Audiovisual and film archives create futures: the European Film Gateway

The challenges of accessing and preserving film – an essentially trans-national medium – cannot be solved at the national level alone. Thus in meeting modern digital challenges, European film archives are benefiting from valuable technical, legal and operational expertise within the framework of the Association des Cinématheques Européennes (ACE), an affiliation of 38 national and regional film archives from all over Europe.
Already, ACE has worked on a number of successful cooperative projects: classical analogue restoration; expansion of a joint European filmography; defining recommendations for the digitisation of films and other audiovisual content (FIRST); providing a gateway to information about the existence, location and copyright of documented material (MIDAS); and leading standardisation processes (CEN) on metadata for cataloguing and indexing of cinematographic materials. These projects are the building blocks for the European Film Gateway, a new EU-funded project uniting 20 ACE partner institutions from 14 European countries. EGF will be the key to unlocking Europe’s film archives for users of Europeana, an EC funded online library that will feature millions of digital items from Europe’s cultural heritage. ACE is a founding member of the EDL Foundation, the governing body of Europeana.

Technical and semantic interoperability
Common interoperability  standards are not yet widespread in the film archival community. While many European libraries and non-film archives already enforce common cataloguing and metadata standards as well as interoperability protocols, most film archives lack these basic preconditions e-Infrastructures for Culture, Arts & Humanities Applications for technical interoperability. By involving a large number of European film institutions, EFG aims to develop a comprehensive strategy to close this interoperability gap. The EFG system will be based on the D-Net software toolkit produced by the DRIVER project. Running D-Net enables a service-oriented distributed infrastructure that offers:
flexible and configurable tools for constructing a uniform Information Space by collecting, transforming, and indexing metadata records from a set of heterogeneous data sources
customisable functionality including user interfaces, recommendation services, and user profiling. This openness will allow EFG to be easily adapted and extended to deal with specific metadata formats and functional requirements.

Intellectual property rights
In many European countries, works of film are especially affected by copyright regulations, rendering their digital preservation and access a difficult and legally complex task. In addition to European copyright directives, a variety of legal regulations exist for non-commercial and educational use of material in film archives and cinémathèques. Further, access to works considered “orphans” can be complex and time-consuming, as film heritage institutions
face the task of trying to find and contact creators or their successors. As a result, most films and film-related objects in Europe’s film archives are effectively inaccessible. To help tackle this, EFG will develop guidelines and best practices that support film archives in avoiding legal pitfalls.

EFG and Europeana
As an aggregator of aggregators, Europeana depends on the spadework being done within the four domains: libraries, museums, archives and audio-visual archives. As a leading aggregator project, EFG will make a huge contribution to Europeana, making Europe’s rich and valuable film archive content more accessible and thus enriching user experience with a popular form of cultural expression. EFG launched in September 2008 and will run
for three years. EFG’s public operational service will launch in 2010. EFG is co-funded by the EC’s eContentplus programme and coordinated by the Deutsches Filminstitut.