An increasing number of broadcasters and organizations are considering the digitization of their media archives. Implementing digital media libraries so as to ensure the proper preservation of legacy archives has been recognized as a priority. Yet, many organizations are faced with a paradox: although strategic, these digitization projects are postponed because of budgetary constraints. As a result, little attention is paid to the opportunity and necessity to archive day-to-day programming and use that as a starting point of a digital archiving campaign. This paper, a follow-up to one recently presented to AES in Berlin, discusses several case studies and suggests a new approach to implementing a pragmatic archiving strategy – one that will get approval and support from management.

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A Pragmatic Strategy
to Digitizing Production Archives
NICOLAS HANS AND JOHAN DE KOSTER
Dalet, France; Radio Netherlands, The Netherlands
ABSTRACT
An increasing number of broadcasters and
organizations are considering the digitization of their
media archives. Implementing digital media libraries so
as to ensure the proper preservation of legacy archives
has been recognized as a priority. Yet, many
organizations are faced with a paradox: although
strategic, these digitization projects are postponed
because of budgetary constraints. As a result, little
attention is paid to the opportunity and necessity to
archive day-to-day programming and use that as a
starting point of a digital archiving campaign. This
paper, a follow-up to one recently presented to AES in
Berlin, discusses several case studies and suggests a
new approach to implementing a pragmatic archiving
strategy – one that will get approval and support from
management.
INTRODUCTION
By 2020, storing 1.4 million hours of audio content on-
line should cost less than 100 Euros. One petabyte – a
thousand terabytes – will hold 165 years worth of
continuous broadcast encoded in 16 bits at 48 KHz.
Storing the equivalent amount of media in analog form
typically represents 2.5 million documents spread over
80 Kilometers worth of shelves! [1] In 15 years from
now, that amount of content will be in our pockets, on
our children’s future iPODs.
It is time for audio archive departments to recognize the
drastic impact that digitization has on their mission.
Whereas in the analog world, the preservation of a
master copy was paramount, in a digital environment,
all duplicates are masters. If one used to choose a
carrier format for decades to come, in today’s digital
world, carriers have become virtual. Hierarchical
storage management (HSM) systems that combine
hard-disk storage with tape libraries and DVD
jukeboxes now make it possible to store hundreds of
thousands of hours of broadcast material on-line or near
on-line. In effect, carrier virtualization is the most cost-
efficient option for preserving and distributing records.
But, the impact of the digital wave does not limit itself
to storage.
The emergence of open standards such as Broadcast
Wave Format (BWF) and Metadata eXchange Format
(MXF) combined with the increased quality of
streaming formats such as MPEG-1 Layer 3 (MP3) are
creating the conditions for a new ecosystem. Archivists
need to re-consider their priorities and change their
primary focus from preservation to distribution.
Archive professionals need to move out of their
historical habitat – the basement of most broadcast
facilities – into the production space. By moving
upstream in the workflow, they can ensure proper
metadata collection and guarantee that search and
retrieval do not become more and more expensive as
archive volumes increase.
Such a migration does not happen overnight. It requires
a step-by-step, pragmatic approach similar to that of a
surgeon dealing with a patient in an emergency room.
By first digitizing the day-to-day archival process and
making sure that tomorrow’s program will not be stored
on tape, archivists “stop the bleeding”. This first step
improves the quality of service that archives provide to
production departments (the “heartbeat”); it also frees
up the resources required for “reconstructive surgery”
i.e., ensuring the digital transfer and proper cataloguing
of decaying media. That process can be spread over
multiple years and pave the way to “re-education” and
the launch of new services open to both internal and
external organizations.
