcore by Jean-Pierre Evain from the European Broadcasting Union, the EFG metadata schema by Julia Welter from the European Film Gateway, the activities within the Media Annotation Working Group by Tobias Bürger from W3C and the Europeana Data Model by Carlo Meghini from the EDM Group. The applications session will highlight various applications through presentations about what users can do with multimedia by Natasa Sofou from WeKnowIt, use of linked data by Guus Schreiber from NoTube/Free University of Amsterdam,  automatic metadata extraction by Marco Bertini from VIDI-Video & IM31 and the PrestoPRIME project by Johan Oomen from the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and Günter Mühlberger from the University of Innsbruck Library.

Registration for the workshop is still open. A social event has been planned on Wednesday evening. Participants who would like to join can subscribe to this event during arrival on the first day.

By Wietske van den Heuvel

Delegates of EUscreen have been present at a number of conferences and meetings in the beginning of June, disseminating the results of the project. Johan Oomen did a presentation during the TERENA Networking Conference in Vilnius about the relation between EUscreen and Europeana. The slides of this presentation are included here.

Johan Oomen also attended the EuroITV2010 Conference in Tampere, were he showed a demo of EUscreen and Video Active. Sally Reynolds highlighted the value of EUscreen for education during the EDEN Conference in Valencia in a session about networked learning and web 2.0 studies. The Kungliga Biblioteket in Stockholm hosted an event for the delegates of the Romanian Academy Library, where Christoper Nátzen gave a presentation about EUscreen. The end of June will be devoted to the first EUscreen Open Workshop on Metadata Schemes and Content Selection Policies, which takes place next week in Mykonos.

Press release by Europeana

Venue: Cologne University of Applied Sciences, Cologne, Germany
Date: July 19-20, 2010

In cooperation with the German National Library, the Institute of Information Management at the Cologne University of Applied Sciences has organised Concepts in Context, the conference on Interoperability and Semantics in Knowledge Organisation. The talks present current developments in the field of knowledge organisation, especially theoretical foundations for interoperability and semantic enrichment.

The conference will offer a platform for discussing recent developments and activities to improve interoperability and search functionalities of knowledge organisation systems with internationally renowned information specialists like Stella Dextre Clarke, Maja Žumer and Dagobert Soergel. It will also present and assess several ideas and models which have been developed in the context of two current research projects, CrissCross and RESEDA.

The programme as well as further information and a registration form can be found on the conference website.

By Wietske van den Heuvel

Today, Johan Oomen will be showcasing EUscreen during the TERENA Networking Conference (TNC2010) in Vilnius, Lithuania. The conference is hosted by the Lithuanian National Research and Education Network (LITNET). TNC is the largest and most prestigious European research networking conference – over 500 participants including decision makers, networking specialists and managers from all major European networking and research organisations, universities, worldwide sister institutions and industry representatives attend.

The presentation about EUscreen is part of the session Media and Content which focuses on a few important content distribution video portal services that demonstrate the usefulness of video sharing, both in education and research and in on-line presentation of cultural heritage. Besides EUscreen, SURFmedia, Mediamosa and SWITCHcast will be showcased. The session can be followed live.

By Berber Hagedoorn & Dana Mustata

On May 14^th, l’Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA) in Paris hosted the 1st FIAT/IFTA Television Studies Seminar. Participants came from a wide range of countries: India, Greece, Romania, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Great Britain and France. PhD students, professors and archivists presented their research results. The papers presented findings resulting from studies in television archives and were illustrated by archival material from their holdings. Presentations were structured around four main panels: “Television and memory”, “Early TV, going from black & white to colours”, “News broadcast & current affairs: comparative approaches” and “Television and cinema”. The event promoted academic research in FIAT/IFTA member archives, which provided excerpts for illustration during the presentations. Liselotte Doeswijk (University of Amsterdam) was selected to present her paper on “Colour and Graphic Design for Television” at the upcoming FIAT 2010 Conference in Dublin.

Members from the EUscreen consortium were predominantly present at the event. Alexander Hecht (ORF), Claude Mussou (INA) and Andy O’Dwyer (BBC) were part of the organizing FIAT/IFTA Television Studies Commission. From the EUscreen partner Utrecht University, Berber Hagedoorn presented on “Television as a Practice of Memory: the Case of Herinnert U Zich Deze Nog?” based on archival materials from the Dutch Institute for Sound and Vision. Dana Mustata, also from Utrecht University, presented on “Televising European Events: from Cold War Borders to EU Borders” providing archival materials from the Romanian Multimedia Archives and Video Active. Members of the European Television History Network also participated.

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.

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.