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Digital Archiving & Delivery at ScreenSound Australia
OZeCulture: getting it online
13-14 June 2001
Presented by Michael Tuite, Senior Manager, eBusiness and IT, ScreenSound Australia.
Overview
Today's presentation will begin by giving a background on who ScreenSound is and what it does, before looking at digitisation, why ScreenSound is adopting a digital agenda and how it is going to implement its digital strategy.
Who is ScreenSound?
ScreenSound Australia is Australia's National Screen and Sound Archive. It is based in Canberra at its Acton site with storage facilities in Mitchell, ACT. State offices are located in Sydney and Melbourne. 215 staff work at ScreenSound.
What does ScreenSound do?
Since its establishment in 1984, and prior to that at the National Library, the major emphasis of ScreenSound's effort has been archiving and preserving over 1,000,000 items of film, video, records, audio tapes, documents and artefacts. ScreenSound only holds rights to approximately 10% of this material.
With the advent of content which is "born digital", ScreenSound has moved into archiving this new media content.
In addition to a focus on archiving and preservation, ScreenSound needs to make its collection material accessible to its audiences. Rights Management is therefore a major area to be addressed when it comes to digital content delivery.
We also provide national leadership in techniques for archiving and preservation of moving image and sound materials. Our website at http://www.screensound.gov.au/ is a major tool for providing this leadership, containing a glossary of technical terms and a catalogue of the national collection.
What are ScreenSound's strengths?
As mentioned previously, ScreenSound holds a very large collection of sound and moving image material.
The organisation has a strong technological and expertise base with purpose-built facilities.
ScreenSound enjoys a high profile and good reputation amongst "professional": users of the collection.
Staff have an extensive knowledge of the collection we have a first-class collection management system, MAVIS.
Who (or what) is MAVIS?
MAVIS, the Merged Audio Visual Information System, was jointly developed by ScreenSound and Wizard Information Systems from Canberra. In addition to filling ScreenSound's need to catalogue its collection, MAVIS has since been sold to:
- The Norwegian National Library
- US National Library of Congress and most-recently to the BundesArchiv, Germany's National Archive.
Weaknesses
As already referred to, ScreenSound has limited ownership of the collection and therefore there are limited recoupment opportunities for investment. Relationship management with depositors is therefore an important issue, as is management of copyright.
We have a very low profile in the public and educational markets. Branding and marketing are areas for development.
As a medium-sized cultural agency, there are limited investment funds for major capital costs. These are significant in providing digital infrastructure.
Demand for our product is limited at present, but we need to monitor the market carefully so that we can respond to quickly changing demand patterns.
Opportunities
ScreenSound holds a huge audio-visual collection. There is a potentially huge market. The collection has been proven to be popular. There are a potential cost savings in service delivery, with improved quality of service. Current technologies and infrastructure are progressing rapidly (eg rollout of broadband cables).
Threats
It is easy to invest a lot of funding in, what turns-out to be, the wrong technology. Digital delivery technologies are very costly and are changing rapidly. There is the potential to misjudge the demand. There is a risk of waiting too long and missing out on opportunities. Existing Internet cabling allows stills and audio but only limited quality video. Digitisation of video is very expensive.
Digital Strategy
ScreenSound's digital strategy is based around three key components:
- utilise computer equipment to digitise and archive analogue material in a highly selective manner according to preservation criteria.
- Collect and archive material which is "born" in a digital format eg CDs, DVDs, mp3s.
- Make ScreenSound's collection available as readily and cheaply as possible using new digital communications technologies.
Digital Delivery
The following steps are aimed at improving our digital delivery strategy:
- Increase the amount of sound and moving images available for "online" delivery.
- Deliver our collection "online" via the Internet · Deliver digital content in our own exhibitions.
- Deliver content "online" over broadband networks as they become available.
- Deliver our collection "online" to schools.
Selection of material for digitisation will be driven by the requirements for each of these target audiences.
Why digitise?
There are three imperatives for ScreenSound to "go digital".