THE NEED FOR VIRTUAL CARRIERS
A number of institutions are still considering shelved
CDs as the most efficient preservation medium for
audio archives. In a recent survey of 84 international
archiving institutions, forty-five percent of collection
owners use CD-R as the preservation format of choice
and 57% still regard CDs as the appropriate media for
access and distribution. [2]
Digital storage is cheaper than labor
At first sight, this may be considered as a smart
economic move. CDs remain one of the cheapest digital
media to date at 0,75 € a piece or 0,001 € to the MB,
but their cost of maintenance – from production to
retrieval – is huge. Handling CDs is a labor intensive
operation. “Burning” a single CD, generating the
corresponding bar coded cover and storing the resulting
carrier on a shelf can be estimated as a 15-minute
operation in an assembly-line type of environment. On
this basis, archiving one year worth of audio recording
on CDs – or 8 760 hours at 48 KHz, 16 bit – costs

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nearly 40 000 € of which 80% is labor. If one compares
this cost to that of permanently storing the
corresponding media files on-line, the adoption of CDs
as carriers comes to light as being an economic
absurdity. Storing 8 760 hours of audio recording
requires a total of 6 Terabyte (TB). By today’s market
prices the corresponding storage solution based on
high-performance, redundant hard-drives costs
20 000 €. In a fully on-line environment, handling
operations are limited to triggering file copies and can
be considered as negligible. As a result, storing audio
archives permanently on-line can be estimated as being
at least 50% less expensive than storing them on CDs!
Figure 1: Archiving audio on CDs is not cost efficient
This estimate is conservative. On the one hand, it does
not refer to near on-line storage systems such as tape
libraries and DVD jukeboxes which provide cheaper
storage than on-line drives. On the other, it does not
take into consideration labor costs linked to retrieving
material archived on CDs.
Digital files are a remedy against technology
obsolescence
As demonstrated, adopting information technology (IT)
based on-line or near on-line storage systems offers
immediate cost savings. In the mid-term, it obviously
implies faster retrieval of archived material: it takes less
time to access a file over a network than to retrieve a
carrier from a shelf. In the longer run, it enables
archivists to truly take advantage of the fact that digital
copies are in no way different from original digital
recordings. Making sure that the archiving process does
not give way to off-line archives simplifies the
generation of back-up copies at alternate sites and
allows for the implementation of a disaster recovery
policy. What is more, it makes future migrations from
one storage medium to another seamless and constitutes
a pre-emptive measure to technology obsolescence.
Adopting virtual carriers is necessary because the
lifespan of digital data systems is much shorter than
that of analog technologies. The life expectancy of
polyester-based magnetic tape maintained in a proper
environment is evaluated to be 50 years; for digital
optical media, it is estimated to be between 30 and 200
years; but for IT based storage, it will not exceed 5 to
10 years. [3] From that perspective, the use of files as
virtual carriers constitutes a major switch of paradigm
for most players of the archive world. It recognizes that
the quest for the ideal audio-visual storage medium is a
dead-end and that archives can no longer be defined by
their physical attributes but as a “logical space
independent of the production environment where
records are protected from loss alteration and
deterioration”. [4]
Figure 2: IT based systems such as this tape library in use at
Emirates Media Inc. constitute “virtual carriers”.
ARCHIVE TOMORROW’S PROGRAMS
The digital transfer of legacy archives is a multi-year
process. Emirates Media Incorporated, for instance,
started the digital transfer of its legacy archives some
18 months ago. Of a total of 60 000 hours of legacy
recordings, roughly 20% have been digitized to date.
Play against the clock
The biggest challenge for broadcast organizations lies
in determining the most efficient starting point for the
digitization process. When faced with this situation,
most archivists focus on decaying carriers and
disappearing playback devices. This approach offers

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little benefit from a financial perspective. On the one
hand, most studies show that “reformatting is […]
always one of the most expensive options compared to
providing the proper storage for originals to extend the
usable life”. [3] On the other, this approach strictly
focuses on preservation and does not consider usage
patterns.
When it started its digitization project in the mid-
nineties, CBC – Radio Canada decided to analyze the
use it had of its archives. The resulting study showed
that 50% of requests were for program content that had
been broadcast in the preceding 12 months. [5] As a
result, CBC – Radio Canada decided to “stop the
bleeding”. It put an end to the constant addition of tapes
to its archives by first digitizing the recording of its on-
going broadcasts.
Accelerate Return on Investment
The major benefit of this approach is that it provides
short term return on investment. It requires minimal
capital expenditure, cuts archiving costs and offers
immediate visibility to the digital archiving project. The
archival of tomorrow’s programs requires little initial
investment compared to that of ensuring the digital
transfer of past recordings. As detailed previously (see
section 2.1), digital on-line storage is now cheap
enough to allow for the continuous logging of
broadcast programs in linear, uncompressed format.
