Indexing and Editing metadata for documentary films on line: the ECHO Digital Library

Wide access to large information collections is of great potential importance in many aspects economic, environmental, health, cultural, social, etc. of everyday life. Historical video documentaries hold by national audiovisual archives, constitute one of the most precious from a historical and cultural viewpoint and less accessible cultural information. This paper presents the ECHO (European CHronicles On line) Digital Library which aims at providing a reusable software infrastructure and new metadata models for old historical documentary films in order to support the development of interoperable audiovisual digital libraries. Particular emphasis is given to the Metadata Editor which is designed to be extendible on the basis of the XML schema of the metadata model. The ECHO Digital Library is being developed within the ECHO Project funded by the European