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6. PrestoSpace Support for Using New Technology

This section doesn’t explain preservation – that has been done in the previous sections. The purpose of the following material is to have, in one place, an index of the PrestoSpace work that either explains or develops digital technology relevant to audiovisual collections.

PrestoSpace has help, guidance and new technology to offer in four areas, as shown in the following diagram:

the digitisation of analogue media (PRE = Preservation Unit)
clean-up of degraded audio and video signals (RES = Restoration Unit)
medatata, search and retrieval and publication (MAD = Metadata and Documentation Unit)
all sitting on some sort of storage (SAM = Storage and Archive Management)

6.1 Digitisation: [PRE deliverables]

PrestoSpace has developed innovative methods for capturing signals from obsolete and fragile formats, and is developing the best of these to the stage of fully-developed commercial products. All the work is here, or pick from the following guide:

New Technologies for Old Formats

audio
video
film

New Products

Support for the Factory Approach to Digitisation

General Guidance

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6.2 Media and mass storage options [SAM]

D12.1 Archive Storage and Technology Watch Website http://prestospace-sam.ssl.co.uk/

D12.2 Storage Calculator

The simple tool that tells you how much your existing holdings amounts to, when converted to digital data: http://prestospace-sam.ssl.co.uk/hosted/d12.2/calc4.php

The more complex tool that gives a rough estimate of costs for a digitisation project: http://prestospace-sam.ssl.co.uk/hosted/d13.2/newcalc.php

D12.3 Storage quality management

The overview is on the SAM website: http://prestospace-sam.ssl.co.uk/articles/T8/T8%2d1.html

and the full article is available for download [So why isn't it on the PrestoSpace site??]

D12.5 10-year Technology Forecast http://www.prestospace.org/project/public.en.html

One result of the User Survey was a widespread view that archivists were unfamiliar with digital storage technology, and had no idea where this technology was going. They were attracted by the dropping costs, but intimidated by the high rate of technology change and implied built-in obsolescence. This report gives the best available industry information and forecasts, to shed light on this difficult area.

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6.3 Encoding, files and file types [SAM and MAD]

D12.6 Survey of Digital Formats for Storage

The User Requirements study showed that archivists are also very concerned about the range of digital formats available. Although it is a primary purpose of the website (D12.1) to provide basic information, it is clear that archives need detailed documentation to back up the information already available through the website. This report will be available as a downloadable document (separated into divisions by format for faster access), but it will have management-level information on the website itself, as an update to and extension of the information already provided by D12.1

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6.4 Restoration [RES]

Restoration work, on audio video and film, is shown here.

Audio work

de-reverberation
film sound tracks

Film and Video Work

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6.5 Metadata and documentation [MAD]

The Metadata access and Delivery (MAD) Area

In the recent years, broadcasters have rediscovered the value of their audiovisual archives. Moreover, recent research has shown that the 'asset management' approach (and related technologies) designed for archives can actually produce consistent cost savings and performance improvements in the overall programme production process.

In order to achieve these improvements, it is essential to adopt metadata.

Metadata can be defined as “data about data”: information that describes, or supplements, audiovisual content. For broadcast archives, this entails finding information schemes which allow archive users to retrieve audiovisual items with effective levels of accuracy.

The MAD (Metadata Access and Delivery) Platform is the component of the PrestoSpace project having the following objectives:

1. extracting metadata from audiovisual items; 2. offering suitable mechanisms for retrieving and accessing audiovisual contents based on metadata.