MIDAS - Moving Image Database for Access and Re-use of European film collections

The MIDAS project aims at addressing effectively one of the bottlenecks blocking the full development of an efficient European distribution – for commercial and cultural purposes – of EU archival materials having historical and cultural value. This bottleneck, on which there is a vast consensus of a wide spectrum of stakeholders, consists in the complex, time consuming and costly process of locating archival materials across European collections, and identifying the copyright owners.

The project addresses this issue by establishing technical solutions apt to making possible the search and retrieval of archival materials held in a number of collections across Europe by centralising the process of search and retrieval, and by overcoming the language barrier. Search results will provide available information about existence of the materials, their location, contact information of the collections, and copyright.

The pilot project is designed as a proof of concept, and an operating application gives access to a growing number of collections from 12 EU countries in currently seven different languages. The MIDAS consortium consists of 18 partner archives. Collections of all archives are expected to be online by the end of 2008.

The third and last project phase of MIDAS started on January 15, 2008 with two new partners.

Please visit filmarchives online, the web portal initiated by the MIDAS project partners.

MIDAS is a project by