AVCloud · Audiovisual Use Cases for ECCCH

Audiovisual (AV) heritage is essential for creative processes and for documenting and memorialising history and society, public and private life in the 20th and 21st centuries. Vast numbers of films, videos and audio recordings constitute the holdings of film and media archives, collections, and museums, while many other cultural heritage institutions and research organisations also collect AV media objects. The AVCloud project will integrate Europe’s massive, underexplored AV heritage into the ECCCH through 15 real-life AV use cases. We will test and improve the ECCCH and its functionalities and services in close collaboration between AV professionals and researchers, computer scientists and software developers. Based on our cumulative experience with advanced digitisation, preservation, exhibition, publication, curation, research and reuse of AV heritage, we will perform testing in two stages: First-stage testing will focus on the ECCCH’s Collection Ingestion Tool (CIT) and any ECCCH AV functionalities and services that already exist or are planned by other ECCCH projects. The AVCloud Consortium will provide extensive sets of state-of-the-art AV data and perform a multilevel gap analysis and requirements elicitation (data model, vocabulary, functionalities and services) in close collaboration with the ECHOES consortium and fellow ECCCH projects. We will fill detected gaps through ECCCH AV extensions. Second-stage testing will again test the ECCCH, this time through multidisciplinary user trials and including the AV extensions provided by us. The AVCloud Consortium encompasses nine partners from five countries: film museums & archives, a film studio, AV research & educational organisations, a software enterprise, and a digital think tank. All Consortium members are deeply rooted in their domain-specific networks and communities, allowing them to effectively promote their work within the ECCCH and attract the interest of other future ECCCH users from the AV domain.