Archiving:
- Improve quality of archival copies
- Reduce manual movement and security
- Reduce storage requirements and therefore the cost of storage.
Preservation of new media formats.
Access:
- Reach a wider audience
- Improve tracking of access and rights
- Reach new markets: datacasting, digital broadcast, Internet streaming, VOD.
Concept Model for Digital Delivery
As already indicated, a pre-condition for digital delivery is digitisation of the collection.
Archiving and delivery provide different drivers for the selection of material to be digitised.
Archiving requires high resolution whereas delivery requires medium and low resolution for delivery to exhibitions and the Internet
Infrastructure Overview
The storage area network (SAN) will be a key component of the infrastructure. It will be a central storage repository for all content and data types.
Progress
ScreenSound has undertaken two years of research and are now just at the point of making a significant investment in hardware.
Quadriga digital audio workstations have recently been installed. A digital audio server will soon be installed, thus allowing for a switch over to digital as the preferred media for archiving of audio.
A streaming media server will soon be purchased as the beginning of building the infrastructure to support digital delivery.
A disk-array, or Storage Area Network (SAN), is about to be purchased to provide a centralised disk storage facility for digital stills, audio, video and data.
Discussions have been held with several broadband providers re: laying broadband into the Acton site.
Applications Issues
There are significant application ramifications arising from the digital strategy, which will impact on the MAVIS application:
- enhancements are required to support digital hardware, manage digital assets and support online delivery of content.
- Rights management software will be required to support online delivery
- Integration will be required with proposed eCommerce and Supply Chain Management Systems.
Current Demand
To date there has been little proven demand for online delivery of moving image content in any significant scale.
However, online audio has been very popular in the Napster free use model for current or recent titles but copyright-controlled distribution is yet to be tested.
ScreenSound will continue to monitor its potential markets carefully, to quickly detect any change.
Strategy Options
In the face of uncertain marketing models and high initial investment, our options are limited:
- Wait and see
- Explore a range of opportunities, initially small scale and low cost
- Pursue one major delivery project
- Seek additional funding for a serious investment in across-the-board digital delivery.
To deliver short-term results and to position us for the future, option 2 is the only viable choice.
Projects
The projects pursued must satisfy the following criteria:
- reflect areas of assessed potential demand
- be viable in the short-term
- be affordable
- be based on partnerships that bring the skills, resources or expertise that ScreenSound lacks
- have the potential for expansion or growth
- deliver market intelligence
The following projects have therefore been identified:
1. Education -Develop a pilot project to identify potentially useful educational materials, using teachers to do the selection, and a viable network to test distribution.
2. Transact - is currently rolling-out broadband cable to 190,000 households in Canberra. This will be Australia's first true widely accessible broadband network. ScreenSound will investigate options to deliver content on this network (including to 6 primary and secondary schools).
3. Exhibition - our Sights and Sounds of a Nation exhibition contains 7 interactive modules allowing online access to a wide range of digitised audio-visual content. ScreenSound will deliver bigger volumes of AV material in a amore broadly searchable presentation as part of the ARIA Hall of Fame proposed for our North Gallery.
4. Internet Delivery - in conjunction with suitable partners, ScreenSound will develop a model for the delivery of Archive content over the internet. This will provide an opportunity to test digital rights management software, server and storage technology and delivery software.
Conclusion
ScreenSound will, over the next 12 months, build an introductory level hardware infrastructure to allow digital archiving and delivery to commence. Initial efforts will be assessed to identify further targeted small-scale projects.
ScreenSound will share developments with other interested organisations and collaborate with suitable partners.
Credits
Presented by Michael Tuite, Senior Manager, eBusiness and Information Technology, ScreenSound Australia
ph: 02 62482044, email: michael.tuite@ScreenSound.gov.au
Incorporating material from:
· Digitisation Strategy by Ron Brent, Director, ScreenSound Australia
· Networked Storage and Access in Archives by Ian Gilmour, Manager, Engineering Research Group, ScreenSound Australia
View Michael Tuite's Powerpoint presentation on Digitisation of Collections.
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