Project Details
AV-EFI - Automated interlocking system for audiovisual holdings via uniform film identifiers
Subject Area
Theatre and Media Studies
Term
since 2023
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 517778207
The networking of standardized scientific metadata across institutions is an overarching social goal. It enables more efficient structures, further innovations and thus continues the tradition of the large associations in the archive and library sector. The "AV-EFI" project makes a novel contribution to this overarching goal in the field of audiovisual film holdings and their evidence for scientific research and cultural heritage. It addresses film and media studies in particular, but also the interdisciplinary humanities and cultural studies, especially the digital humanities. The project will develop and test how a cross-institutional, web-based system, in which Persistent Identifiers (PID) play a central role, can serve as a research infrastructure for identifying AV works, their associated versions and data objects, and how they can be linked to each other. The PID system with the uniform film identifiers (“EFI”) assumes the function of a central database, brings together the existing metadata of the different versions and materials from the original databases of various institutions in a structured and, as far as possible, automated manner and thus ensures the free and long-term availability of this information. It is planned to support the disambiguation and allocation of metadata from different institutions through automatic synchronisation and matching routines. The network system to be developed, including a user-friendly search and editing interface, is intended to complement the already available "ecosystem" of (film) identifiers, data and authority files (e.g. Filmportal, EIDR; GND, NFDI4Culture) in a meaningful way and to fit into this as an original offer with a strong reference to holdings.The initial two-year project, in close cooperation with practice partners and representatives of research communities, not only serves the exemplary, modular development and testing of the system on a technical level. Last but not least, it is important to work out and define detailed requirements, rules and workflows together, especially in the area of metadata management, with the aim of creating a long-term service. The system is intended to serve the verification and linking of film holdings of all origins and genres. However, the project addresses a gap: with a special focus on educational and scientific films as well as ephemeral film material or amateur films, these genres are to be made available to research for the first time in an interlocking system as a "small” film alongside the "big" film. Through a low-threshold, automated, resource-saving technology, smaller institutions in particular will be given the opportunity to participate in and contribute to the project.
DFG Programme
Research data and software (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
Co-Investigators
Dr. Sven Bingert; Antje Dittmann; Annette Groeschke; Jürgen Keiper; Matti Stöhr