News

June, 2010: Dissemniation activities to be scheduled
The European Commission has awarded a grant to CEN for a series of dissemination activities promoting the use of the two new metadata standards, EN 15744 and EN 15907. Coordinated by the German Standards Institute (DIN), these activities will include four workshop-type seminars hosted by major European film archives. The first of these seminars will be scheduled for the end of 2010 in Rome, Italy, to be followed by three further seminars in Prague, Copenhagen and Paris during the first half of 2011. Seminar dates and further details will be published on this website as they become available.

February, 2010: Open Call for Project Team Experts
CEN/TC 372 has issued an open call for experts to conduct dissemination activities around the EN cinematographic metadata standards. These activities will consist of preparing proof-of-concept and reference implementations of the standard, and of a series of hands-on seminars to be held in several locations within the EU. An outline of these activities can be found here, while the terms of reference can be downloaded from here. Please note that the deadline for applications has been extended to March 20, 2010.

December, 2009: Final draft for EN 15907 now available
The preparation of EN 15709, the metadata sepcification for cinematographic works, has now reached the final stage by entering the formal vote process at CEN. The text submitted to CEN is available from this server and incorporates the resolutions from the last TC meeting which took place in Frankfurt in November, 2009. A corresponding version in German is also available. It is not expected that these version wills undergo significant changes before publication by CEN. Please note that draft versions of the standard will no longer be available for download once the standard is available for purchase.

December, 2009: Updated OAI schema release for EFG
DIF has released an updated version of the XML schema for OAI harvesting of metadata for non-audiovisual resources. This is a two-part schema, consisting of DIF's native element definitions and a wrapper that maps these to OAI-DC schema elements with extensions for EFG and Europeana. EFG partners are encouraged to adapt these schemas for making their own non-AV metadata available via the OAI protocol.

April, 2009: EFG interoperabilty group adopts prEN 15907 as guideline
A recent meeting of the European Film Gateway technical interoperability group led by CNR-ISTI in Pisa (Italy) was devoted to the design of a common metadata schema for the project. The group agreed to use the current draft of prEN 15907 as a guideline for modelling most elements of the interoperability schema that relate to cinematographic works and their manifestations. For non-film documents, an adaptation of the Europeana Semantic Elements (ESE) definition was proposed. Authority metadata such as those about persons and corporate bodies will be exchanged using the Encoded Archival Context (EAC) XML schema. This approach conforms to the current definition of the AgentReference element in prEN 15907 which delegates the detailed modelling of Agent authorities to external schemas.

February, 2009: prEN 15907 undergoing formal review
Part two of the metadata specification for cinematographic works has reached the stage of a final working draft for a European Standard. The draft has been submitted for formal review by all European standards bodies and the outcome of the review process is expected in autumn of 2009. In the meantime, a preliminary reference implementation using the XML schema language will be issued to parties interested in an early adoption of the standard.

04-Aug-2008: Revised MIDAS XML schema available
The MIDAS project has released version 1.1 of its XML schema for the exchange of filmographic records. This version defines metadata elements for representing catalogue records from all current MIDAS partners, including those that are being prepared for the upcoming Europeana project. Schema documentation can be found on this site.

Draft of second CWS part to be discussed in Madrid.
The CEN.BT Technical Committe 372 (formerly: TF 179) has scheduled a meeting on the 6th and 7th of October, 2008, in Madrid. This meeting will focus on discussion of the first complete draft for the second part of the cinematographic works standard, to be subsequently submitted to formal review.

29/30-May-2008: CEN.BT TF 179 to meet in Vilnius.
The 8th meeting of the Cinematographic Works Standards Group (a.k.a. CEN.BT Task Force 179, now renamed to CEN.BT TC 372) was held at the Lithuanian State Archives in Vilnius. This meeting was devoted to deciding upon comments received during the review phase for part 1, and to discussing the draft element list for part 2 of the Standard. In contrast to part 1, which defines essential data elements for the identification of film works, part 2 will provide an element set and syntactical rules for structuring and representing a large fraction of statements found in existing filmographic records. It is expected that the final document will define a "canonical" data representation while allowing for some variation in several data elements without affecting overall interoperability.

18-Apr-2008: Meeting on FIAF Cataloguing Rules.
A meeting of the FIAF Cataloguing and Documentation Commission was held as part of the 64th FIAF Congress in Paris. Delegates discussed the current state and further requirements for the revision of the FIAF Cataloguing Rules for Film Archives. Members of the CWS Task Force reported on the CEN standardization activity and several discussions were be devoted to coordination between FIAF activities and other initiatives, including RDA, ISBD, IFLA-FRBR, and CEN-CWS.

07/08-Feb-2008: 7th meeting of CWS group.
CEN.BT Task Force 197 held its 7th meeting on the premises of DIN in Berlin. Participants decided that part 1 of the standard still requires a few amendments. Part 2 will not contain controlled vocabularies for element values. Instead, users of the standard will be required to declare the origin of any controlled vocabularies used. This decision will be reflected in changes to the introductory chapters. The issue of relationships between major data elements in the CWS and the model defined by the IFLA Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) will be studied further before the next meeting which will take place in Vilnius, Lithuania, in May.

06-Feb-2008: MIDAS releases XML schema.
The MIDAS project has released version 1.0 of an XML schema designed for data interchange between partner institutions. The namespace URI for the schema is

http://www.filmstandards.org/midas/fw-view/1.0

Full documentation is available here. An export facility using this schema is under development and will be availabe via http://www.filmarchives-online.eu.

15-Oct-2007: CWS part 1 is now prEN 15744.
The German Standards Institute (DIN), acting as the secretariat for the cinematograpic works standard, has submitted part 1 as a draft European Standard ( prEN 15744) to CEN members for enquiry. This first stage in the review process ends on March 8, 2008.
CEN members are the national standards bodies of Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and United Kingdom.