Giving Users What They Want: Bringing Audiovisual Sources Online
Erwin Verbruggen and Johan Oomen
Non-professional audiovisual archive users are requesting higher access, higher quality, higher independence to do with materials what they want. Granting them that freedom can create remarkable outcomes: remix videos, additional descriptions, revived interest, reuse in mobile applications or putting new life in previously unknown and unloved content. Yet more is needed to bring our audiovisual heritage to this level. This panel discusses the bumps and strains for audiovisual archives to get the materials they carefully preserve out in the world. it will discuss the status of publishing audiovisual heritage online and the policy changes that archives, funding bodies and law makers alike could adapt to make this possible.
This panel includes participants from audiovisual heritage institutions, broadcasters and the academic domain who take part to discuss possible solutions to these dilemmas. We will discuss how the EUscreenXL project, which takes the assembled collections from 19 European broadcasting archives in EUscreen in a new direction, the Med-mem project, which has created an entry portal for broadcasters from the mediterranean and the European Film Gateway, the portal for film archives, have envisioned public access to audiovisual heritage. In the panel, 3 heritage project members (Erwin Verbruggen, Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision; Mireille Maurice, INA; Georg Eckes; Deutsches Film Institute) will discuss the pitfalls and necessary policy recommendations with 2 academic participants: Susanna Kleeman from Royal Holloway, University of London, who has worked on BBC's iPlayer and Motion Gallery and conducts market research for EUscreenXL, and Andreas Fickers, Maastricht University, who is leading research into platforms for cross-media storytelling and is editor-in-chief for the journal of European television history and culture VIEW.