The BIRTH project has achieved its initial goals with the following major achievements 

• finalisation and launch of the general public access to the BIRTH portal (BIRTH of Television Archive) - www.birth-of-tv.org
• intensive evaluation of the BIRTH portal and incorporate findings into a revision of the portal
• community building on a European level within the academics (ETHN - European Television History Network)
• collecting additional material and creation of theme based articles on the history of Television integration and first evaluation of B2B facilities for direct, Internet based file transfer (SEFT - Stream Edit File Transfer).
• setup of a new management structure and business plan for the years after the funding period (i.e. after 2005)
• presentation of BIRTH and its results at the MEDIA Committee meeting in Brussels on 16 December 2005

The collection and publishing of material was proceeding as expected, lead to approximately 130 a/v assets, 100 pictures and 20 theme based article per contribution partner.

With the establishment of the ETHN  a major step in building and coordinating a European scientific community on Television history could be achieved. BIRTH acts as one of the central hubs of this network.
Finally a follow up management structure could be established, thus ensuring ongoing BIRTH services after 2005.

The Institute of Information Systems & Information Management was responsible for the project co-ordination and in particular it concentrated on adaption and integration of existing software-components of the technical partners in order to fulfil the user requirements.

Two of these components were not only integrated but also developed by the IIS:

• The multilingual thesaurus, integrated into the portal backend, is maintained and management by an application called ThesauriX and stored in a central relational database.
• The Contribution Tool  supports the contribution partners in the preparation and management of their content items.

BIRTH remains active

BIRTH will continue its services (The BIRTH of Television Archive) after 2005 in a new structure: JOANNEUM RESEARCH has hand over its leadership to Sound and Vision, becoming the project office and the official front of the consortium. All archive partners agreed to continue with providing content of the early days of TV to the portal - thus making it a true multi-national archive of European broadcasting history.

The BIRTH project started on January 1st, 2003 as an international project, funded by the EC MEDIA plus programme within action 4 ?Archives: to create digital services providing access to audio-visual archives and means of retrieving them at pan European level for B2B and B2C markets?.

The  project aimed at building up a multimedia-based, multilingual pool of archive material from the first broadcasting days 50 years ago for online access by different user-groups. Audiovisual content as well as accompanying text and photographic material will be collected from six major European broadcast archives in order to give online access to the first years of European television-history in a way it has never been presented before. Both factual information and the atmospheric ?touch? of a new media´s early days will be accessible to the visitors. The work to achieve these objectives was organised into

• research and collection of representative audiovisual material from ?TV´s early days?,
• transfer of the material to a digital long-term preservation format and the generation of digital preview-material,
• implementation of an on-line archive pool for TV archive material containing both metadata and audiovisual material.

Result
The BIRTH project has achieved its initial goals with the following major achievements

finalisation and launch of the general public access to the BIRTH portal (BIRTH of Television Archive) - www.birth-of-tv.org intensive evaluation of the BIRTH portal and incorporate findings into a revision of the portal community building on a European level within the academics (ETHN - European Television History Network) collecting additional material and creation of theme based articles on the history of Television integration and first evaluation of B2B facilities for direct, Internet based file transfer (SEFT - Stream Edit File Transfer). setup of a new management structure and business plan for the years after the funding period (i.e. after 2005) presentation of BIRTH and its results at the MEDIA Committee meeting in Brussels on 16 December 2005

The collection and publishing of material was proceeding as expected, lead to approximately 130 a/v assets, 100 pictures and 20 theme based article per contribution partner.
With the establishment of the ETHN  a major step in building and coordinating a European scientific community on Television history could be achieved. BIRTH acts as one of the central hubs of this network.
Finally a follow up management structure could be established, thus ensuring ongoing BIRTH services after 2005.

The Institute of Information Systems & Information Management was responsible for the project co-ordination and in particular it concentrated on adaption and integration of existing software-components of the technical partners in order to fulfil the user requirements.

Two of these components were not only integrated but also developed by the IIS:

The multilingual thesaurus, integrated into the portal backend, is maintained and management by an application called ThesauriX and stored in a central relational database. The Contribution Tool  supports the contribution partners in the preparation and management of their content items.

BIRTH remains active
BIRTH will continue its services (The BIRTH of Television Archive) after 2005 in a new structure: JOANNEUM RESEARCH has hand over its leadership to Sound and Vision, becoming the project office and the official front of the consortium. All archive partners agreed to continue with providing content of the early days of TV to the portal - thus making it a true multi-national archive of European broadcasting history.