Present and share your infrastructure solutions: At the conference we would like to explore and exchange different ways in which community media can preserve, use and share broadcast content. What tools and infrastructures to archive audiovisual material are best suited for community media? Which formats did your station find or create to present audiovisual content online? Which innovative techniques or tools did you develop or are you still looking for?

Archiving methods and archiving culture: A major challenge in building community media archives is how to cultivate archiving as an essential part of radio making. Many programme makers are focused foremost on their “on air” show. What are the best ways to engage them in archiving their programs and sharing them with online listeners? Who undertakes what task: uploading programmes, adding descriptions and tags, promoting them on social media? Are programs uploaded whole or split into specific items, with or without music, and how is the material edited?

The responsibility to archive: How can community archives integrate multilingualism? How can online archiving support programme exchange within Europe? What importance do analogue, physical archives have in the digital age, and how can community media secure and digitize them? How can community media archives unlock historical material about community life and social movements in user-friendly ways? Not least, we encourage proposals dealing with the question of copyright regulations and the role of open software and open knowledge.

For whom?

We invite and encourage programme makers and coordinators from European community media, radio activists, researchers, programmers and technicians to participate in the conference and submit proposals.

Formats of Presentation

We invite proposals for papers, workshops, discussions, presentations and radio shows on any subject related to “Radio Archives in European Community Media”. You can send in proposals in German, English or Spanish.

Proposals that engage the audience in active participation and discussion, or in trying out or evaluating archiving tools or strategies, are especially welcome. Participants can contribute to the conference in a variety of ways, not just by presenting a paper or hosting a discussion in 30-minute slots, or conducting a training or hosting a world café in max. 1 hour slots, but also by publishing a text in the conference reader, broadcasting or producing a radio show during the conference, or creating posters, web features or any other content you find suitable.

Submission

Please send proposals by January 31, 2015, to info@livingarchives.eu. Describe your proposed activity on not more than one page (including title and type of presentation) and include a short biography.

Presenters of accepted proposals will be informed by February 28, 2015. They will be invited to the conference and reimbursed for travel and accommodation expenses.

The conference will be live streamed. For further information please check

our Website: http://livingarchives.eu or

on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/communitymediaarchives

You can find the Spanish language version of the call here.

Please spread the word!

Analysiert wird der aktuelle Stand bei der Online-Archivierung und beim Online-Austausch unter den Mitgliederradios des BFR. Einige Beispiele werden genauer betrachtet, u.a. Pi Radio Berlin, Radio Unerhört Marburg, Freies Radio Wiesental, Radio StHörfunk, Radio Dreyeckland, Wüste Welle Tübingen, Coloradio Dresden, Radio Corax Halle und Onda „Agencia Radiofónica Latinoamérica-Europa“ Berlin.

Der Artikel „Community radio broadcasters in Germany and online archiving: Are we there yet?“ ist komplett nachlesbar HIER.

Die vollständige Studie wird im Juli 2015 veröffentlicht. Sie fußt nicht nur auf der Analyse von Archiv-Lösungen auf Radio-Webseiten, sondern auch auf Interviews mit Koordinierenden verschiedener freier Radios in ganz Europa, u.a. in Deutschland.

Joost van Beek, Kate Coyer und Helen Hahmann vom Projekt CAPTCHA, im Rahmen dessen die Studie durchgeführt wird, werden zur Tagung des BFR im November nach Potsdam kommen und bitten Euch um Feedback und weiterführende Hinweise.

Am 29. und 30. Mai 2015 findet bei Radio CORAX in Halle zum Thema „Praktiken des Archivierens in Europäischen Community Medien“ eine zweitägige Tagung statt. Für die Tagung laden wir Mitglieder des Bundes Freier Radios ausdrücklich ein, Vorschläge für Referats- und/oder Workshop-Themen einzureichen: info@livingarchives.eu.

ABSTRACT

This article tallies and describes the extent to which German community radio stations have engaged with digital sharing, at a time when an ever growing online audience is getting used to being able to find and listen to programs when and where it wants. Live streaming has become ubiquitous, but many fewer stations make a significant part of their individual programs accessible online for people to listen back to and share with others. Podcast feeds are available in some cases, but their user-friendly potential is underutilized.

