Introducing EUscreen

EUscreen, is an ambitious audiovisual, mostly television, archive project whose aim is to bring together in one digital space millions of items from libraries, archives and museums from all over Europe (20 countries). The selection policy is currently three-pronged.  Items are selected either to inform 14 historical topics, as part of a virtual exhibition on themes that content providers select themselves, or as part of exhibitions on comparative themes across the region. Topics are broad: Arts and culture, Being European, Disasters, Education, Environment and Nature, Health, History of  Euroropean Television, Lifestyle and Consumerism, National holidays, festivals..., Politics and Economics, Religion and Belief, Society and Social Issues, Special Collections, The Media, Transportation, Science and Technology, War and Conflict, and Work and Production.  Genres are: Advertisements, Drama/Fictions, Entertainment and Performing Arts, Factual, Interstitials and Trailers, News, and Sport. 15 languages are represented. These video, audio, image and text materials range from the early 1900s to the present day.

In early 2012 EUscreen will launch an eJournal dedicated to the history of European television.  The journal will live on the EUscreen site.  Besides the searchable database of materials, the site will showcase curated exhibitions from member archives.  

EUscreen is currently in beta but it is up and available.  Keep an eye on it in the coming year as it goes into full breakout mode.

Harvard to Digitize 80,000 Hours Israel Broadcasting Authority Content

The Jerusalem Post (10/27/2020) reports:

The Israel Broadcasting Authority and Harvard University signed an agreement Tuesday to digitize 80,000 hours of recordings dating back to the pre-state period.

...History conscious people at the IBA were aware that the technology of yesteryear was fast becoming obsolete and unless the archives were transferred to a system compatible with today’s technology, they would continue to deteriorate and a great deal of valuable information about the development of the state, issues that transfixed or galvanized the nation, and, most important perhaps, the voices and images of national icons would disappear.

The problem, as always, was the cost factor. With its huge deficit, the IBA simply could not enter into a multi-million dollar arrangement.

But what may have spurred the IBA to risk at least part of the cost, was the damage done by water leaks and building faults to precious books, manuscripts and other documents stored in the archives of the National Library....

After long months of negotiations [three years] with Harvard, an agreement was reached whereby the IBA would transfer copies of some of its archives to Harvard, which would digitize them, keep one copy for the library of the university’s Judaica Department and send another copy to the IBA.

The process is due to begin next week, and Harvard, as under the previous agreement, will keep a copy for itself.

The Scope of FBIS and BBC Open-Source Media Coverage, 1979–2008

An excellent piece of content analysis on the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) and the Summary of World Broadcasts (SWB), by Kalev Leetaru (Cline Center for Democracy) from latest issue of Studies in Intelligence (Volume 54, Number 1, March 2010).

The Scope of FBIS and BBC Open Source Media Coverage, 1979–2008

Kalev Leetaru

ABSTRACT
For nearly 70 years, the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) monitored the world’s airwaves and other news outlets, transcribing and translating selected contents into English and in the process creating a multi-million page historical archive of the global news media. Yet, FBIS material has not been widely utilized in the academic content analysis community, perhaps because relatively little is known about the scope of the content that is digitally available to researchers in this field. This article, researched and written by a specialist in the field, contains a brief overview of the service — reestablished as the Open Source Center in 2004 — and a statistical examination of the unclassified FBIS material produced from July 1993 through July 2004 — a period during which FBIS produced and distributed CDs of its selected material. Examined are language preferences, distribution of monitored sources, and topical and geographic emphases. The author examines the output of a similar service provided by the British Broadcasting Service (BBC), known as the Summary of World Broadcasts (SWB). Its digital files permit the tracing of coverage trends from January 1979 through December 2008 and invite comparison with FBIS efforts.

Chinese news translations from FBIS

Penn Libraries has just added a very large collection of translated Chinese news sources in the latest update to the Foreign Broadcast Information Services 1974-1996 NewsBank collection. Here is the New & Noteworthy announcement from the Library homepage.

FBIS goes to China
The latest update to Foreign Broadcast Information Service Daily Reports 1974-1996 provides 790,752 news articles translated from Chinese news sources, including Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao.

FBIS Daily Reports are English-language translated media reports gathered from monitored broadcasts and publications in more than 50 languages. FBIS Daily Reports cover all newsworthy topics and they are invaluable sources of local information on both local events and world affairs.

The fulltext online FBIS Daily Reports are a collection in progress, being converted from microfiche and print originals. The collection is expected to be completed by Summer 2009. Status reports on the conversion process are provided at the NewsBank web site. Next up for release: Asia and the Pacific (APA) and East Asia (EAS).

The Penn Libraries owns the complete run of FBIS Microfiche and the online FBIS Daily Reports index - but the recently acquired online version offers more friendly access to those difficult formats.

International Radio and Television Broadcasts

In the March issue of College and Research Libraries News, librarian John Barnett has put together a useful annotated list of international broadcasts available on he Web. Global Voices, Global Visions: International Radio and Television Broadcasts Via the Web names 16 useful sites you can check out on your own, if not the article itself available electronically from the main page:

RadioStationWorld: Your Global Radio Station Directory
http://radiostationworld.com

World Radio Network (WRN)
http://www.wrn.org

ABC Radio Australia
http://www.radioaustralia.net.au

BBC World Service
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice

Channel Africa
http://www.channelafrica.org

China Radio International (CRI)
http://english.cri.cn

Deutshe Welle (DW)
http://www.dw-world.com

IRIB World Service
http://english.irib.ir

Israel Broadcasting Authority
http://www.iba.org.il http://www.israelradio.org
NHK World Radio Japan Online
http://nhk.or.jp/english

Radio Canada International/CBC Radio One
http://www.rcinet.ca http://www.cbc.ca/radio

Radio France Internationale/Radio France (RFI)
http://www.rfi.fr http://www.radiofrance.fr

Radio Netherlands
http://www.rnw.nl

RTVE: Radio Televisión Española
http://www.rtve.es

United Nations Radio
http://radio.un.org

Vatican Radio
http://www.vaticanradio.org

Voice of Russia
http://www.vor.ru

Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) Daily Reports, 1974 - 1996

Penn Libraries has just added to its e-resource page the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) Daily Reports, 1974 - 1996 for the regions of the Middle East & Africa, Near East & South Asia and Africa (Sub-Saharan) & South Asia. "The original mission of the FBIS was to monitor, record, transcribe and translate intercepted radio broadcasts from foreign governments, official news services, and clandestine broadcasts from occupied territories. Many of these materials are first-hand reports of events as they occurred." (from the Readex overview page). This fully searchable archive of scanned transcripts from the United States' principal record of political and historical open source intelligence has been recently digitized from the microfiche. Other regions of the world such as China, the former Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe are available at Penn, but only in microfiche. You can use the Foreign Broadcast Information Service Electronic Index (1975-1996) to access the microfiche for these other regions, not ideal, but a step up from the paper indexes that we used to rely on.