"Going EUscreenXL: on the joys and challenges of participating in a pan-European AV heritage project" by Maria Drabczyk (NInA), Kamila Lewandowska (NInA), Eve-Marie Oesterlen (BUFVC)
Developer Data Modeling Mistakes: From Postgres to NoSQL
EUscreenXL @BAAC 2014 Annual Conference in Riga
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Going EUscreenXL: on the joys and challenges of
participating in a pan-European AV heritage project
Maria Drabczyk (NInA), Kamila Lewandowska (NInA), Eve-Marie Oesterlen (BUFVC)
BAAC Conference,
Riga, September 18, 2014
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1. EUscreenXL – who and why?
2. A newcomer’s experience
3. The view from the inside
4. The end product – new euscreen.eu portal
5. The EUscreenXL Network
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EUscreenXL
29 partners
Our goal:
60,000
audiovisual materials
1 000 000
of metadata
in 2016
2014 2015 2016
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29 partners 19 content partners
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Kungliga Biblioteket
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DR
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Aalto-yliopisto Lietuvos Centrinis
Valstybės Archyvas
Deutsche Welle
Česká Televize
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Instituto Luce Cinecittà
Österreichischer Rudfunk
2
Radio Télévision Belge de
la Communauté Française
ATiT
Universite de
Luxembourg
Ireland’s National Television
and Radio Broadcaster
Radiotelevizija
Slovenija
Televisió de Catalunya
Televiziunea Română
Nederlands Instituut voor
Beeld en Geluid
Noterik
Universiteit Utrecht
European
Broadcasting Union
Nemzeti Audiovizuális
Archivum
Eötvös Loránd
University
Εθνικό Μετσόβιο
Πολυτεχνεί
Royal Holloway
University of London
The British Universities
Film & Video Council
Screen Archive
South East
Queen’s University
Belfast
Rádio e Televisão
de Portugal S.A.
Institut
national de
l'audiovisuel
Narodowy Instytut
Audiowizualny
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PMB Structure
WP2 Aggregating and Enriching
Content (BUFVC)
WP3 Contextualisation, User
Engagement and Evaluation (KB)
WP1 Project Management and
WP6 Dissemination, Exploitation
and Sustainability (NInA)
WP4 Integration and Cloud-
-based Services Platform (NTUA)
WP5 Network Expansion and
Pan-European Policies (NISV)
Pilots Leader
(RHUL)
Content
Partners
Representative (RTBF)
Quality Assurance (UU)
Project coordinator (UU)
Technical coordinator (NISV)
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Benefits
For archivists/broadcasters:
open collections to wider audiences
join network for discussion/best practice around IPR, metadata
standards, digitisation, new services and technologies
For users (educators, researchers, media professionals, enthusiasts):
access, find and explore rich variety of AV content from across Europe
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Portal
1.000.000
metadata records
free
access
thousands
of items
17
languages
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BUFVC’s task
“metadata and content uploading and oversight”
• support the delivery process in best possible way
• monitor quality standards and performance
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Key ingredients
Data and content
Metadata schema
Content selection policy
Ingestion tools
Interoperable multilingual online platform
Committed partners
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Communication is key!
Regional Workshop
for Content Partners
Technical Workshop
for Content Partners
Strategic Workshop on IPR
Regulations for Audiovisual Heritage
Metadata &
Content Handbook
Video tutorials
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Why new portal?
Users’ requirements (based on Google Analytics, focus groups and surveys):
Search, surf, build
• Less static, more dynamic and inviting homepage
• Showing ratings, most watched videos
• More information about available material
• Apps for mobile devices
• Video subtitling (respondents expressed interest in providing translations
1.000.000
themselves)
• More metadata intuitive records
search tool
• Bulilding exhibitions, rating, creating collections
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How did we do it?