Still largely missing is an optimally user-friendly model which more fully uses the opportunities that now exist to publish, share and preserve programs online. Only around one in five stations that belong to the national umbrella organisation of community radio organizations BFR makes it possible to access audio content by topic, program, and/or date – and some of those offer one or the other of these options but not all. Fewer still use topical tags or advanced search options.

On the bright side, few stations rely on commercial, third-party services to archive their files, especially in comparison with other countries. This may well be thanks to the existence of an online, BFR-run program exchange platform. This website, Freie-Radios.net, suffers from an outdated design and a lacking appeal to casual listeners, but provides an important archiving and exchange tool for especially the smaller German community stations, and the relative thoroughness of its archiving practices constitutes an example of good practice.

This review raises several strategic dilemmas bedeviling German community radio sites, and presents examples of stations which successfully navigated one or the other. How to expand existing options, such as podcasting, with relatively little effort? How to meet potentially conflicting needs and interests of different audiences, for example for archived information about all past broadcasts versus access to only audio content? How to marry an advanced level of archiving detail and customization with attractive, public- and mobile-friendly design? It does not yet address other dilemmas being explored in ongoing Captcha research through interviews at radio stations across Europe, such as how to involve, motivate and guide volunteer program makers in online archiving.

AUTHOR

Joost van Beek, Center for Media, Data and Society, Central European University

FULL ARTICLE

View or download as PDF file: Community radio broadcasters in Germany and online archiving: Are we there yet?

In this radio show CBA (Cultural Broadcasting Archive) activists Thomas Diesenreiter and Ingo Leindecker tell us about the past and present challenges regarding programming and maintaining this exchange-platform. Beside topics like solutions for long term preservation and copyright issues in Austria they speak about their experiences with commercial hosting services. Last but not least questions are raised about their plans and commitments within the CAPTCHA project.

All the music heard on the show is published under a Creative Commons license (June 2014):

Delenda – True

Delenda – Urban dictionary

Delenda – Good time

Delenda – Baruc

Arbalord – Lo

Starlight – Nouvelle aventure

Most of all, the discussion brought home how divergent the capacities of different stations are, and how ‘best practice’ recommendations must be tailored to existing possibilities, however modest. Working on a non-profit basis with mostly volunteers, community media have to grapple with particularly pronounced choices in how, what and where to archive. In this context, attendees discussed the tension between the practical advantages and strategic disadvantages of using third-party online services like Soundcloud, Mixcloud and Vimeo.

Such services provide easy-to-use, low-cost ways to upload and share materials, which can function as convenient shortcuts when the time, cost and know-how required for archive and website design, volunteer training and hosting packages are in scarce supply. They also provide low-threshold statistical info and sharing options. Their limited categorization options are geared for sharing rather than archiving purposes, however. Perhaps most importantly, relying on such services means a station becomes dependent on an external, commercial party for the online preservation and availability of its programs as well as the living archives built around them, from tags to audience interactions. The long-term existence of these services is not guaranteed, as MySpace has demonstrated, and instead of being able to freely develop new archive functions or interfaces, a station becomes in part reliant on corporate development choices beyond its control.

Nevertheless, their attraction for especially small community stations is self-evident, and their use fits within a broader trend of even much larger organizations delegating functions like search and mapping on their websites to commercial third-party applications. Moreover, even if a station doesn’t use them officially, individual program makers will, potentially creating diasporas of content. The experience of one of the stations attending the small discussion therefore underlined the need to make consistent choices about what to upload where, use embedding options to optimize the accessibility of programs, and present clear information to website visitors.

You can find the photo documentation of the Civilmedia14 UnConference here.

The conference convened by the Austrian Association of Independent Radio Stations (VFRÖ) and Radio FRO in the context of ARS Electronica Festival 2012 (The Big Picture) was held on 31 August and 1 September 2012 in the Wissensturm Linz.

