The FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2008 will take place in Copenhagen, from 19. - 22. September 2008. The title of this conference is: Archives in Changing Climate. This event marks the official launch of the Video Active portal, currently available in Beta.

On Saturday, September 20th, a Video Active Workshop will take place as part of the conference programme. Hosted by Prof. Dr. Sonja de Leeuw and Johan Oomen, the workshop will include a full demonstration of the portal as it stands, whilst addressing issues of comparison, contextualisation and the presentation of archival material through the portal. With the help of show cases around one or two of the topics that Video Active has defined this workshop aims to demonstrate the comparative approach in more detail. Alsothe future relationship with Europeana, Europe’s digital library, museum and archive, will be addressed.

Registration is already open. Video Active looks forward to meet you at the FIAT/IFTA Conference and explore possible collaborations. The consortium still welcomes associate partners from across the world.

(more…)

At the European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (NECS) conference in Budapest a workshop was held on Online Archives. Presenters were Rick Prelinger (21st Century Archives: Access, Authority and the Social Contract) and three members of the Video Active consortium: Sonja de Leeuw (Creating TV Memories Across Europe. Transnational Archiving and Transnational TV History), András Balint Kovács (Mission Impossible – Cultural Heritage versus Online Services), and Pelle Snickars (Media as Archives). Sonja de Leeuw presented on Video Active and focused on the possibilities and limitations of doing transnational televlsion history. It was discussed how Video Active provides one solution as it creates access to Europe’s television heritage through a multilingual portal, and at the same time it intensifies co-operation between archives, academics and technology. Video Active’s added value was dicussed in terms of comparison, metadata and signifying practices. Its possible implications were addressed by focusing on the relationship between heritage, memory and identity and by discussing how the archive would function as a cultural agent and cultural practice. Issues such as access online, canonicity as well as the changing relationship between audioviual culture and its participants were also addressed in the other presentations and made up for a lively discussion on online archives.

Over the past months, Video Active has conducted user surveys, defined the content selection policy, added metadata to hundreds of video files and constructed a multilingual portal for managing assets. Final tests of the front-end are executed now, but a sneak preview can be accessed online.  Screenshots of the backend are also available for download. We aim to lanch the first public version of the portal in a few weeks from now.

Video Active participates in the Europeana/EDLnet conference later this month, titled ”Users expect the interoperable“. It’s taking place at Monday 23 and Tuesday 24 June 2008 at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague, The Netherlands.

Video Active has been involved with the EDLnet network from its beginning, participating in “Work Package 3: Users and Usability”, that aims at delivering a final set of recommendations on users and usability for the operational Europeana service.