Utrecht receives €4 million EU grant for research on Europe’s television heritage
08 Oct 2009
The European Commission has granted a subsidy of over 4 million euros to the research project 'EUscreen - Exploring Europe’s Television Heritage in Changing Contexts'. Utrecht University is coordinator of this research project on accessing and using television archival material from all over Europe.
The European funding supports the position of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University as centre of European television history.
The major objective of EUscreen is to stimulate the use of television archive content for the widest range of European user communities, and thus to advance active engagement with the cultural memory of Europe both at a national and a European level. EUscreen builds on the results of 'Video Active - Creating Access to Europe’s Television Heritage', a European funded project that ended 1 September 2009 (see: www.videoactive.eu).
Easy access to digitised television material
EUscreen will build a highly interoperable digitised collection of television material, which supports the exploration of Europe’s television heritage in changing contexts. A critical mass of audiovisual content and its metadata will be made accessible through the EUscreen platform. The project will investigate, exploit and extend existing tools in order to enable content sharing among the EUscreen partners and with the European Digital Library portal Europeana, for which EUscreen will deliver the audiovisual component.
User participation
Television scholars from across Europe will be encouraged to contribute to the contextualisation of television archival material, which will be carried out from a comparative television-historiographic perspective. To this end, user-led activities such as rating and tagging systems, blogs etc. will be developed. By investigating what users need in working with European television content, EUscreen will develop and evaluate scenarios for using content for research, learning and leisure, regardless of the language and cultural boundaries. In this way the project aims to create appropriate conditions for multicultural and multilingual access and use of audiovisual (television) content that comes from across Europe.
Partners in EUscreen
EUscreen is co-oordinated by Sonja de Leeuw, Professor of Television Culture at Utrecht University, and is facilitated by the Faculty of Humanities’ EU Liaison Office. It starts on 1 October 2009 and will have a duration of 3 years.
The proposal has been developed in cooperation with the Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision in Hilversum. The project involves 27 partners, among which are 6 universities (Athens, Brussels, Budapest, Helsinki, London, and Utrecht), 18 archives (ranging from Polish TV, Romanian TV to RAI and Luce in Italy, and from Greece to the UK and Denmark and Sweden), two technical partners (Noterik in Amsterdam and the EBU in Geneva) and the European Digital Library. The EU Directorate-General Information Society and Media has granted the funding within the eContentPlus Programme (Stimulating cultural and scientific/scholarly content enrichment).
Soon online: www.euscreen.eu.