In addition, the recording of current programs can be
automated. As a result, the workload of a broadcaster’s
archiving department is decreased and staff can be
freed up for the coming digitization campaign of legacy
analog carriers. More importantly, day-to-day archiving
can be used as a pilot to spearhead the overall
digitization process. As pointed out by the European
Broadcasting Union, [6] the digital transfer of archives
implies profound change management of existing work
practices; “cultural change of this scale will be an
evolutionary process over several years”. Digitizing the
day-to-day archiving process and generating the
associated metadata constitutes the first logical step of
that evolution.
PULL ARCHIVES OUT OF THE BASEMENT
Abandoning tape based archiving for tomorrow’s
productions allows broadcast organizations to review
current work practices. Existing workflows can be
optimized across departments so as to address the
challenge of metadata collection. IT-based storage may
provide the ideal, virtual carrier but it does not solve
the challenge of indexing content.
Build alliances
Traditionally, production teams have had little concern
for archiving. Tapes and analog carriers required large
storage space and careful logistical procedures. As a
result, these were systematically stored in the basement
of broadcast facilities or in remote silos. Ease of use
and access were limited. The move to a digital, on-line
environment eliminates these technical constraints and
allows for production teams to have direct access to
archived material. News and feature producers can
have immediate and around-the-clock access to existing
recordings and sound libraries. As a result, they can
stop maintaining their own private micro-archive
islands which typically litter corridors of most
broadcast organizations. When one considers that
nearly a third of a typical European newscast takes
advantage of archived material, [6] the impact of
pulling archives out of the basement is potentially
tremendous.
Although on-line access to archives may provide
production staff with immediate benefits in their daily
jobs, it is not sufficient to turn them into supporters and
advocates of a digitization process. Archive
professionals need to take advantage of the fact that
they act as beholders of the collective memory and as
such are valuable assets in newsgathering meetings and
brainstorms about future programs. They should take
advantage of it. To that effect, some suggest that
archivists and cataloguers change their title to media or
knowledge manager. Although nomenclature has its
importance, the strategic issue is for archive
professionals to move out into the production space. As
such, they can be in a better position to promote the
usage of the goods they preserve and advocate the
benefits of modern archiving practices.
Collect metadata at the source
Building alliances with production departments is
important because producers and journalists can be of
great help in the archiving value chain. By properly
documenting production material, they can play a
crucial role in the proper indexing of archives.
Cataloguing content is time consuming. In the analog
realm, properly indexing one hour of radio material
typically takes three times longer. [6] A large fraction
of that time is dedicated to ‘metadata safaris’ whereby
cataloguers go out into the wild production realm to
obtain the proper spelling of a name or the details of a
location mentioned in a recorded program.
Archivists can save valuable time by promoting the
merge of metadata into the production workflow. This
merge should not boil down to having production staff
painfully fill compulsory, pre-defined forms. Much of
the information required for indexing is already
collected by journalists and feature producers. In many
cases, technical and descriptive metadata can be
aggregated with minimal changes to daily operations.
For example, most broadcast operations have to
continuously record their programs for legal purposes.

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Today this requirement is often ensured by dedicated
logging robots which continuously record on-going
broadcasts in low audio quality; once the imposed legal
deadline is past, recorded material is purged. An
efficient digital archive infrastructure can leverage this
process to generate properly indexed archive material.
In parallel to the recording, corresponding broadcast
logs, line-ups and scripts used to produce the programs
can be collected. In most cases, this metadata track
already exists in electronic format; it can be combined
with the continuous digital recording so as to generate
time code markers. As an extension, speech-to-text
engines can be deployed in order to automatically
generate a transcript which can be associated to the
original audio track so as to enable full-text searches.
[7] Whichever option is chosen, the resulting time-code
based markers can serve as indexes for navigation and
future extractions.
Plan Ingest Produce Schedule Broadcast Archive Multicast
Traditional metadata ingest points
Plan Ingest Produce Schedule Broadcast Archive Multicast
Potential metadata ingest points in a digital workflow
Plan Ingest Produce Schedule Broadcast Archive Multicast
Traditional metadata ingest points
Plan Ingest Produce Schedule Broadcast Archive Multicast
Potential metadata ingest points in a digital workflow
Figure 3: Metadata gathering needs to be merged into the
production workflow.
