Training and dissemination

PrestoCentre professional development series

Long term audiovisual preservation: strategy, planning and tools

From 13 to 17 September, the first PrestoCentre training course took place at the Ina premises in Bry sur Marne, 8 km east of Paris. During five days, 27 participants from 8 countries took part in a course on long term audiovisual preservation. The objective was to introduce archive managers and practitioners to the strategic approach of long term preservation: how to organise it, how to plan and evaluate its incidence and risks, and which tools exist.

The course was organised in teaching modules:

• Presentation of tools and models
• Case studies
• Industrial solutions
• Assessment discussions with participants
• Institutional visits

Day 1 was dedicated to preservation planning and management. The session gave an overview of digital preservation and of PrestoPRIME technology. Essential aspects of preservation planning were presented, mainly the mapping and prioritisation of collections.

Day 2 was dedicated to metadata, metadata tools and technology integration. The content tracking technology, the multivalent long term management approach, MPEG issues for digital preservation and the rights management tools were presented. Two major achievements of the project were introduced: P4, the PrestoPRIME preservation platform, an open source integration platform; and the industrial solution Rosetta, developed by Ex Libris, which integrates many of the results of the project.

Day 3 concentrated on predicting and planning the future. This essential aspect of digital preservation was presented from different approaches: cost and risk modelling, service management, video quality assessment, metadata mapping and validation, and management of user generated metadata. These tools and methods contribute to decision making and risk analysis.

Day 4 was the industrial day, a showroom for audiovisual preservation technology with a large number of industry providers. A technical showcase was installed at the Ina premises, where industry participants installed their solutions, gave demonstrations and answered questions about technology and its evolution.

Day 5 looked at the future, with topics such as the situation of audiovisual research in Europe, the Europeana and Digibic projects, the development of digital humanities within archival studies, and the future of 3D and its incidence in archiving. A presentation about use and reuse by educators and the public of archival material closed the week.

Different case studies of advanced preservation and access projects were presented by Ina, BBC and B&G in the Netherlands. Memnon from Belgium presented a case study on semantic metadata and linked metadata. A visit to the Ina premises and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France allowed participants to see how large institutions deal with the digital world in terms of preservation and access, and how legal deposit is organised in France.

Test Workshop, London, 19 to 22 October 2010

A whole week in October 2010 was dedicated to a concerted evaluation of the status of developments in the technical work packages. More than 25 members from all archive partners and several developing partners attended the workshop, which took place at BBC Centre House in London.

The main focus was to gain a complete overview for archive partners and technical partners of the status of tools, methods and related developments. Since the event was seen as the last chance to detect and deal with departures from the needed and expected directions, close collaboration and open discussion were central. The status of most tools was still prototype, so usability tests were not planned in a narrow sense. User partners were asked to raise usability issues whenever they felt the need, especially for tools where visualisation of results had been undertaken.

To provide input for the future consolidation of all tools in a concerted system, evaluation and tests were also carried out by members from the partners responsible for that task later in the project. Developers were asked to write test reports addressing the issues raised by user partners and other testers. This kept the wider purpose of the developments in view and supported the next steps in the project.

PrestoPRIME meeting, Vienna, 5 and 6 October 2009

About 100 people with a common problem met on 5 and 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, including format change, technical dependencies and bit rot. We share some of these file based problems with other areas such as digital documents and 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
• Marius Snyders and Beth Delaney: the Competence Centre and preserving PrestoPRIME

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

1. Problems with files, particularly in a broadcast context.
2. Service providers: are they going digital? What are their problems?
3. Access: files are all very fine, but what are people doing with them?
4. Non broadcast archives: broadcaster archives are very big, but 70% of European audiovisual content is in other collections, according to the TAPE study. What are their problems with digital content: technical, rights, services or money?

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 had the least problems, were best supported with open source, easy to use tools, and were the most future proof. There was also clear interest in the proposed work on quality checking, to see if the video signal in a file had defects.

The service providers attempted to define and measure trust. Commercial service providers can help in this discussion because of their experience building trusted relationships with clients, but beyond third party recommendations trust comes from experience. Many institutions have a level of concern about commercial enterprises, but in the debate on file formats such providers can bring experience with a variety of customers who share common problems within their own situations.

Session 3 focused on access to the contents of archives. The benefits and issues arising from submitting archive metadata to large content aggregators such as Europeana were explored. Large aggregators help direct more traffic to content providers because they rank high in search engines and can provide multilingual and semantic functions that individual providers cannot support. Another topic was user generated metadata. Its usefulness was acknowledged, especially where a collection lacks metadata, but archives stressed the need for reliable ways to validate user generated content that aims to inform and enrich archival metadata.

To address the complexity of rights associated with a programme, RAI investigated ways to associate rights descriptions with any clip of the audiovisual content so that rights could be mapped to a timeline. Such a development would make the reuse of archival content much easier. Approaches to enhance collaboration between small and large archives and broadcasters in sharing expertise and infrastructure for preservation, digitisation and online accessibility were also discussed.

Non broadcast archives sent a clear message: we are not there yet. The problem is still how to digitise analogue material, with difficulty in collection condition assessment, a lack of metadata and the need for a workflow approach between the factory and the hospital. They want this category to include more types of potential archives, such as material in music conservatories, film schools and opera houses. They want the Competence Centre to play a stewardship role, gathering the largest variety of tools available and explaining which resources apply in which context, and to encourage the broadest dissemination through cooperation with national and regional organisations.

This workshop was a beginning. PrestoPRIME completed a digital preservation strategy document and other project planning work. After an internal review, the strategy was made public. The following year saw work on tools to deal with digital preservation and to improve access.

Europeana is a PrestoPRIME partner, and the project worked with a range of other projects that link to Europeana. The access goal was to make legacy metadata web usable through semantic linking and related work, and to make digital libraries usable for audiovisual content with tools that use the time dimension for description, playback and annotation.

A second public workshop followed in London in November 2010, where the first real results of PrestoPRIME were presented.

Workshop documents

• Vienna workshop presentationsZIP, 25 MB
• Vienna outcomesPDF, 40 KB
• Printable version of the Vienna reportPDF, 118 KB