Athenaweb: A Professional Web Portal for the EU Audiovisual and Scientific Communities
13.06.2005 - Other
In conjunction with the project's strategic partners and contributors, the IPF attended the European Commission's launch of the AthenaWeb portal on June 4th in Paris, France as part of the "Salon de la Recherche et de l'Innovation".
What is AthenaWeb? It aims to address an apparent paradox involving European audiovisual (AV) and scientific professionals. There is a large amount of scientific AV material (films, news, interviews) coming from a large number of sources across the EU but there is also great difficulty in locating, accessing and evaluating the material. There are also issues related to copyright and different languages. For these reasons, science films and related audio-ivisual products (e.g. radio and television broadcasts) are under-used and under-developed and aren't disseminated as well as they could be throughout the EU.
As a concrete response to this problems the European Commission and its partners have developed a completely new web tool based on the idea of better, cheaper and more flexible scientific content circulation for Europe: AthenaWeb. As an indepdent European science information portal, available only for AV and scientific professionals and mainly focused on high quality video productions, Athenaweb may be just the right thing to build partnerships and to boost European science productions.
How does it work? AthenaWeb presents a user-friendly and secure site with innovative functionalities such as a fully searchable electronic library of a wide range of science television and radio programmes, real online screening, innovative contractual solutions and even a European science news service, with constantly updated information drawn from the news services of the European Commission, AlphaGalileo, Euractiv, Research TV and other international news partners.
Following a pilot phase, more and more content is progressively being made available. This portal prings new and exciting perspectives and adds considerable value to European science research and education.
See more about this topic on the AthenaWeb website: www.athenaweb.org/
