EUscreen - Discover Europe’s Television Heritage

As historical television content is being digitised and some of it increasingly available online, access to audiovisual archives (television in particular) remains scattered. EUscreen built a network of content providers, standardisation bodies, television research partners and specific user groups around the task of providing multilingual and multicultural access to television heritage.

The EUscreen portal is a unique showcase of Europe's television heritage. The project consortium is made up of 34 archives, broadcasters, universities and technical partners from 19 European countries. The online portal is meant for the widest range of cultural, educational and recreational users by employing a number of interactive functionalities and dynamic links with Europeana - the single access point to millions of cultural objects and archival records that have been digitised throughout Europe.

Thousands of videos and images are available for free online consultation, and additional content is added on a daily basis. The portal provides a wide variety of functionalities to search and browse the collection, which can be used in different contexts such as curricula and research programmes, for remix, and for leisurely dives into popular history. The portal www.euscreen.eu was officially launched in celebration of UNESCO's World Day of Audiovisual Heritage on October 27th, 2011. Additional tools for curated exhibitions and an academic e-journal will become available in 2012.

We take special care to provide all our items, coming from more than 20 European television and audio-visual archives, with well-aligned and comprehensive metadata to fully contextualise our content. All descriptions are available both in English and the original language and all items are fully accessible for online streaming.

By the end of this year, EUscreen will contribute over 30,000 digital items celebrating Europe's cultural diversity. This material is not only about television, it is also about how television documents and shapes history and historical events, and how they in turn affect television. This material offers a great insight into our history within and across different European nations.
 
For a video introduction to the project see http://vimeo.com/31778916