Since digitization, much has changed in the structure of information and communication. One of the strongly affected areas are archives. What was  discussed was not only the technical implementation and durability of digital archives, but also their social function. Whereas for a long time, archives were accessible only to a limited public and consequently irrelevant for the chain generating royalties and revenues, digitization and, above all, the internet offer the potential for opening up archives to the public worldwide.

Whether these archives, made available worldwide, impair the chain generating royalties and revenues or not depends upon the content made accessible; a film archive available worldwide can impair the generation of royalties and revenues, just as it can do in musical or literature (e-books). Other archives, such as radio station archives, can be made available to the public without disturbing generation of royalties and revenues from the materials used (the inputs). If, for example, music is played in the background of a conversation, or even simply played on the radio in the program-breaks, presumably no one would listen to the radio program in the online archive instead of buying the CD or MP3 file.

Especially in the area of public radio and independent, non-commercial radio stations, a question arises concerning the sense of copyright barriers to access. In both cases in Europe, public financial means are deployed to produce the programs because they are regarded as being socially relevant. Because of copyright limitations relating to making content available on the internet, however, providing open public access to program archives is highly restricted and, in many cases, practically impossible. Even though public moneys are deployed and the use of relevant program-content for linear transmission (terrestrial transmission and live-stream) is appropriately remunerated, apparently, permanent availability is still not possible. The private interests of the copyright owners (even though the potential for generating royalties is not curtailed) are placed above the public interest in information which is manifest also in the statutory public assignment and the public financing of non-commercial, independent radio stations.

At Archiva 2012, problems with archiving content or making it publicly available were illuminated and potential solutions discussed in workshops. Renowned keynotes by scientists, philosophers and experts like Manfred Faßler, Ruth Towse and Till Kreuzer threw light on the problem from the perspectives of media studies, economics and the law. The contribution from media studies showed the social function of archives, the significance of public accessibility and changes thereto in the past two decades. The contribution of economics concentrated on possible inefficiencies and problems of welfare economics triggered by copyright. And the contribution of jurisprudence elucidated the current situation and discussed the prospects for possible solutions, such as the introduction of statutory licenses.

The conference Archivia 2012 brought together opinions and positions of operators, both in Austria and internationally, of archiving and internet projects, statutory public and independent, non-commercial radio stations along with players in diverse fields of art, media and academic disciplines as well as politics. The conference bundled together shared interests to gain an orientation in current academic and political discourse, and to form alliances across the broad spectrum of digital archives. ARCHIVIA 12 was the starting-point for a networked political effort in the sense of creating such political boundary-conditions that appropriately take into account contemporary utilization and the generation of royalties and revenues from the digital cultural heritage.

Two years later, the Archivia 2014 will continue this broad discussion and focus on practical solution strategies. It will be held on the 6^th and 7^th September in Linz in cooperation with the Ars Electronica Festival.

As with most media production, producing your pre-production is always concerned with the who, where, what, when and how of the production. These questions in planning, are also exceedingly important when distributing your content afterwards.  You need to know who your subject is, what they will talk about, where the interview will be held etc.  These things will go a long way to describing your media. No matter the site you’re submitting to, or the type of content, the vast majority of these rules apply.

The major search engines all work in a very similar matter.  They search for valuable content and their criteria for what is deemed valuable, is very similar and simple. They will want, and as a result you will want your content to be well ordered and well formatted.  You want the sentences to be short and legible (see Flesch-Kincaid readability test).  And start at the start.

The most valuable information for search engines is at the beginning; the title, the first sentence, the first paragraph.  The focus of the description should be mentioned in these and throughout the body of the text.  The focus of your media should also be the focus of your description.

Writing a Title for a Media Description

Often when titling a piece of art or media, there can be a tendency to write the title in an abstract or ethereal manner, describing a sense of the piece rather than the content itself.  If you think of film titles, often they have no direct descriptive relationship to the content of the film.  For the purposes of search, unless someone knows exactly what they are searching for, these are largely useless.

The focus of the media should be clearly outlined in the title.  The title will be considered, by most searches, as the most important signifier of what the content is.  If your piece is on interculturalism, the syrian conflict or whatever this should be contained within the title.  Put yourself in the mind of the searcher.  How do you connect your audience with your media and what will they be looking for?  Always be: think of the who, what, where, when etc.

