Dr. Adelheid Heftberger is the Deputy Head of the Department for Audiovisual Media at the German Federal Archives (Bundesarchiv) in Berlin. Previously, she worked as a researcher, curator, and archivist at the Brandenburg Center for Media Studies in Potsdam and at the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna. She holds a PhD in Slavic Studies and a Master’s degree in Comparative Literature from the Universities of Innsbruck and Vienna. In 2016, she completed an M.A. in Library and Information Science at Humboldt University of Berlin. Dr. Heftberger currently chairs the FIAF Cataloguing and Documentation Commission and is an active advocate of the Open Science movement.
Topic summary
The copyrights and rights of use for film works are often difficult to determine, meaning that these films remain largely hidden from the public. Institutions such as the Federal Archives have a treasure trove of film works, many of which are orphaned. In order for society to share in this treasure, uncertainties regarding copyright and usage rights must first be clarified and institutions must define their strategy in accordance with the legal framework. Adelheid Heftberger from the Federal Archives describes her experiences with “systematic rights clearance,” which were gathered in a five-year project. In this process, more than 20,000 so-called out-of-commerce works were registered on the EUIPO portal, enabling the Federal Archives to present over 10,000 video streams in their Digital Reading Room (https://digitaler-lesesaal.bundesarchiv.de/).
