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A New Look for the EUscreen Portal

The EUscreenXL project was set up with two key objectives: to increase the amount of audiovisual material which can be accessed via Europeana, Europe’s cultural platform, and to expand the amount of television-related material on the EUscreen portal and to improve the user experience A dedicated task force has set to work on a redesign of the EUscreen portal.

The work of the task force has been ongoing since October 2013. As part of this process some significant decisions have been made regarding how the EUscreen portal should evolve. The task force’s main objective is to improve the look and feel of the portal and ensure that materials on the portal are displayed in an informative and appealing manner. The task force analyses website statistics in order to monitor user experience and keeps track of comments left on the site. The main purpose is to use such information to understand the site users and to ensure that the portal meets user expectations.

The group met for the first time in Amsterdam in November 2013, in order to define the key aspects of EUscreen and to map the user requirements for the portal. The workshop centered around creating an overview of the required portal pages and making more detailed sketches of some portal pages, e.g. the homepage.

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The main outcome of the workshop was the creation of new portal overview…

mappingpages_small   homepagesketching_01_smallThe current task force activity focuses on defining the purpose of specific portal webpages and creating wireframes. The portal development ties in with different user engagement pilot activities that take place within the project and investigate questions such as: how to provide translations for videos coming from this many international sources? How to engage digital humanities researchers with this unique international resource of audiovisual history? And how can the creative industries benefit from the archives that can be consulted through EUscreen?

The new, re-developed EUscreen portal will offer users different tools to find and perhaps also provide context around the wide variety of texts, sounds, images and videos in the collection. Users could create virtual exhibitions or facilitate the use of videos, photos, audio and images in the classroom. Users, especially translation students and professionals, will be encouraged to add subtitles to the videos and use the content for learning purposes. To this end, subtitling tools would have to be developed and integrated into the portal. An early version of the portal will be released in June 2014.

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