Access to content is usually what justifies the existence of any archive- in-accessible content is not worth archiving. The metadata, access and delivery area of PrestoSpace is developing new innovative technologies and processes in these areas that will capitalise upon the digitised status of archive content, and allow quicker, easier and cheaper access to content, which in turn will be a powerful justification for your digitisation effort.
Metadata
The cataloguing of an archive is of critical importance. It's an expensive process though to accurately and completely and reliably annotate all the content of an audio visual archive. By using the digitised content as an information source, tools are now being developed that can greatly assist the process of cataloguing.
At the core of the new processes are speech-to-text and semantic analysis tools that can automatically generate appropriate searchable terms from a specified ontology, taxonomy or keyword list. Key frames can be identified in the video stream by shot analysis, greatly assisting the segmentation of footage into catalogue sections.
Once digitised, audio visual assets can incorporate the metadata that such processes generate by utilising the MXF file format, and similar wrapper based encoding techniques.
Access
Access to items stored in an archive is to a large extent driven by what can be found by the customer or client or borrower. To find relevant items in most catalogues today relies in the best cases on searching through a database, but such data sources are frequently widely different in the standards they use to describe the content. This in turn makes searching across multiple archives a lengthy and difficult business.
The PrestoSpace project is developing recommendations for the use of standardised metadata, to assist in the use of federated searching across multiple archives. The use of digitised content though allows for the first time, the possibility of searching for items by interrogating the content directly. Whilst developments in this area are at the very early stages, we are already seeing developments in the use of rich metadata- key frames and textual content- as a searchable resource. Digitised assets, searchable as files, are therefore far more accessible to users of archives, and are set to become even more accessible over time.
Delivery
The distribution and delivery of audio visual assets is an issue that taxes many archives today. Whilst the assets exist as discrete high quality items on shelves, there are great costs involved in sending such content to a user- Logistical stock management, copying, transcribing formats and loan management all tax the limited resources of an archive, and can set a limit on the amount of material available for loan.
Every stage of the distribution process is aided by conversion to digital mass storage:
Availability: All items are always available, as only copies are delivered. There is not case due to a previous or simultaneous loan, where an item will not be available.
Latency: The time needed to find and deliver the item is reduced dramatically, as there are no shelves to check, no copies to make and no conversions to carry out by playback on physical machinery.
Compatibility: Even in instances where the user requires the final content in a specific physical format, time is saved by eliminating the need to ingest material for conversion. Digitally stored files can more easily be converted than almost any discretely help asset. For an increasing majority of cases, copying onto a physical file format will not be required and file format conversion will be the most that is needed.
Throughput: The physical distribution of tapes, discs and other discrete media is eliminated by the transfer of content over IT networks. Network speeds are increasing rapidly, and in many situations the deliverable data rate over the network can only be exceeded by dedicated high cost physical logistics operations. Even those few operations that can afford such support will soon see the performance of networks outstrip the physical distribution of material.
