Projects
Europeana Sound
Présentation
Le CREM est partenaire du projet Europeana Sound, dirigé par la British Library. Ce projet est financé par l'Union Européenne. Europeana est une bibliothèque numérique européenne lancée en novembre 2008 par la commission européenne. Dans ce cadre, le projet Europeana Sound propose de créer un accès unifié aux collections sonores de grandes institutions patrimoniales et scientifique en Europe.
Le Lesc-Crem participe à Europeana Sounds (2014-2017) qui regroupera les ressources sonores d’une vingtaine d’institutions : bibliothèques nationales, fondations, centres de recherche et universités européennes. D’ici 2017, plus d’un million d’enregistrements seront disponibles sur la plateforme audio Europeana Sounds, donnant à écouter la variété et la richesse du patrimoine sonore collecté par les institutions européennes au cours de ces 130 dernières années. Tous les types de contenus audio seront librement accessibles : des musiques (classique, contemporaine, traditionnelle ou de variété) aux contes et récits issus de la tradition orale, en passant par les bruitages, les ambiances sonores ou les sons de la nature, les langues courantes ou oubliées et les enquêtes de terrain issues de la recherche en sciences humaines et sociales.
PRESENTATION
(Abstract from "Description of work") Europeana Sounds creates a much-needed gateway to Europe’s incomparably rich sound and music collections. Many of Europe’s leading cultural heritage institutions have large, high quality audio collections which have great value for a wide range of general and professional audiences, but access to them is fragmented and constrained. So while audio is one of the most popular media types available through Europeana (equally true of the Web as a whole), it represents just 2% of Europeana overall. This project will bring together for the first time major European audio collections and specialist technologists to solve the problem. The project has six specific objectives which will result in delivery of the measurable outcomes listed below.
- Aggregation: provide a critical mass of digital audio tracks and supporting objects through Europeana to meet the needs of public audiences, creative industries and academic researchers.
- Enrichment: support discovery and use by improving metadata through innovative methods including semantic enrichment and crowdsourcing.
- Access: work with our content providers as well as publishers, the recorded music industry, rights holders, and libraries to improve access to out-of-commerce audio content and increase the opportunities for creative re-use of Europeana content.
- Channels: enhance the existing Europeana portal by implementing a mechanism for providing channels that enable specific user communities to discover, share and annotate digital audio content and which can be extended to address other communities of interest and media.
- Infrastructure: underpin the technical infrastructure required to enable the aggregation of metadata from archived digital content, primarily music and speech audio, including out-ofcommerce recordings and crowdsourced content, through the Europeana portal.
- Dissemination and networking: expand the work of the Europeana Sounds Best Practice Network among target audiences, acting as a catalyst for the inclusion of a significant quantity of items from collection-holders not yet engaged with Europeana.
CONSORTIUM
The Consortium has 24 partners from 12 countries selected for their content, technical, delivery and impact expertise. The core group of six are all active contributors to initiatives such as Europeana Creative and EUScreenXL and includes the Europeana Foundation (EF) itself. This will ensure maximum synergy with other Europeana initiatives and all the work proposed is foreseen in the Europeana business plan. The British Library (BL), Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (NISV) and Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF) are three core content-providers joined by a further 15 sources of high-quality material, including ten that have not previously submitted audio material to Europeana. They include partners from Italy, Portugal, Greece, Latvia and the UK (Member States prioritised by Europeana because of their disproportionate under-representation).
IMPACT
The Europeana Sounds network has already received commitments to aggregate at least 530,000 rights-cleared audio and audio-related items from national libraries and archives, specialist sound archives, research institutes and non-profit foundations. This project will within three years more than double the amount of audio content aggregated in Europeana over the past seven years. Providers have also committed to develop solutions for IPR issues to increase that amount further and will work with users to improve the delivery of audio content. By forming a Best Practice Network including internationally renowned institutions we can give these issues the high visibility required. We anticipate working with new content providers who will become associated members of the network. These relationships will result in a total inventory of sound and sound-related content by the end of the project of at least 1.5m items and much more if rights are cleared for access to additional content. We shall also work with three commercial organisations, Historypin, Spotify and SoundCloud, to bring in their existing audiences and extend further the public reach of Europeana’s rich sound collections.