ENSURE THE DIGITAL TRANSFER
OF DECAYING MEDIA
By first digitizing present and future programs, archive
professionals free up the resources required to ensure
the digital transfer of decaying media. By improving
the quality of service offered to other departments, they
ensure that they will obtain the internal political support
they need to secure the investment funds that a
digitization campaign requires.
Ride the wave
The need for qualified professionals is often
underestimated. Experience shows that the proper
handling of legacy carriers often turns out to be trickier
than expected. [8] On the contrary, the investment
required for storage infrastructure tends to be initially
over-evaluated.
The digitization of material recorded on analog carriers
takes time. Yet many digital archiving project teams
consider the deployment of a large scale storage system
as a preliminary requirement to any other task.
Although this approach is often the consequence of
budgetary constraints, it is not financially sound. Since
1997, raw storage prices have declined 50 to 60% per
year. [9] Hard drive “capacity is doubling at a frantic
100 percent per year. This means that the capacity (for
a single hard drive) is likely to be […] 2,56 terabytes in
2007.” [10] In parallel, local area data networking
solutions are becoming easier to deploy and Network
Attached Storage (NAS) systems are turning into plug-
and-play appliances. Digital archivists need to ride this
wave and adopt a step-by-step, incremental storage
policy. Ideally, capacity should be acquired on-demand;
less than capital expenditure, storage should be
considered as an operating cost.
Turn archives into assets
The digitization of legacy archives is expensive. The
European Preservation Technology for European
Archives (PRESTO) project recommends that “the
value of an item be more than four times the
preservation cost in order to be financially justified on a
commercial basis. […] For most broadcast archive
material, this condition can easily be met as one minute
of sold or re-used archive material will pay for the
preservation of one hour of archive material”. [11]
Lowering the cost per use so as to optimize the number
of times a recording is re-purposed should be the
priority. To turn archives into such assets, archivists
need to focus not only on the descriptive metadata
which is the key to future access but also on the
associated copyright information.
Media Recording
+ Technical Metadata
+ Descriptive Metadata
+ Rights Information
= Asset
Figure 4: Assets are more than just archived recordings.
Although most broadcasters make a financial reserve
for the rights they might have to pay for the re-use of
historical material, the re-issuing of past recordings is

5. A Pragmatic Strategy to Digitizing Production Archives – Hans and de Koster – Joint Technical Symposium 2004 – Page 5 / 6
too often halted because of a lack of information
regarding copyright. So as to put an end to this type of
scenario, the ARD public broadcaster in Germany has
linked its archive and rights management databases. A
basic color code (green, orange or red) lets users know
if a recording can be used with no limitation, if a
detailed inquiry is necessary or if no broadcasting
rights are available. The EBU Project for Future Radio
Archives (P/FRA) goes one step further; it considers
“Rights” to be one of the fifteen core fields of the
metadata scheme it promotes for radio archives. [12]
PROMOTE AND DISTRIBUTE ASSETS
Converting legacy archives to digital assets constitutes
a heavy financial burden. Distribution and promotion
are the keys to revenue and long-term return on
investment. Providing on-line, self-service access to
producers and adopting a “build and they will come”
approach is not sufficient. Archivists must partner with
program makers to seek and promote new distribution
channels.
Create new broadcast channels
Although some predict the end of traditional broadcast
in favor of a stock model whereby content is strictly
consulted on-demand, creating programs that leverage
archived recordings can be a key factor to changing
consumption habits. The digitization of video archives
at the RAI in Italy resulted in an 85% increase of hours
of archive material used on-air. Although this success
was partially due to the improved service provided to
production departments, it also resulted from the launch
of several digital television channels dedicated to
historical recordings. It is true that until digital radio
platforms such as DAB or DRM come of age and
simplify the multiplication of broadcast channels, such
a radical approach is difficult to implement for audio
archives. Specific slots can nonetheless be developed
within the existing program grids. [6]
Move to content distribution networks
Archivists can also explore the opportunity to build
their own content distribution networks. These can take
the form of CD compilations. For example, Radio
Netherlands Music has encountered greater than
expected success with a series of Royal Concertgebouw
Orchestra concerts directed by renowned conductors.
