Providing free access to an archive of videos, stills, texts and audio from European broadcasters and audiovisual archives from early 1900s to the present day, the EUscreen portal is now live in the UK.
‘This is a valuable resource for anyone interested in social history or indeed TV history, as it brings together tens of thousands of clips from across Europe,’ says John Ellis, Professor of Media Arts at Royal Holloway University of London (which played a key role in the content selection strategy) and principal investigator on the project. ‘The portal is available to anyone – not only academics – and it is very easy to get absorbed and spend hours browsing all of the footage’.
Presently counting in excess of 30,000 items, the portal promises interactive functionalities designed for a wide range of cultural, educational and recreational users.
‘We encourage users to actively engage with the history of Europe and the history of television regardless of the language and cultural boundaries,’ says project co-ordinator, Professor Sonja de Leeuw. ‘This is a great step forward to explore the role of television heritage in how we came to see ourselves and others in changing times.’
The project is financed by the European Union and developed by the project consortium is made up of 28 partners and nine associate partners from 20 European countries.
EUscreen has developed a content selection policy and metadata framework that ‘aligns the heterogeneous collections held throughout Europe and encourages the exploration of European television history’. As one of the main audiovisual content aggregators for Europeana, EUscreen and its collection is also connected to an online collection of millions of digitised items from European museums, libraries and archives.
The EUscreen content selection policy has been divided into three parts that will be further developed to allow visitors the opportunity to investigate, explore and watch clips and programmes in a number of different ways. These include Historical Topics, Content Provider Virtual Exhibitions, Comparative Virtual Exhibitions and Virtual Exhibitions.
More: http://www.euscreen.eu
