cost of such plans. Machines were expensive, operations were time-consuming,
and highly skilled operators had to perform the tasks; the transfer of one hour of
an analog media to a digital media could cost several hundred Euros, which was
a huge cost in regard to the colossal amounts of the existing audiovisual
archives.
Three major European Broadcast Archives9 launched together a program in 2000
in order to evaluate the amount of audiovisual holdings in Europe and to
determine if substantial cost reductions could be obtained in the preservation
process, either by building new machines or by optimising the process. The name
of the project was Presto10, which proved the urgency of the problem.
The results of the project, which ended in 2002, were flabbergasting: after a
European survey of 10 National Broadcast Archives, almost 5 million hours of
audio, video and film were identified and further studies permitted to evaluate
the total broadcast holdings to 50 million hours, and the whole audiovisual
holdings to nearly 100 million hours. What was even more appalling was that
most of the material was original, analog and in danger! It was urgent to act and
to develop a consciousness in the society with regard to this problem.
Fortunately, technical results were very encouraging; systems were developed and
built that substantially reduced the cost of preservation, with less expensive and
more robust machines, and through efficient process optimisation.
The following step: PrestoSpace
Once the project was finished, the same actors worked together to prepare a new
project that was going to be far more ambitious than the previous one. The
objective was to analyse all the areas related to audiovisual archives and to find
technical solutions, define methods and guidelines to provide an efficient
programming and calculation of the whole digitisation process.
Thirty-four partners from eight countries, including the US, were brought
together around a core group of seven partners, who worked together for 18
months in order to prepare the project.11 Six different areas were identified with
particular problems that needed studies, development and technical or
management tools. These are:
Preservation, concerning all the problems related to the transfer of analog
media to a digital format, mainly through the construction of dedicated
playback machines.
Storage, concerning all the problems related to storage systems, including a
Forum with the storage industry.
Archive Management, concerning the methods and tools for digitisation
planning and calculating.
Restoration, to apply new algorithms and optimise the restoration process.
Metadata, integrating and developing tools for content indexation and
description.
Access and Delivery, developing tools for content management and browsing
as well as turnkey systems for small archives.
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The project will bring answers to all the questions that archive owners ask and
propose technical solutions and even service providers that apply the methods
and technologies developed by the project. A concept that the project will
develop is that of 'Preservation factories', in which the whole digitisation
process will take place. Large archives will send their holdings to the factory and
they will receive back the contents preserved, digitised, restored and indexed if
needed. Small archives will send their holdings and get in return an operating
system with the digitised contents, and the operating tools for indexation and
annotation. At the same time, the results of the project will have considerably
lowered the cost of the preservation process, making it more accessible to
medium and small archives. Even if archive owners do not use the PrestoSpace
technology, they will always be able to access the PrestoSpace calculation tools
and follow the guidelines for proper audiovisual archive preservation. The
project was launched in February 2004 for a 40 months duration. The first major
technological results will be presented in September 2005.
What comes next?
The importance and the acceptance of the PrestoSpace project is due to the fact
that its initiators have already launched major preservation and digitisation
programmes at the end of the nineties and have accumulated strong experience
and know-how in the domain. As National archiving institutions, they have
been able to convince authorities of the importance and necessity of preserving
this unique asset. In setting up the project, the concern was that other archives,
large, medium or small, would be able to profit from this previous experience
and launch, with an available technology and methodology, the preservation of
their assets. It would be very difficult, mainly for small archives, to obtain the
necessary funding to launch preservation plans if costs and technology remained
high and complex.
Three impediments hamper audiovisual archive preservation: technology,
funding and access. PrestoSpace focuses on the first one. Funding will be a major
challenge for the future. Even if preservation and digitisation costs will be
reduced through the project, they still have a cost, which can be considerable if
collections are large. However, during the user requirement studies that initiated
the project, archives were approached and it was found that their major concern
was to decide what to do and to be able to calculate the costs. Planning the
expenses through time and finding the financing is a large issue that will also
involve European resources.
Access, meaning making contents available, is a next challenge for our society.
It is important that authors receive a proper compensation for the diffusion of
their work, whenever it is necessary, but it is also essential to find solutions that
will make audiovisual contents available for studies, research or simply for
pleasure. Governments are conscious of this issue, and are slowly working
towards a simplification associated with an effective control of content
distribution.
Archive preservation also involves a hidden challenge, and this is documenta
tion. Documentation means having a concise and structured description of
contents in order to be capable of going through the collections without having
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BEHOUD
9 The BBC in Great Britain, INA in France and the RAI in Italy.
10 http://presto.joanneum.at/index.asp
11 These are: BBC, INA and RAI, as initiators; JRS and ORF in Austria, Beeld en Geluid in the Netherlands
and University of Sheffield in Great Britain. For a full description of partners: http://www.prestospace.org
DANIEL TERUGGI DO WE NEED A PROJECT LIKE PRESTOSPACE?