Video Active: creating acces to Europe’s television heritage

Posted on 29 October 2009 | Comments Off

Video Active provides access to European television heritage through an online, multilingual portal. The project reached its final stage in August after three years of development and now contains over 10.000 videos, photographs and articles. This collection will continue to grow. The renowned media artist and independent filmmaker Péter Forgács has used the material from Video Active to create a short documentary. By using footage from the different archives, Forgács gives a beautiful insight in the rich material available on Video Active. The documentary enables viewers to discover various aspects of European television history in a compelling form. This new work had its online premiere on October 27th, to celebrate the UNESCO World Day for the Preservation of the Audiovisual Heritage and can be viewed from this day on http://tinyurl.com/videoactive.

Video Active

Television material is a vital component of Europe’s heritage, collective memory and identity. However, audiovisual material can only reveal cultural commonalities and differences when its origins are known and understood. By presenting a large collection of European television heritage and by contextualizing this collection with extended descriptions of the sources and comparative articles the Video Active portal offers an enormous resource for exploring both the representation of cultural and historical events within and across nations and the development of the medium itself at a cross-cultural level. As such, it is a highly valuable source for the educational field at large, notably academic research. Also Video Active is a valuable repository for primary and secondary education where Video Active material can be used as (an addition to existing) learning material. On top of that media and cultural heritage professionals benefit from the unique possibility to search different collections through one access point. pdf: Video Active press release

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