Declercq developing a national strategy
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
0 likes•294 views
This document discusses developing a national strategy for digitizing, storing, and providing access to audiovisual heritage materials. It notes that digitization needs to be done quickly, cheaply, and well. Many different types of organizations hold these materials. A mass digitization approach is preferred when possible but a customized one may be needed in some cases. Examples are provided of projects to digitize large broadcast video and rare wax cylinder collections. Key aspects of the strategy include economies of scale, quality control, technical expertise, content expertise, customer satisfaction, and sustainability. Authenticity of the materials should be preserved as much as possible during digitization.
Recommended
Recommended
More Related Content
Similar to Declercq developing a national strategy
Similar to Declercq developing a national strategy (20)
More from Brecht Declercq
More from Brecht Declercq (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Declercq developing a national strategy
- 1. Brecht Declercq – IPPSA Workshop – Piazzola sul Brenta – 17.09.2015 Developing a national strategy For the digitisation, sustainable storage and access of audiovisual heritage
- 10. courtesy Chris Lacinak, AVPreserve
- 11. courtesy Chris Lacinak, AVPreserve
- 12. courtesy Chris Lacinak, AVPreserve
- 13. we need it fast
- 14. 0.00 5.00 10.00 15.00 20.00 25.00 30.00 35.00 40.00 45.00 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 FORMAT 1 FORMAT 2 FORMAT 3
- 16. we need it cheap
- 18. we need it good
- 19. Slide 19
- 21. libraries archives museums universities broadcasters privately held companies private collections research centres arts organisations governemental bodies
- 24. ANALOG CARRIER REGISTRATION LOGISTICAL PROCES DIGITISATION DELIVERY FILES IMPORT IN ARCHIVE REDUNDANT STORAGE MANAGE – ANNOTATE – ENHANCE PICK-UP FROM ARCHIVE ENRICHMENT, CONTEXTUALISATION DELIVERY TARGET GROUPS AMS MAM WEBSITES
- 26. Economies of scale Special care for quality Internationally rooted technical expertise Distributed content expertise Customer satisfaction FIVE RETURNING KEYWORDS
- 27. TWO EXAMPLES VRT’S DIGITAL BETACAM COLLECTION UGENT’S WAX CYLINDER COLLECTION “ ... mass digitization if possible, customized approach if necessary ...”
- 28. VRT’S DIGITAL BETACAM COLLECTION size ca. 80.000 #, ca. 50.000 h content all kinds of TV-programmes age between 1998 and 2011
- 38. UGENT’S WAX CYLINDER COLLECTION size 96 #, ca. 20 h content etno-linguistic field recordings from Belgian Congo featuring Bantu language samples age between March and September 1937
- 44. CONCLUSION: VIAA’S CORE VALUES A networked service organization Preservation, storage and access are active processes Encourage use to increase digital competencies Measurable operational excellence, transparency and sustainability Demand driven and innovative at the same time
- 45. CONCLUDING THOUGHTS ON AUTHENTICITY Authenticity is an unreachable goal: you should strive for it, but you’ll never get there Authenticity is only one aspect of historical source criticism; completeness is equally important Historical documents are remainder, historians transform them into sources by asking questions, history is constantly rewritten We shouldn’t deliberately alter the remainder, but if it is inevitable, documentation is crucial
- 46. THANKS! E-m: brecht.declercq@viaa.be Tw: brecht_declercq LkIn: be.linkedin.com/in/brechtdeclercq
Editor's Notes
- Ladies and gentlemen, First of all thank you very much for allowing half an hour of your attention at this inspiring workshop and this truly unique venue. It is a great honour for me to stand in front of this wonderful group of well known experts in our field of audiovisual archiving and sound and music research.
- The story I would like to tell you today, is about Flanders, the northern, Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, how we figured out and are bringing into practice a national strategy for the digitization of our audiovisual heritage. For the Italians, it is a region about as big as Trentino - Alto Adige.
- First I’d like to set the scene by showing you some pictures. I’d like to warn you... They can be very painful for your eyes.
- A completely torn and flaked audio cassette.
- A completely warped film
- A film completely warped and affected by the vinegar syndrome.
- A broken wax cylinder
- The residue of splice glue on a quarter inch audio tape. OK enough horror...
- These pictures might look like a little more peaceful, but these are actually pretty endangered species... This is a Philips VCR player. But we could add: - An AKAI open reel video player, - A Sony DAT device - A Webster Chicago wire recording system
- Now, what is my point of showing you these pictures? It is to stress the urgency of this matter. If we want to save our heritage we need a solution, and we need it fast. This is a quote of Mike Casey of Indiana University, one of the largest audiovisual archives in the US. He said this in 2013.
- And this is a quote by Richard Wright, probably one of the most experienced audiovisual archiving specialists in the world, with more than 40 years of experience with BBC Archives and Information and still an appreciated consultant after his retirement.
- And this is a slide from Chris Lacinak I’d like to show you. Many of you know Chris, he’s the founder and CEO of AVPreserve, a New York based consultancy company specialising in audiovisual preservation. AVPreserve last year concluded a survey about audio collections, only in the US. Their estimates talk about 240 million undigitized, preservation worthy audio items in the US; 168 million of them magnetic media. The small white box in the right corner, 25 million, is the supply that could be delivered by five times the current capacity of Memnon Archiving Services, the world’s biggest audiovisual digitization company. Please bear in mind that there are not even five Memnon’s in the US...
