A project of the University Library Johann Christian Senckenberg / Specialised Information Service Performing Arts and the German Centre of the International Theatre Institute / Media Library for Dance and Theatre in cooperation with the Video and Audio Collection of the Department of Theatre, Film and Media Studies at the University of Vienna.

The aim of the project „Digitally Connecting Media Libraries of the Performing Arts" is to aggregate metadata on audiovisual collections of the performing arts that are distributed among theatre and dance studies institutes at universities, art academies or media archives in Germany and German speaking countries. The implementation of a central access point to these data via the SIS portal www.performing-arts.eu will enable the research of information on audiovisual media as well as the performances and events of the performing arts that are represented in them.

The following are focal points of the project:

• Developing workflows for aggregation, modelling, enrichment, implementation and publication of media library metadata of the performing arts
• Establishing a central access for media library metadata via the SIS portal www.performing-arts.eu
• Sustainable publication and distribution of media library metadata for use in and beyond the project
• Establishing a communication structure with the professional community
• Developing consulting services for media libraries and media collections of the performing arts as well as the evaluation of project results.

The digital accessibility and curation of metadata is a central concern of the project. In addition to the metadata of the project partners - ITI Germany and TFM Vienna - further metadata from data partners are to be integrated in order to publish the largest possible amount of freely accessible media library metadata.

The technical developments and best practices developed as well as the evaluation results will be permanently and freely available for subsequent use or research to theatre and dance studies institutes, non-university research institutions, collections and archives. Application scenarios of the project results will be developed as part of the openly accessible project documentation. All technical implementations will be published as open-source source code.