Connected to

About EFG

Aim of the EFG project is to build a web portal with direct access to over 700.000 objects including films, photos, posters, drawings, sound and text material. The project started with an inaugural meeting on 21 September 2008 bringing together representatives from the 20 partner institutions, including 14 film archives and cinémathèques of the EFG consortium. Working groups were formed to tackle the main challenges of the three year project:

Establishing technical and semantic interoperability between the heterogeneous databases of the contributing archives as well as finding solutions for rights clearance and IPR management for digitised moving images and cinema-related material.

Even today the film archival scene still lacks metadata standards for describing their collections. In spite of the EU Directive on the harmonisation of copyright in the information society, the situation in European countries is rather diverse. Moreover, rights clearing is complicated due to the multitude of rights holders of a single film work. These and more issues are being faced by the EFG work groups. Their results on finding a common interoperability schema, legal frameworks in the consortium countries and guidelines for digitisation, storage and retrieval will be made available via the EFG project website in the next months.

Establishing semantic and technical interoperability is at the heart of the project. A common metadata interoperability schema is currently being developed. The work carried out in this field is closely linked with the efforts of the Meatadata Standardisation for Cinematographic Works initiative to define a cinematographic works standard CEN.BT TC 372. Another important co-operation is the one with the EDL Foundation behind the EUROPEANA web portal. Having EDL Foundation as an EFG consortium partner ensures that the achievements gained for Europeana enrich the EFG work in the best possible way. Also, in 2010 the assembled data of the film archives will be contributed to the Europeana web portal. In addition to the EDL Foundation, the EFG consortium has five further partners that support the project with their organisational and technical competence.
The next months will be dedicated to develop technical specifications and sustainability models for the EFG web portal. The archives are currently starting to prepare their data for a smooth integration into a common EFG information space.

For further reading we invite you to visit the following websites:

Outcomes of the EFG project: http://www.europeanfilmgateway.eu/outcomes.php

Cinematographic Work Standard http://www.filmstandards.org/

Outcomes of the Europeana project: http://dev.europeana.eu/home.php

Upcoming EFG Events (Workshops & Presentations)

18 June: Cinema Experts Group: Subgroup Film Heritage, Brussels, Belgium

20-25 September: IASA 2009 Annual Conference, “Towards a new kind of archives? The digital philosophy of audiovisual Archives”, Athens, Greece
http://www.iasa2009.com/

25-29 September IASA: audiovisual archives / statt 'Archives'

27-30 September: ECDL Conference, “Digital Societies”, Corfu, Greece
http://www.ecdl2009.eu/

2 October: Communia Workshop, Barcelona, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain

4-7 October 2009: Joint BAAC & LCSA Annual Conference in Vilnius, Lithuania
'Aggregation and Management of Audiovisual Content in the Digital Space'
http://www.baacouncil.org/index.php?m=76