Tag: Digitisation

Increase availability of European films for research – Petition by University of Udine

14 March 2013 – Yesterday, at the XX Udine International Film Studies Conference ( 12-14 March) students, researchers and University professors have launched a petition to the European Parliament, the EU Council and the European Commission to increase the availability of  films to the wider public, but also for research and educational purposes by fostering the digitisation of European films and their diffusion; to create a safe legal environment in which films can be freely used in the context of research and education at all levels.

You can read more and sign the petition here:
https://www.change.org/petitions/european-commission-and-european-parliament-increase-availability-of-european-films-for-research

Filmoteca Española – new online platform

31 January 2013 – Filmoteca Española has recently given free online access to the Spanish newsreel NO-DO (Noticiarios y Documentales, 1943 – 1981).  Users can also find a selection of feature films, shorts and documentaries, among them ” Un perro andaluz”  and other important films from the collections of Filmoteca Española. The videos were published in co-operation with Radio Televisión Española – RTVE.

http://www.rtve.es/filmoteca/

Now online: Presentations from the ACE workshop “A digital agenda for film archives”

29 August 2012 – Presentations made at the ACE workshop “A digital agenda for film archives”, held on 28 June in Bologna, are now available online.  26 experts from 18 European countries discussed the practical, financial and political impacts of digital archiving. It was the 1st in a workshop series called “Management strategies for film archives in the digital era”, which will be continued in 2013.

Workshop Programme

Presentations:

Digital Agenda For Film Archives ( Mikko Kuutti, National Audiovisual Archive, Helsinki)

ACE Digital Agenda (Thomas C. Christensen, Danish Film Institute, Copenhagen)

DAEFH study-  What now? (Nicola Mazzanti, Cinematek, Brussels)

 

 

ACE Workshop Series “Management Strategies for Film Archives in the Digital Era”

4 June 2012 – With the entire film industry changing to digital, film archives need to be well prepared if they want to collect, preserve and show both analogue and digital formats. Based on the recommendations of the “ACE Position Paper on the Digital”, ACE is organising a series of 3 – 4 workshops for (higher) management staff  of the ACE member archives to discuss strategies how these challenges can be met. The workshops are conceived as forums to discuss the intellectual and practical requirements which come along with digital archiving. The aim is to pool together competences and expertise already existing in the ACE member archives in such fields as archive technology and strategic planning (digitisation planning, training, funding, etc.).

The first workshop, which starts with a general outlook and focuses on the results of the Study “Challenges of the Digital Era for Film Heritage Institutions”, will be held during the Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival in Bologna on Thursday, 28 June 2012.  Registration is open to management staff from the ACE member archives.  For further information and to register, please see the draft programme.

The second workshop, dedicated to training in digital workflows and digital preservation, will take place at the Danish Film Institute later this year or early 2013. Further workshops will be scheduled and announced in due time.

 

 

EFG1914 – Film Digitisation Project on WWI Launches

Giftgas DE 1929 8 March 2012. During the EFG1914 kick-off meeting on 27/28 February, more than 40 representatives from the 25 partner institutions came together in the German Film Museum in Frankfurt am Main. Among others, film archives from France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Serbia, Italy, Belgium, Denmark and the Netherlands will digitize up to 650 hours of film – newsreels, documentaries, propaganda and anti-war films – from and about World War I, and make the digitized collections available online through the EFG Portal www.europeanfilmgateway.eu and Europeana (www.europeana.eu). With the Imperial War Museums in London, probably the largest institutional World War I related film collection is part of the project. The films are expected to become available over the next two years, just in time for the 2014 centenary. With EFG1914, a major European co-operation project enters a new phase: During the last three years (2008-2011), The European Film Gateway became a frequently used web portal for finding films and film-related material from the film archives and cinémathèques of Europe, making available more than 500.000 objects to date. Apart from EFG1914, currently two other projects from the Europeana Group are dealing with WWI:  Europeana 1914-1918 collecting family memorabilia and Europeana Collections 1914-1918 making available material from national library collections. EFG1914 is co-funded by the  Community programme ICT-PSP. Read the EFG1914 press release (en); french version Find more about EFG1914 and its project partners on www.efg1914.eu

Workshop Digital Agenda for European Film Heritage

19 September 2011 – In January 2011, the European Commission has launched a Study on the challenges of the digital era for film heritage institutions to assess the impact of digitisation for European film archives.  A public  consultation on the preliminary findings is currently being carried out.  A workshop to validate the results of the study will be held on 20 September 2011 in Brussels.