- So to make a long story short... There’s our first constraint: we need it FAST!
- About our second constraint I can be a bit shorter. It is a fact that for most audiovisual carrier formats, the prices are at a record low these days. Thanks to the breakthrough of mass digitization and to a quite low demand, they have dramatically dropped throughout the past decade circa. There are some exceptions, notably the ones for which devices and spare parts are becoming tight, but generally speaking we’re at a record low. The good news is that we can do a lot with our current budgets, the bad news is that prices will only go up. The graphs I show you here are just for illustration purposes, but there is one parameter which I’d like to stress: based on experience and a lot of talks with several experts, I work with an average increase of prices over the years and over several carrier formats, of no less than 16% per year.
- And this lady is called Annemie Turtelboom. She’s the current Flemish Budget Minister. On this picture she looks quite happy, but believe me, she is not. For the first time in ages, the Flemish government is heading for a quite heavy deficit on it’s yearly spending budget. Not easy to cope with, for a right wing government.
- But hey, it is important! We need to do it... It’s the memory of our society, of our civilisation,... A little afternoon quiz to keep you awake! Who recognizes this? It’s a detail of the frescoes inside the Scrovegni chapel, at the Padova city centre. They were made by one of the earliest Renaissance painters, Giotto, in 1305. Only a very restricted number of visitors are allowed, at very restricted timeslots, to protect the paintings from too much invasive substances in the air. It ‘s our heritage! Time will tell us if our era – and the audiovisual media - also produced such masterpieces. But if so, they should be protected, handled, digitized with the same care as the Scrovegni frescoes?
- In other words: we need it GOOD!
- So what should the solution look like?
- So there we are with the old triangular constraint: Quality, Timing and Budget. How do we balance these three? Because if we want to concede as little as possible when it comes to quality, And time is not on our side... We better try to develop a VERY cost efficient approach.
- And then... Just to make things even worse... The audiovisual heritage in Flanders is very much spread... Over many institutions... Libraries, archives, museums, universities, broadcasters, privately held companies, private collections, research centres, arts organisations, governemental bodies... And probably I’m stil forgetting some. Can you imagine the time, budget and quality issues when every institution would try to face the challenge on its own???
- So, one thing I’d like to make very clear... A solution was not there overnight... It took us some time... About 8 years or so, depending on where exactly you begin to count, between the idea to start with a joint approach, and the actual start-up.
- So VIAA was born on December 21st 2012, and gradually increased it’s staff until about 16 employees now. For the first two years we got the mission to establish ourselves, and to set up activities and infrastructure on our three main focus domains: Digitization Archiving Interaction
- Together, these are our three main activities: Digitization Archiving Interaction
- In the VIAA story that I’m going to tell, you’ll hear that five keywords always come back: Economies of scale Special care for quality Internationally rooted technical expertise Distributed content expertise Customer satisfaction
- Part of a project with more than 20 content providers, with the large parts coming from broadcasters.
- The tender document was written making use of a lot of international experience. Particular attention was given to comply to standards and to a good choice when it comes to file specifications: The broadcaster’s Digibeta’s were digitized to MXF/D10, OP1a – VRT Profile The cultural heritage material will be digitized to MXF/MJPEG2000 – INA Profile
- With so many partners involved it’s of course very important to keep trace of everything. Every carrier, every box gets a barcode; every transport back and forth is meticulously planned, Every CP can track and trace any carrier at any moment; and he gets a report of everything that has happened during the digitization, when, by whom and with which kind of devices. If there is doubt or a particular decision needs to be taken, VIAA acts as a go-between between CP and SP. All specific actions not specified in the tender are carefully documented also on shared platforms.
- Actually there’s even one part missing on this scheme: The third copy, vaulted in a bunker in the Netherlands.
- Here we’re talking about things like File integrity checks Virus checks Compliancy checks Provenance metadata ...
- Just as the digitization, all the ingest is documented and monitored using PREMIS. Thanks to these mechanisms, we can work in utmost transparency towards our content providers. The systems allow us to control every single item, from the very first moment it was registered for digitization until every kind of re-use on our interaction platforms. In the next months we’d like to add to this also a better focus on quality control on artefacts: Created during the digitization As a result of the deterioration of the carrier
- Second example is a totally different one: Way smaller in scale, way fewer carriers involved. It’s a typical example of a customized approach for a very selected quantity and special kind of carriers. It also prevents us from acting as “Moscow has decided...” Key decisions here are taken in very close collaboration with the people from UGent.
- Considering the sustainable storage here there’s not much of a difference with the Digital Betacam’s Here we’re talking about things like File integrity checks Virus checks Compliancy checks Provenance metadata ...
- Unfortunately when it comes to the access to this kind of very specific collections, there’s not much we can show yet. We did a very thorough state of the art research on this kind of platforms, and our Dutch colleagues of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision proved again to be best in class with their AVResearcher platform. We hope that from 2016 on, we’ll be able to restart these activities and to offer as much as possible metadata (via API?) and essence to the research community of a whole diversity of scientific disciplines.