Creating Access to Europe’s Television Heritage Vienna, EDL Workshop November Dr. Alexander Hecht (Austrian Broadcasting Corporation ORF) Johan Oomen MA (Sound and Vision ~ technical director)

Background  Television = a cultural space  European dimension hardly explored  Access remains restricted because of - Technology - Rights issues - Content sources

Main Objectives  Stimulating use and re-use of a large body of digitised television archive content consisting of selected, comparable programme material  Accompanying the selected content by knowledge- based descriptions  Presenting the selected content using new and existing metadata  Advancing active engagement with the cultural memory of Europe, in close collaboration with related initiatives, such as The European Library

Supporting Objectives  Providing targeted, enriched access to heterogeneous television collections  Establish a flexible technical platform  Serving as a platform for all heritage organisations with moving image content  Enabling in-depth academic research into the history of television in Europe  Stimulating awareness of the role television played in the construction of cultural identities in Europe.

Dimensions  4.5 million hours  10 languages English, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Greek, Hungarian, Catalan, Danish and Swedish  Duration of the project: 36 months Other European audiovisual archives will join

Advisory Board  FIAT/IFTA International Federation of Television Archives  International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives  European Broadcasting Union  British Film Institute  Joanneum Research  University of Madrid

European Television History Network  Launched at FIAT/IFTA 2004  Emphasising the need for close co-operation between archives and academics  Advising on the content selection strategy  Developing highly relevant case studies in European television history (comparative and cross-cultural)  Remaining sensitive to what the different archives hold: again: close co-operation!

BIRTH Television Archive

Architecture

Backend Thesaurus module Multilinguality Contribution application Metadata and transcoding

Workflow (client based scenario) Portal ThesauriX Contribution Tool

Mapping tool (Technical University of Athens) Video Active schemalegacy schema Mapping tool (creates conversion script) Descriptive metadata: Dublin Core Technical metadata: MPEG-7

Milestones  M1 User requirements specified and framework for content selection developed (March 2007)  M2 Launch of Video Active portal Version 1 (assessment and refinement) (November 2007)  M3 Launch of Video Active portal Version 2 (October 2008)

SWOT analysis StrengtsWeakness  Offering video content  Rich metadata  Existing community and tools  Limited domain (television history) OpportunitiesThreats  Interoperability with other collections (new services)  Use the material in education  Use technology of other projects  IPR will possibly limit the content available  Other suppliers of the same content

Dr. Alexander Hecht ~ (WP3 leader – Austrian Broadcasting corporation) Johan Oomen MA ~ (Technical Director - Sound and Vision)