Editorial policy based on collaboration within the network
(18 content providers)
Institut
national de
l'audiovisuel
1.000.000
The Netherlands Institute Romanian Public Television
for Sound and Vision
metadata records
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Danish Broadcasting
Corporation
The National Library
of Sweden Lietuvos Centrinis
Valstybės Archyvas
Deutsche Welle
Česká Televize
Instituto Luce Cinecittà
The Austrian
Broadcasting Corporation
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Radio Télévision Belge de
la Communauté Française
Ireland’s National Public
Service Broadcaster
Radiotelevizija
Slovenija
Televisió de Catalunya
Nemzeti Audiovizuális
Archivum
Screen Archive
South East
Rádio e Televisão
de Portugal S.A.
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Narodowy Instytut
Audiowizualny
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Join EUscreenXL network!
Initiate Cloud-enabled
Make use of our
technical and
archival expertise
technologies
for storing, indexing,
and linking metadata
Boost the visibility
of your content
Get your content
contextualized through
historical and cultural
experts
Develop new tools for
automatic metadata
enrichment
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EUscreenXL Conference in Rome
From Audience to User: New Ways of Engaging
with Audiovisual Heritage Online
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How to reach us?
https://www.facebook.com/EUscreen
info[at]euscreen.eu
https://plus.google.com/114583222201094670383
https://twitter.com/EUscreen
https://www.flickr.com/photos/euscreen/
http://vimeo.com/euscreen
EUscreenXL is a three-year project co-founded in 2013 under the CIP ICT-PSP Programme. The project brings online 40 000 audiovisual materials, and will soon add another 20 000 to those already presented on the EUscreen portal. It makes Europe’s audiovisual history freely accessible to a broad audience. It aims to connect Europe’s online audiovisual heritage to Europeana by aggregating a comprehensive body of professional audiovisual content and making it accessible through Europeana, providing it with about 1.000.000 metadata records and giving access to digital content held by European providers.
It is also a network of twenty-nine partners acting in the project.
The EUscreenXL project brings together twenty-nine audiovisual archives, technical and research partners from twenty-two different European countries. The project consortium consists of leading audiovisual archives, excellent media scholars, skilled technical service providers and the European Broadcasting Union.
18 of them provides also content.
Brief description
What is NInA and why we joined EUscreenXL. Double role in the project – being a content partner and dissemination coordinator.
VIEW, Journal of European Television History and Culture is the first peer-reviewed multimedia e-journal in the field of television studies. Offering an international platform for outstanding academic research on television, the journal has an interdisciplinary profile and acts both as a platform for critical reflection on the cultural, social and political role of television in Europe’s past and present as well as a multi-media platform for the circulation and use of digitized audiovisual material.
The journal’s main aim is to function as a showcase for a creative and innovative use of digitized television material in scholarly work, and to inspire a fruitful discussion between audiovisual heritage institutions (especially television archives) and a broader community of television experts and amateurs. In offering a unique technical infrastructure for a multi-media presentation of critical reflections on European television, the journal aims at stimulating innovative narrative forms of online storytelling, making use of the digitized audiovisual collections of television archives around Europe.
EUscreen portal gives public access to thousands of items of film and television clips in nineteen different languages.
Challanges: Standardise wide variety of holdings and make them interoperable and accessible on our own portal and Europeana
EUscreenXL represents a twin-track ingestion approach:
1. ‘Core Collection’ 60.000 enriched moving image content on EUscreen portal
2. ‘Aggregation’1.000.000 aggregated metadata records of digitised AV content
We mapped user’s requirements using Google Analytics and carried an Assessment of user requirements (focus groups for General Public and Researchers, surveys and questionnaires, desk research). Focus groups meeting were arranged by KB for General Public and by University of Utrecht for Researchers (2013). Then surveys and questionnaires were distributed among those groups. The aim was to gather information about basic requirements shared by researchers and users.
