Preservation Guide | Main / PublicWorkshop2010

London, 26 November 2010

PrestoPRIME Digital Preservation Workshop

BBC R&D South Lab, Centre House, 56 Wood Lane London W12 7SB, UK

INITIAL ANNOUNCEMENT – DRAFT PROGRAMME

There is one project pan-European project that is looking specifically at the digital preservation of audiovisual files: PrestoPRIME. This project started in January 2009 and presented its strategy – for public review – a year ago in Vienna (5-6 October 2009). Now a year has passed, and PrestoPRIME now has definite, concrete and useful results to present. It’s all about files You can’t see them, you don’t know where they are, they are so complex that they are called wrappers instead of formats, they have embedded encodings, there is a ton of technical jargon [MXF, XML, MPEG-50, i-frame only, lossy, D10, codec, compression ... ].

There is technology for preservation of files, coming from the digital library community, which has its own complexities: OAIS, trusted digital repositories, preservation metadata, metadata extraction, METS, MODS, PREMIS, JHOVE, PRONOM, DROID, LOCKSS, DAITSS, PLANETS, DRAMBORA, DCC, DPC, DPE ... and more.

Strategy PrestoPRIME will present a clear strategy for the digital preservation, for the foreseeable future, of audiovisual content – with solid information on costs, benefits and risks.

We will cover standards – and their gaps – and present information to bridge various gaps:

between digital preservation technology and audiovisual archiving;
between metadata and processes that were fine for shelf-based archives – and the new metadata and methods needed for internet technology and access;
between the various kinds of audiovisual collections: broadcast, museum, archive, research;
between the needs and desires of individual collections, and the opportunities offered by aggregation – in particular, joining forces with the Europeana portal.

Technology PrestoPRIME has been building digital preservation (and access) tools that work on audiovisual files, in particular on the professional files that are recommended for preservation. We have our own overall architecture so that these tools can be shown to fit within a formal structure that follows the OAIS model. We also have a partner who produces commercial digital preservation technology, which keeps PrestoPRIME tied to the digital library world and to the world of commercial realities and priorities.

In November, we will have working demonstrations covering:

preservation planning toolkit: costs, risk, options and decision making
metadata mapping: a key tool for building digital collections from multiple types of files, with varying kinds of embedded metadata
a metadata validation web service
an annotation tool: time-based notations on audiovisual files
an ontology of rights: what contractual terms mean, which is fundamental to automation of rights procedures
emulation: the multivalent approach to digital preservation
automatic quality control tools
automation for service level agreements: managing outsourced services
managing storage as a service
managing digital archive storage and access

Support Digital Preservation has to be about the long term, and so PrestoPRIME is launching a Networked Competence Centre, covering Europe, that will live on after PrestoPRIME, to be a permanent source of support to audiovisual preservation.

The Competence Centre will be launched in stages, beginning with an information and services website that should go live in October (2010). The Competence Centre structure will be outlined, and all participants will have a chance, at the workshop, to influence the organisation, structure and functions of the Competence Centre.

Send no money now! More information will be sent in September, including registration details and information about accomodation in London. This notification is meant to give you enough information so that you will, if interested, hold the date in your diaries.

PrestoPRIME listens: if anyone does want to tell us anything now or in August, please do. Just send an email to: prestoprime_contact@ina.fr