The internet provides an even more powerful platform
for both consumer to consumer and business to
business distribution. National Public Radio (NPR) set
up an agreement with audible.com to sell MP3 versions
of its most successful programs. In parallel, it launched
the Public Radio Exchange (www.prx.org) to provide
an online service for peer-review and digital
distribution of public radio programming. This website
allows for station program directors to search for new
programs and directly download corresponding
recordings. Such services result in increased
distribution of programs and lower cost per use of
existing recordings.
CONCLUSION
Recognizing that today’s broadcast is tomorrow’s
archive, improving the quality of service provided to
production departments, launching a digitization
campaign of legacy archives, promoting the resulting
assets and then distributing them; these are the five
pillars of a pragmatic archiving strategy. Revisiting
archives from a digital media asset management
perspective is a cost saving exercise for broadcast
organizations.
The financial benefits of digital storage are obvious. If
one considers that tape typically costs 25 € for
730 meters and that archiving tape speed is 0,38 m per
second, then the cost of tape required for archiving a
year’s worth of continuous recording in analog form is
410 400 €. In other words, tape is twenty-one times
more expensive that on-line storage! The benefits do
not stop there. Sharing files across the network
facilitates access to content and reduces administrative
costs. More importantly, the use of a scalable and open
digital asset management system can guarantee that
archives become the back-bone of the production
workflow. Metadata can hence be aggregated at every
step of the lifecycle of a recording. Indexing can be
improved and content easier to find and re-purpose.
Audio archivists have to learn new skill-sets and
become digitally literate. They also have the unique
opportunity to re-define their role within broadcast
organizations.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors wish to thank Mat Hans, Eric Richardson,
Rich D’Angelo, Alexis Rowell and Anne-Marie Swift
for their careful reading of this paper and for their
suggestions. In addition, they wish to give a special
mention to the Google team for providing a fabulous
tool for searching the world-wide web on-line archives.
REFERENCES
[1] INA Official Website (www.ina.fr).
[2] “Survey: Dams & Digitization Preparedness”, John
Spence, ABC Sound Archives, IASA Conference,
Aarhus, 2002.
[3] “Preservation Reformatting: Digital Technology
vs. Analog Technology”, Steven Puglia, US
National Archives and Records Administration,
18th Annual Preservation Conference, March
2003.

6. A Pragmatic Strategy to Digitizing Production Archives – Hans and de Koster – Joint Technical Symposium 2004 – Page 6 / 6
[4] “Preservation of Electronic Records”, Charles
Dollar, National Association of Government
Archives and Records Administrators, 1999.
[5] “Overview of the CBC Radio Digital Archiving
System”, Tom Holden, Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation, SMPTE 143rd Technical Conference
and Exhibition, November 2001.
[6] “Archives in Digital Broadcasting”, EBU Archive
Report, European Broadcasting Union, September
2003.
[7] “SpeechBot, the first internet site for content-based
indexing of streaming spoken audio”, Eileen
Quinn, Compaq Computer Corporation.
[8] “Audio and Video Preservation Reformatting: A
Library of Congress Perspective”, Carl
Fleischhauer, Library of Congress, 18th Annual
Preservation Conference, March 2003.
[9] “The evolution of storage systems”, R.J.T. Morris
and B.J. Truskowski, IBM Systems Journal, Vol.
42, N° 2, 2003.
[10]“Hard disks and media PC”, John C. Dvorak, PC
Magazine, November 2003.
[11]“Archive preservation and exploitation
requirements”, Preservation Technologies for
European Broadcast Archives, PRESTO IST-1999-
20013, June 2001.
[12]“EBU Core metadata set for Radio archives”,
European Broadcasting Union, Tech 3293,
December 2001.
FURTHER INFORMATION
Nicolas Hans is Director of Product Strategy for Dalet,
with offices in Paris, France. He can be contacted at
nhans@dalet.com. The corporate website is at
www.dalet.com.
Johan de Koster is Head of News Production at Radio
Netherlands. He can be contacted at
johan.dekoster@rnw.nl.