After thoughtful analysis of the gathered data, both from Google Analytics and the survey, we decided that the main focus should be the three core activities that represent the main actions on the portal, which are Search (exploring the collection in more depth, with an interest in geographic location, tools, timelines, links to related videos), Surf (relates to intuitive uses of the portal: guided by, for instance, ratings, most watched videos, most discussed or commented items, latest updates) and Build (to allow users to build new things out of the parts found using searching and surfing. These can range from simple actions of building bookmarks, creating your own playlists, of adding comments to complex forms like the exhibition builder in Euscreen).
We realized that:
The interface was too much focused on organizing the content (self-determined themes, historical topic sections). The Euscreen homepage should be less static, more dynamic, for example by showing ratings, most watched videos or the latest uploaded videos.
Users needed to make at least three choices to access a moving image. They should be able to play a video directly on the homepage.
More information should be given about available material on the portal and about the providers and partners. There should be and explanation concerning content selection criteria. Users also expected more information about the project aims and what the portal is about.
The lack of apps for mobile devices was a significant shortcoming (both survey and GA)
Since the content is in 15 different languages, the language issues were highlighted in the postal interface, the metadata but especially in the videos. The use of EUscreen tends to be nationally-focused rather that pan-European: the heaviest relative use of national collections tends to be user based within the same country.
Subtitling and translations: General public would prefer wide coverage of most or all clips rather than high quality translations of a selected minority. Users in both target groups called for different translation tools and they also expressed interest in providing translations themselves.
Users wanted more information about how to use search, especially researchers required assistance in ordering and narrowing down results (more exact and detailed results).
Behind the analysis and finding solutions was the Task Force, a group created in October 2013. Task Force is a communications-focused working group to work in consultation with PMB and other work packages. The group possesses expertise in key areas; technical development; social media and engagement; curation and dissemination.
Key objectives of the Task Force:
To improve the look and feel of the portal
To ensure that material on portal is displayed in an informative and appealing manner
To optimise user-friendliness of the portal
To manage user expectations
The Task Force is also responsible for developing an editorial policy, which aim is to keep the portal fresh and attractive. Except for the curatorial role, which centers around identifying varied selection of material for showcasing on portal, the group’s responsibility is also to involve all the content providers in the content selection. So far the process included:
Gathering videos for the Highlights section
Collection of thumbnail texts for most of the videos
Collection of subtitles for most interesting videos
Recent months has seen an increased focus on a redesign of the EUscreen portal. This work has been ongoing since October 2013 when the task force was created. Since then some significant decisions have been made regarding how the EUscreen portal should evolve.
The new version of the portal will be released in October 2014. An emphasis was put on making the homepage more inviting and attractive. The interface is more stylish and the user should have a better idea what the website is about. Videos, ready to be played, are published in three sections:
1.Highlights – which contains most interesting videos picked by all the content providers (with thumbnails)
2.Languages and decades – which allow users to immediately access videos in selected language or from a particular decade (from 1900 till now)
3.In the News – which contains sections created and curated by the task force. The videos are organized according to the topical subjects: political (crisis in Ukraine), anniversaries, holidays etc.
We applied a journalistic approach in order to make the homepage more appealing and up-to-date.
The new, re-developed EUscreen portal will offer users different tools which will allow to reuse the content, e.g. create virtual exhibitions or facilitate the use of videos, photos etc. in the classroom. Users, especially translation students and professionals, will be also encouraged to add subtitles to the videos and use the content for professional purposes. To this end, subtitling tools are being developed and will be integrated into the portal.
The mobile version of the portal was also created.
The About page will contain more information about available material, providers and partners, as well as the content selection criteria. It will also inform about the aggregation process to Europeana.
The search tool is organized according to different filters which enables users a much easier, more intuitive and faster surfing through the content.
Metadata facts will be presented in a more user-friendly and accessible manner.
Invitation to the EUscreenXL Conference. It will take place on October 30-31 2014 in Casa del Cinema in Villa Borghese, Rome (Italy)!
We always invite you to contact us under general address info[at]euscreen.eu
or to directly get in touch with the coordinators and work packages leaders.. You can also find us and explore EUscreen more on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Flickr and Vimeo.