6-7 July 2017, Final Recommendations from the Audiovisual Media in Europeana Task Force

1. Presentation & Review of the
Final Recommendations from the
Audiovisual Media in Europeana
Task Force
S. Bartholmei (DDB), European MC-Meeting, Copenhagen Jul 6

2. TF coordinates
• proposed in Feb 2016, 2 face-2-face meeting, Google Hangouts
• Chairs
• Members
Erwin Verbruggen Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision Chair
Johan Oomen Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision Co-chair
Aubéry Escande Europeana Foundation Europeana liaison
Marco Rendina Istituto Luce Cinecittà European Film Gateway
EUscreen
Julia Welter Deutsches Filminstitut European Film Gateway
Maria Drabczyk Narodowy Instytut Audiowizualny EUscreen
Richard Ranft British Library Europeana Sounds
Rutger Rozendal Noterik BV EUscreen
Rodolphe Bailly Cité de la Musique-Philharmonie de Paris Musical Instruments Museums Online
Álex Hinojo Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona Wikipedia GLAM Ambassador

3. TF came up with 10 recommendations
Increase Visibility for Audiovisual Items in Europeana Collections
Recommendation 1 Increase Visibility for Audiovisual Items in Europeana Collections
Recommendation 2 Create Ample Opportunities to Include Audiovisual Content in Curation
Recommendation 3 Explore Possibilities for External Editorial Use of Audiovisual Content
Recommendation 4 Offer Unified Audiovisual Playout
Optimise Integration of Audiovisual Content to Improve its Usage
Recommendation 5 Offer a Shared Streaming Infrastructure
Recommendation 6 Bring Audiovisual Assets to the Semantic Web
Recommendation 7 Include Citations for Research
Recommendation 8 Implement Content-based Indexing for Audiovisual Materials
Accessibility of Audiovisual Media
Recommendation 9 Create an Infrastructure around Subtitled Media on Europeana
Recommendation 10 Allow Time-based Annotation and Metadata Creation to Make More Relevant Search Queries

4. Overall evaluation – personal feedback by SB
• Could use some editing
• (too) many ideas
• Half of the recommendations are duplicates, too generic or based on anecdotal
evidence.
• Due to lack of explanation of community specific terms and acronyms parts of the
report aren‘t understandable outside the A/V community.
• Especially Rec.s 4 & 5 (AV media server and player infrastructure) are very
important for Europeana‘s attractiveness and fit right into the on-going IIIF
efforts.
• Also beneficial for whole ecosystem.
• Should be followed up within the next Generic Services Call.
• Some recommendations (e.g. Rec. 7) should be discussed, followed-up in
broader contexts.

5. #1: Increase Visibility for Audiovisual Items in
Europeana Collections
• Summary
AV content is numerically underrepresented, can‘t be found (due to
some sort of unexplained ranking malus) in European collections and
should get an exemption to enter EPF tier 2 without a direct link.
• Notes
• Goal (more AV visibility) is valid, proposed solution lacks effort.
• Only anecdotal evidence is presented. Needs more work.
• Very much from A/V provider/aggregator POV, ignores end user perspective.
• No solutions how to achieve tier 2 are developed, just exemption suggested.
• Concrete recommendation: include AV teasers in search results

6. #2: Create Ample Opportunities to
Include Audiovisual Content in Curation
• Notes
• too generic
• Only concrete recommendation refers to recommendation #4

7. #3: Explore Possibilities for External Editorial Use
of Audiovisual Content
• Summary
EPF ist too harsh. E.g. 97% of videos can‘t be re-used (due to legal
reasons). EuScreen <-> EuroClio, mismatch between content holders
possibilites & educators‘ high expectations. Successfull social media
experiment: labour-intensive, but with measurable impact.
• Notes
• Report unfortunately doesn’t offer any ideas how to improve the situation.
• Numbers for social media experiment lacking.

8. #4: Offer Unified Audiovisual Playout
• Summary
• Current situation: no Europeana video player, only embedding of external players.
• There are quite a few existing projects to build upon.
• Requirementss for Implementation
• OSS HTML5 video (and audio) player
• Play-in (Europeana portal)
• Subtitles
• time-aligned metadata / annotations
• Keyframe / thumbnail extraction
• Secure (DRM) playout
• Video.js based
• IIIF compatible
• Benefits
• Additional functionality for Europeana‘s users
• Re-usable (esp. in connection with Rec. #5) for smaller CHIs.
• TF Recommendation
• Explore wether solution exists. (SB: Don‘t ignore commercial solutions!)
• Build Prototype with the same partners that build Euscreen player.

9. #5: Offer a Shared Streaming AV media server
Infrastructure
• Summary
• At the moment there are only 27.350 records that point directly to video files and
about 61.000 that point directly to audio files.
• Almost all technically inferior legacy formats, require special players (not support by
state-of-the art HTML5 players).
• Proposal: develop and offer a shared infrastructure for hosting, processing and
streaming audiovisual content as an integrated component of the Europeana DSI.
• Recommendations for Implementation
• transcode legacy and proprietary formats
• thumbnail and keyframe extraction
• subtitle support
• Benefits (selection)
• „long tail“ institutions could provide at least tier 2 material
• Notes
• Why aren‘t IIIF AV developments mentioned?

10. #6: Bring Audiovisual Assets to the Semantic Web
• Notes
• mixed bag of recommendations
• follow LD-Standadts like 'Metadata Standards for Cinematographic Works' (CEN TC 372)
and
• multimedia hyperlinking (should be two recs ?)
• not enough meat to evaluate
• low-hanging-fruit solution could be addressed in EDM (several objects linkt to different parts
of the same AV media file)

11. #7: Include Citations for Research
• Summary
• fetching and automatically importing bibliographic references into
bibliography applications is very important for researchers
• the equivalent conventions of attribution – footnotes, endnotes,
bibliographies – remain challenging for moving images and recorded sound
• Minimum viable product could be “cite this“ button, but problem of
persistency remains
• Notes
• Should be addressed in broader context (Wasn‘t there a dedicated TF for
persistent Ids and citation?)

12. #8: Implement Content-based Indexing for
Audiovisual Materials
• Summary
• Automatic or semi-automatic extraction of metadata (descriptors) from video
and audio is a topic explored in several research projects, might not be ready
for production (scalabiltiy issues) yet.
• Investing directly in research and development of new technologies on the
topic of automatic metadata/features extraction is out of the scope of the
actual Europeana DSI framework. Experiments might be fruitful.
• Notes
• The age of GPU is here: technology is production ready IMHO.
• Could be addressed within Rec. 5 (as a IIIF service)

13. #9: Create an Infrastructure around Subtitled
Media on Europeana
• Notes
• Duplicate with recommendation #4 (Europeana video player)

14. #10: Allow Time-based Annotation and
Metadata Creation to Make More
Relevant Search Queries
• Notes
• Section too short to evaluate or reviewer too dumb to understand.