Read the workshop agenda.

International Symposium “Digital Cinema: What Does the Future Hold for Cinematheques?”

19 September 2011 – On 13 and 14 October, film makers, curators and historians, technicians, and producers, will meet at La Cinémathèque Française in Paris to discuss the transition from analogue to digital and its impact on the founding missions of cinematheques : to collect, conserve, restore and show. The symposium will focus on 4 topics:

  • The digital revolution today and tomorrow
  • Digital filming: writing in sand?
  • Restoration and digitisation of collections
  • What future for cinematheques?

View the full programme here.

Cinema Experts Group Meeting – Subgroup Film Heritage, Brussels, 19 September 2011

19 September 2011 – The Cinema Experts Group – Subgroup Film Heritage is a platform offered by the Commission’s Audiovisual Policy and Media Unit to present and discuss projects, policies and best practices related to film heritage. This year’s meeting will focus on film heritage online (The European Film Gateway, Europeana), support models for film digitisation and copyright issues. It is hosted by the Cinematek in Brussels .

Read the agenda.

Austrian Film Museum’s Ephemeral Paper & Documents Collection Now Searchable Online

8 June 2011 – More than 10,000 titles of dossiers relating to films, personalities and other categories can now be researched online. Within the next years, this number will increase to over 50,000 dossiers.  The database allows he materials themselves cannot be displayed or downloaded. Detailed information about the content of each individual dossier can be obtained by an online request. The “results list” represents the materials held by the Museum, which can then be viewed on-site with requests made in advance.

Please visit our website to explore the collection:

http://www.filmmuseum.at/en/collections/ephemeral_paper_and_documents_collection

Acquisition of film-related materials and documents by the Film Museum dates back to the founding of the institution in 1964.

The collection contains materials and documents produced throughout the process of making movies, such as treatments, scripts, promotional materials, press kits, screening invitations, advertisements, reviews, distribution catalogs, magazines, newspaper articles and clippings, as well as unbound documents which may contain brief film descriptions or production-related information. These documents include filmmaker bios and filmographies, interviews, obituaries, and correspondence including letters, postcards and greeting cards. Another aspect of the collection is focused on film festivals, exhibitions and retrospectives, as well as technical developments in cinema and film projection, represented through materials such as program notes, exhibition catalogs, brochures and manuals.

These materials are stored in acid-free paper envelopes (numbered consecutively) in files separated into categories: Film, Personalities, Institutions, Companies, Film Festivals, Exhibitions/Retrospectives, and Technical. The file titles and groups are searchable via the database. Screenplays, along with festival and rental catalogs are stored separately.

It is the Museum’s policy to make as many materials as possible available to students as well as scholars. Open and “barrier-free” access to the collections via online search helps create transparency as well as a connection to both academics and researchers.

EC Adopts Proposal for a Directive on Orphan Works

27 May 2011 – On 24 May 2011, the European Commission adopted a Proposal for a Directive on certain permitted uses of orphan works with a view to establishing common rules on the digitisation and online display of so-called orphan works. Orphan works are works like books, published articles and films that are still protected by copyright but whose authors are not known or cannot be located or contacted to obtain copyright permissions.

According to a study ACE carried out among its member archives in 2009, about 21% of the films held in Europe’s film archives and cinematheques are estimated to be orphan works. But with no common rules available to make the digitisation and online display of orphan works legally possible, they are doomed to remain untouched and therefore inaccessible. In order to proceed with large-scale digitisation projects such as the Europeana portal, common guidelines on how to deal with such works are necessary.

The Proposal forsees a new EU law providing lawful, cross-border online access to orphan works. Libraries, museums and archives in the EU country where a work was first published would be required to conduct a thorough search to find the copyright holder before creating a digital version. If the rightholder cannot be identified or located, the work would be identified as an “orphan” and that status would apply throughout the EU so that the work could be made available online without prior authorisation until the owner is identified and found.

Further information on the Proposal for a Directive on orphan works as well as other language versions of the related documents are available here.