Search Disabled |
|
|
|
Search Options | Help | Site Map | Cultivate Web Site | ||||
|
|
|||||
| Home | Current Issue | Index of Back Issues |
| Issue 7 Home | Editorial | Features | Regular Columns | News & Events | Misc. | ||
By Richard Wright - July 2002
Richard Wright reports on the Multimedia Archive Preservation Workshop held in London this May.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
During the period 22-24 May 2002, about 130 people directly involved in multimedia preservation gathered in London to review the problems and learn about new solutions. The workshop had an international audience, from Africa, the Caribbean and North America as well as from Europe. About 1/3 of delegates were from outside broadcasting, representing audio, film and video collections in a range of cultural and academic institutions, from the Edison National Historic Site to the National Archive of Malawi.
The workshop was sponsored by four organisations working together:
PRESTO and the BBC took the opportunity to host the 5th IASA/FIAT seminar on digitisation, and extend it to cover PRESTO results, and present them to an audience that extended outside FIAT/IASA membership.
In order for people to get maximum benefit, people new to audiovisual archiving also attended a training day on 21 May, where the BBC archive operations and policies were presented. Also, half of the final day was devoted to tours of actual preservation work by the UK National Sound Archive, British Film Institute, and the BBC.
In a very packed three-day programme, there were 27 formal presentations, covering the following areas:
Presentation of all 14 PRESTO 'new technology' key links, and an equipment demonstration of the actual devices up and running. There were also presentations covering restoration work: EC projects BRAVA and DIAMANT. The afternoon focussed on non-broadcast archives, to keep the balance from the morning's concentration on PRESTO technology for broadcast archives. Two presentations from Vienna showed both the range and depth of the problems (Dietrich Schüller, Phonogrammarchiv - Austrian Academy of Sciences), and a very inspiring solutions: an audio collection could be fully digitised with datatape robotics and interned access (Rainer Hubert, Austrian Mediathek).
The day concluded with seven informal presentations from a range of cultural archives, from Malawi to the US Library of Congress. A very informative discussion took place on what preservation really meant, what planning, technology and funding it required, and the role of PRESTO technology in small and diverse collections.
The third day began with tours to the actual preservation work at BBC, BFI and NSA, followed by informal presentation from six broadcast archives. In was notable that although the size and history of the six archives varied greatly, from the BBC to new archives in Albania and South Africa, the broadcast archivist had very close agreement on both what they meant by preservation, and the approach they would use (the high throughput 'preservation factory'). The problem for small broadcast archives is that they cannot invest in setting up such a factory themselves, so there was a clearly-expressed demand for central facilities - preservation factories - to provide cost-effective preservation services. The other clear need was for better information on preservation: what equipment and what media is good - and bad, where to get it, how to use it - and the problems people have had with media and equipment.
For me, it was a pleasure from beginning to end to bring together this wealth of experience and interest, and PRESTO will live on after the EC funding ends, to work with IASA, FIAT and other organisations to continue this essential educational work.
[ Note that Richard has also contributed an article on the PRESTO Project in this issue. ]
Richard Wright
Technology Manager
BBC
Information & Archives
S120 Reynards Mill, Windmill Road
Brentford
Middx. TW8 9NQ
United Kingdom
URL: <http://www.bbc.co.uk
Email: richard.wright@bbc.co.uk
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
For citation purposes:
Wright, R. "Multimedia Archive Preservation: A practical workshop", Cultivate Interactive, issue
7, 11 July 2002
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue7/prestows/>
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Related articles:
If you would like to view similar articles to this one click on a key word below:
< - preservation - heritage - culture - TV - multimedia - radio - audiovisual - technology - >
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
|
|