Training / Dissemination

PrestoPRIME Meeting - Vienna, 5 - 6 October 2009

A brief report on what happened

About 100 people with a common problem met on 5-6 October in Vienna. The problem is digital audiovisual content - the files that are the solution to some preservation problems, but which have their own problems: format change (we've been there before!), technical dependencies (we had that in the analogue days too), bit rot (we had deterioration of analogue media, but deterioration of digital media is also a real problem). We share some of these file-based problems with other areas (digital documents, scanned still images) -- and we have our own special problems of very large files, and formats used only in professional audiovisual work.

The PrestoPRIME project outlined its planned work in these areas on the Monday:

Daniel Teruggi – summary of the project
Richard Wright – audiovisual preservation strategies
Matthew Addis – implementing audiovisual preservation
Werner Bailer – digital access metadata
Walter Allasia - system integration

Then after a tea break, the final session was:

Marius Snyders and Beth Delaney – the Competence Centre: preserving PrestoPRIME

The second day was about listening -- to the real issues confronting the people at the workshop. We divided into four areas.

problems with files -- particularly in a broadcast context
service providers -- are they 'going digital'? What are their problems?
access -- files are all very fine, but what are people doing with them?
non-broadcast archives: broadcaster archives are very big, but 70% of European audiovisual content is in other collections (figures from TAPE study). What are their problems with digital content: technical, rights, services -- or money? (All archives have a problem getting enough funding)

The main result from the "problems with files" session was a plea for PrestoPRIME to develop a "path to the future" that told archives which formats and which technologies (encoders, decoders, players, wrappers) had the least problems, were best supported with (ideally) open-source, easy-to-use tools, and were the most 'future-proof'. There was also a clear interest in the proposed work on quality checking, to see if the video signal in a file had any defects.

The service providers attempted to define and measure 'trust'. Commercial service providers can help PrestoPRIME in this discussion, because of their experience building trusted relationships with their clients, but beyond third party recommendations 'trust' really only comes from experience.
Many institutions and organisations seem to have a level of concern, perhaps even suspicion, of commercial enterprises but in the instance of debating and assessing file formats in pursuit of technological solutions such service providers can bring their experience with a variety of different customers who each share common problems within their unique situations and for whom we deliver cost-effective solutions. And they are willing to do so.

Session 3 focused on issues around access to the contents of the archives. The benefits and issues arising from submitting the archives’ metadata to large content aggregators such as Europeana were explored. Large aggregators help direct more traffic to the content providers’ sites as they rank high in search engines and have the potential to provide multilingual and semantic functionalities that individual providers cannot possibly support.
Another topic addressed was that of user generated metadata. Their usefulness was acknowledged especially in cases where a collection lacks metadata, however, archives stressed the need for reliable ways to validate user generated content that is aimed at informing and enriching archival metadata.
Furthermore, to address the complexity of rights associated to a program, RAI is investigating ways to associate rights descriptions to any clip of the audiovisual content in a way that would give the opportunity to map rights to a timeline. Such a development would facilitate extremely the reuse of the archival content. Finally, approaches to enhance collaboration between small and large archives and broadcasters in sharing expertise and infrastructure on a mutual beneficial basis for preservation, digitization and online accessibility to archival content were discussed.

Non-broadcast archives – Their message, "We're not there yet!". The problem is still how to digitise analog material: difficulty with collection condition assessment, the lack of metadata and the need for a workflow approach in between the ‘factory’ and the ‘hospital’. They want this category to include more types of potential ‘archives’ – material in music conservatories, film schools, opera houses; want the Competence Center to play a ‘stewardship’ role, gathering the largest variety of tools available (including those outside PrestoSpace and PrestoPRIME) and explaining which resources are applicable in which context; and encourage the broadest dissemination possible through cooperation with national and regional organisations.

This workshop was a beginning. PrestoPRIME will complete a digital preservation strategy document, and a lot of other project planning work, by January. After an internal review, the strategy will be made public, and 2010 should see real work on creating tools to deal with digital preservation, and to improve access.

Europeana is a PrestoPRIME partner, and we are working with a range of other projects that all link to Europeana. Our goal regarding access is to get legacy metadata web-usable (by semantic linking and related work), and to get digital libraries to be 'audiovisual content usable' (with tools that use the time dimension for description, playback and annotation).

Another public workshop will be held in about nine months, possibly even further East in Europe than Vienna, where the first real results of PrestoPRIME will be presented.

Watch for further announcements!

All powerpoint presentations are available in a zip file here.
For file selection and details please, see here.

Feedback

Your comments are interesting and valuable. Please send them to jvytopil@beeldengeluid.nl.

Thanks very much.

Printable version : http://www.prestoprime.org/training/vienna200910.pdf