If the media is part of a series, put the series name in the title. If it is part of a larger event, add that also.  Connect your media to other media items by relating themes, events etc.  Ask yourself, what will people who are interested in your content be looking for? Theoretically your title can be as long as you like, at least as long as the word count that is imposed by the site you are using.  In the case of a title, attention should be paid to how the results are listed.  If we take the example of Youtube: you will notice that when results are listed, if the title is longer than 60 characters (give or take) with spaces, the title then becomes clipped.  If your title is longer than that limit, order the title with the most valuable information for the viewer first.

Writing the Description

When writing the description of media, reiterate the key points that are used in the title: the focus of your media.  If the characters that appear in the piece are renowned in their field, use their name, their title or their area of expertise as it relates to the piece.  Mention the key points that are raised within the piece.  It is not uncommon for almost entire transcriptions to appear within a description.

To increase the likeliness of being found, your description should hammer home whatever the focus of the media is.  In search engine optimization terms, the density of your keyword focus can be very important.  If we take for example the focus of your piece is interculturalism, you will want to mention this word in your title and in your description.  For the purpose of this example, the word ‘interculturalism’ is the focus of your piece and thusly the ‘Focus Keyword’.  Keyword density should be 1-3%.  Less than that and search will not consider your piece as being about interculturalism, any more than 3% and search engines can consider your piece as spam.  It will assume that you are attempting to cheat the system.  The focus of your description should also relate to the title so there is coherency between the two.

Always keep in mind the focus of your media and relate that to your description.  Repeat that word or phrase.  Always keep in mind the who, what, where, when etc. and think then of how people will find you.

The prototype has been developed as part of the cooperation project, Automatic Broadcast Content Interlinking Project (ABC-IP), between BBC Research & Development and MetaBroadcast. The idea behind the project is to roughly tag the content automatically and then let the audience do the fine tuning.

The content is processed by an audio-recognition software that makes the first attempt to identify the relevant topics (in some cases the links that have already been associated with the programmes). They use linked data to tag the content, whereby all content tags correspond with wikipedia articles, speakers, series-names etc..

In the archive the radio shows are presented with the automatically received tags from the audio files, the file description and some automatically associated images from Ookaboo. The algorithms obviously do not work perfectly so the tags are not always fitting the content. The show on the death of Pope John Paul II is, for instance, linked with the horror movie “Shock Waves” because in the description you can read: “Death of the Pope and the shock waves around the world.” These mismatches are to be corrected by the users.

After signing up  with name and e-mail you`re invited to work on the metadata of the content by voting up or down some automatically generated topic tags, name some speakers, work on the description, recommend another picture or add more tags.

When editing the description you can always click the “see history” button.  Here you can follow the changes and restore to the original version. If you name an unknown speaker or are editing an existing speaker you don´t see any histories, you can change the names easily. When changing a name of a speaker in one show you change the name in all shows, which have been connected to the same person (ID). Here I made a mistake: wanting to try out the function I just renamed an identity and after I  had completed, I started to search for the option to reverse the changes – there was not such a thing. (Sure, I could rewrite the original name, if I remembered… Sorry.) It is also impossible to reverse by recommending a “better image” to illustrate the show.

Adding a tag is not so easy. Starting to type in a word you get recommendations of phrases which are corresponding to Wikipedia-pages. You cannot just  type in anything, so if you don´t find the phrase you were looking for and you stick to the tag-idea you have, you have to create a Wikipedia page to be able to correspond with your tag.

Summing it up so far I guess we see an option which is worth thinking about for community media archiving purposes. For those who might be fit in technical aspects here is a short description. After seeing how users can help improve the archive, let´s have a look at how and what for they can use it for.

If you only want to explore the collection you just give in a search term, open an item and start to navigate between shows through thematic links, series,  speakers, etc.

The searching options are quite poor. You can not search by author, by running time, by location or by dates, you only search by searching terms. The result of your search is filtered by decades and availability (some shows are unavailable because of technical reasons or copyright considerations).  It is not easy to tell how the results are listed. It`s neither chronological, nor alphabetical, it is not happening upon popularity not even upon the content identification number. Not to mention that you don`t have an opportunity to list the matches upon some criteria (author, running time, publication date etc).

