About

To date, an ever-growing amount of digitised collections including moving images and cinema related material is widely dispersed across Europe. Domain specific research across the various repositories, institutions and countries is still lacking.

Initiated by ACE (Association des Cinémathèques Européennes) and the Europeana Foundation, the EFG project will develop a portal providing direct access to about 790,000 digital objects including films, photos, posters, drawings, sound material and text documents. Content will be provided mostly by film archives and cinémathèques, which are partners in the project. The collections to be made accessible have been selected to serve as a sample representing the actual digitised content held in the film institutions. The project started in September 2008 and will run for three years.

The European Film Gateway portal will be linked to the Europeana portal, which is creating the European digital library, museum and archive, providing integrated access to digital treasures from museums, archives, audio-visual archives and libraries of Europe. By making its archival content available through the common interface of Europeana, EFG will contribute to fulfilling one of the major promises of an integrated digital environment: enabling users to search and retrieve different media  via a single access point.

While developing the EFG portal service, the project will address a number of key issues for access to digital content, namely, technical and semantic interoperability, metadata standards, best practices for rights' clearance and IPR management of cinematographic works.

EFG is a Best Practice Network funded by the European Commission under the eContentplus programme, as part of the i2010 policy.

The project is coordinated by the Deutsches Filminstitut - DIF e. V. (Frankfurt).