AthenaWeb: A professional Web portal for the EU audiovisual and scientific communities

On Saturday 4th of June, the IPF was invited to the launch of the AthenaWeb portal, which took place in Paris at a Press Conference organized by the services of the European Commission and the other strategic partners and contributors to this project, during the Salon de la Recherche et de l'Innovation in Paris.

What is AthenaWeb ? This project aims to address an apparent paradox involving European audiovisual and scientific professionals : on the one hand we have a huge amount of scientific materials (films, news, interviews) coming from a large number of sources across EU (TV's, prods, labs, ind.), and on the other, we actually face difficulties to locate, access and evaluate this materials. There are also problems related to copyrights and different languages. For all these reasons science films and other productions (ex: radio, news) don't travel well in the EU, being though under-used and under-exploited.

As a concrete response to this problems the European Commission and its partners have imagined a web tool based on the idea of a better, cheaper and more flexible scientific content circulation in Europe - AthenaWeb - which is a completely new approach to this questions. Being an European, independent, science information portal, available only for AV and Scientific professionals and mainly focused on high quality video productions, Athenaweb may just be the right thing to build partnerships and to boost European science productions.

How does it work? AthenaWeb is presented as a user-friendly and robust toll with a number of innovative functionalities like for instance: a fully searchable electronic library of a whole spectrum of science television and radio programmes, real online screening, innovative contractual solutions and even an 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.

After the pilot phase, this project is currently in a stage of consolidation as the content is being increased with more and more information, but in any case we can already say that this portal brings new and exciting perspectives and represents a high added value to European science research and education. See more about this topic on AthenaWeb website.