It is also not easy to understand how searching with multiple search-terms functions. If you search “Budapest” you receive 52 matches. If you search “Budapest” and “hotel” you receive 56 matches, some of them are tagged with “hotel”, some with “Budapest”. I didn`t find any double match (I admit I didn`t go through all of them though).  So maybe there are only 4 of all content pieces tagged with “hotel”? Not at all: for “hotel” you get 357 matches!

Search operators known from google like “” for the exact term or “OR” for a search for either word are not accepted here either.

If you are looking for something definite the chances of finding it, without reading the summaries of hundreds (or in some cases thousands) of items, are slim. This is not very motivating even if you know your contributions are supposed to improve the archive, not only the “correctness” of the metadata but through a feedback circle also in the searching and navigating options.  Besides these shortcomings on user-friendliness  I missed the comment, or other content evaluating options, which are also basic things on community managed sites for sorting items (by popularity for instance).

Summing it up: BBC World Service Prototype shows a nice example for crowd content managing possibilities, which is without a doubt highly relevant in community media context. However, when thinking about a similar system we have to be critical towards its lack of effective usability and develop a system matching our purposes. We need to provide real, effective access to our contents – and always be aware of what the users are interested in.

The CBA pursues similar goals as its founders: open access, participation, common public interest, non-commerciality, transparency, self-organization, local and regional development and independence. Furthermore the project follows ethical principals in the pursuit of a self-determined, solidary and emancipatory society.

Today, fifteen years after its start, 25 radio stations with 800 user accounts upload parts of their programs onto the CBA, mostly audio content with text descriptions and semantic categorization. 43.000 audio files with a total length of 32.000 hours tell a diverse story of a societies successes and struggles often overlooked by mainstream media. With a steady and exponentially growing listeners and user base, the CBA is becoming a more and more important online platform for the active civil society in Austria. From the beginning, all the content on the CBA was available for free and it was one of the first platforms to adopt the Creative Commons license on a wide base. Therefore most of the content is available to remix and reuse, for example by other radio stations or for artistic usage. Another important role plays the idea, that information not only needs to be open, but needs an open environment as well. Due to that, the CBA uses only open source software, releases its own source code under a free license and is hosted by a free, independent and local community hoster.

Due to its pioneering role, the project team behind the CBA often had to ask questions and hunt for answers about the challenges of a changing media landscape due to the success of the internet. Over the years, many scientific and legal papers had to be written and many events and conferences were organized to discuss urgent political, legal and technical questions. Even nowadays, although the internet is not a new phenomenon but the now leading technical medium, many problems especially in the fields of copyright are still unsolved.

A significant part of the research, however, will focus on processes and practices as well as products. How have successful models of functioning archives been realized? The Center is conducting interviews with people who have been directly involved with planning or building online archives, and with community media volunteers who work with them on a day-to-day basis as producers, editors or administrators. How do they organize the archive? Who plays what role in the archiving work flow? What training, guidance, moderation or archiving policies are needed? This way, we want to identify and evaluate different models of planning, action and collaboration. Specific attention will be paid to the question of how to develop archiving platforms and formats in sustainable ways, avoiding the pitfalls of project- and funding-dependent temporary initiatives, and taking into account the volunteer-based nature of community media.

In order to evaluate the success of community media archiving models and the needs they need to meet, the Center will conduct survey research to recruit feedback from community media viewers and listeners as well as those actively involved themselves. What are their expectations from community media streams, downloads and archives? How do they use and interact with the sites, and how do they experience the ease of design and navigation of the site or sites they visit? What are their frustrations, and what would they still like to see?

All research will be practice-oriented, tailored to the needs of community media practitioners and activists, and will be driven by the information needs that emerge during the workshops that are at the heart of the project. The research should be able to identify the specific priorities in access, process and presentation that apply to community media. It aims to arrive at recommendations that can inform the work of community media organizations which are planning to launch an online archive, or expand or review the archives they already run, as well as individual community media producers.