EFG: The European Film Gateway

Initiated by ACE (Association des Cinémathèques Européennes) and the EDL Foundation, the EFG project is in the process of developing a portal providing direct access to more than 700,000 digital objects including films, photos, posters, drawings, sound material and text documents. Content will be provided mostly by film archives and cinémathèques, which are partners in the project. The collections to be made accessible have been selected to serve as a sample representing the actual digitised content held in the film institutions. The project started in September 2008 and runs for three years.

The European Film Gateway portal will be linked to the Europeana portal. By making its archival content available through the common interface of Europeana, EFG will contribute to fulfilling one of the major promises of an integrated digital environment: enabling users to search and retrieve different media via a single access point.

While developing the EFG portal service, the project will address a number of key issues for access to digital content, namely, technical and semantic interoperability, metadata standards, best practices for rights' clearance and IPR management of cinematographic works. So far, EFG has adopted prEN 15907 as a basis for filmographic data exchange, and EAC (beta, 2004) for the exchange of name authority data.

EFG is a Best Practice Network funded by the European Commission under the eContentplus programme, as part of the i2010 policy. The project is coordinated by the Deutsches Filminstitut - DIF e. V. (Frankfurt).

More information is available from the EFG homepage and via the EFG newsletter.

Rev. 29-Jun-2009