With the support of ACE (Association des Cinémathèques Européennes) and the EDL Foundation, the EFG Best Practice Network aims at finding and implementing solutions for providing integrated access to the wealth of Europe’s cinematographic heritage. To date, digitised collections of moving images and cinema-related material are dispersed, lacking the possibility of domain-specific search and access across the various repositories, institutions and countries. Considerable challenges exist in several fields: The problem of lacking coherence in digitisation practice and metadata standards across the film archives and cinémathèques has to be tackled in order to provide for the basic technical and semantic preconditions for integrated access. Furthermore, the solving of IPR issues is crucial for providing access to both digitised moving images and cinema-related material. Both challenges can only be met in a collaborative way by building a network of film institutions around the actual task of providing integrated access to federated digital repositories.

EFG specifically addresses the issues of IPR management, digitisation best practices and technical and semantic interoperability. Best practices and standards will be adapted and promoted in each of these three fields. The publicly visible result will be an internet platform providing advanced search facilities and access to federated digital collections. With its 23 partners from 14 EU member states (plus Norway and Switzerland), the network provides a critical mass of approximately 840.000 digitised items including about 70.000 moving image items with a total duration of approximately more than 25.000 hours for testing approaches at overcoming the existing barriers in the fields of copyright and metadata as well as content (essence) standards. Also, an approach at providing basic multilingual features will be made.

Through its unified, result-driven setup and strong network of partners, the project supplies the evolving European digital library with access to Europe’s extraordinarily rich film culture.