Session	PrestoSpace: Preservation Toward Storage and Access Standardised Practices for Audiovisual Contents in Europe
Presenter	Daniel Teruggi Head of Research, Institute National de l'Audiovisual, France
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ABSTRACT

The project’s objective is to provide technical solutions and integrated systems for a complete digital preservation of all kinds of audio-visual collections. Institutions traditionally responsible for preserving audio-visual collections (broadcasters, research institutions, libraries, museums, etc.) now face major technical, organisational, resource, and legal challenges in taking on the migration to digital formats and the preservation of already digitised holdings. Technical obsolescence and physical deterioration of their assets imply widely concerted policy and efficient technical services to achieve long-term digital preservation. The principal aim is to build-up preservation factories providing affordable services to all kinds of collection's custodians in order to manage and distribute their assets.  Coordinator for the PrestoSpace initiative is the Institute National de l’Audiovisual, with participation from approximately 35 additional European partners, including film collections, audio and video archives, and a range of industrial and academic technology providers.

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PRESENTATION

The project’s objective is to provide technical solutions and integrated systems for a complete digital preservation of all kinds of audio-visual collections. Institutions traditionally responsible for preserving audio-visual collections (broadcasters, research institutions, libraries, museums, etc.) now face major technical, organisational, resource, and legal challenges in taking on the migration to digital formats and the preservation of already digitised holdings. Technical obsolescence and physical deterioration of their assets imply widely concerted policy and efficient technical services to achieve long-term digital preservation. The principal aim is to build-up preservation factories providing affordable services to all kinds of collection's custodians in order to manage and distribute their assets.

The 20th Century has provided a new kind of heritage through audiovisual technology. Key events were recorded, and audiovisual media became the new form of cultural expression and an expansion of humankind memory. These historical, cultural and commercial assets, are much more fragile that conventional artwork (paintings, paper documents, monuments…), and are now entirely at risk from deterioration. The UNESCO estimate of the world audiovisual holdings is 200 million hours and about 50 million in Europe. All audio, video and film recordings are endangered within the next 20 years. This is a main challenge for local and national archives but also for universities, libraries, museums and enterprise or personal collections.

Audiovisual contents are disseminated and archive owners are heterogeneous in nature and size: institutions, enterprises, regional and local communities... Up to now, the economical cost and the technological complexity prevents these stakeholders from elaborating and managing their own patrimonial policy, and they have to wait for public rules and subventions in a centralised way.

Although large Broadcasters have already begun to digitise their huge holdings, with very high costs and using complex technology, the necessity is now to introduce a preservation factory approach with the objective of providing an integrated semi-automated solution, to reduce the costs so that the small-to-medium collections can also be saved through common standardised services. The services will be tailored to the realities of the wide variety of audiovisual collections: economic and social models, storage and software costs, and human resources costs as well as the policies and practices applied by stakeholders.

The way to achieve the goal of ‘preservation for all collections’ is with an integrated approach, to produce sustainable assets with easy access for larger exploitation and distribution to specialists and general public. The key idea is: an accessible item is more valuable than an item stuck on a shelf. An integrated process provides this access, generating revenues that will fund the activity and developing resources to finance collection maintenance.

Previous European Projects like PRESTO developed efficient preservation technology for broadcasters, and demonstrated that saving 50% of preservation work can be achieved through a semi-automated assembly-line, with each operator running multiple ‘preservation chains’.

Access requirements involve: addressing to whole documents or excerpts with the adequate metadata and rights clearance and rights management, quality restoration where needed, and effective delivery systems for commercial and public access. There are unsolved problems of digitisation, metadata extraction, restoration, storage, network bandwidth, secure interaction, and end-user delivery. Partial solutions exist, but in general they are not robust, scaleable or affordable – and definitely not integrated end-to-end within a sustainable commercial and legal model. Today many initiatives are funded on a project-by-project basis that provides a poor basis for long-term strategic pan-European collaborative efforts in the field.

In order to enable any European archive owner, from small collections to the largest, to manage an autonomous and realistic patrimonial policy, including preservation and exploitation of digital assets, PrestoSpace will push the limits of the current technology beyond the State of the Art, bringing together industry, research institutes and stakeholders at European level to provide products and services for bringing effective automated preservation and access to Europe’s diverse audiovisual collections.

Objectives

Overall Objective: Audiovisual Preservation Services.

The main Deliverable of the PrestoSpace Project is to develop and launch actual facilities and services for audiovisual preservation. The project will start these preservation factories by preparing the business plan, contacting potential investors and working with commercial partners to set up the actual services. These services will exploit the technological and industrial results of the project. A strong economic factor supporting these preservation factories is a commitment by the major PrestoSpace consortium members to use these services.

Detailed objectives :

Preservation
A fast, affordable datacine
A Contactless Playback Tool for audio disks
A System for Preserving Separate Magnetic Sound Tracks.
An Automated Audio Preservation tool
An Automated Video Preservation tool
A Manual tape condition assessment tool
An Information System for Preservation Management

Restoration
A Restoration Management Tool
A Defect Analysis and Description Infrastructure
A Disk-to-Disk real-time Restoration Tool
A Digital Film Restoration Software Tool
A Set of high-level Restoration Algorithms

Storage and Archive Management
A Web-Guide and Software tool for planning of storage for audiovisual preservation.
A Guide and Software tool for business-case planning for audiovisual preservation.
A Logistics and Quality Insurance System for Audiovisual Preservation.

Metadata, Delivery and Access
A Semi-automatic description tool
An Export system for delivering preservation results to medium and large archives.
A Turnkey system for delivering preservation results to small archives.

Work Breakdown Structure

The partners have analysed the different steps of preservation work towards access according to archives practices and to the required skills and technologies. The main production chain is the migration from analogue to digital material, including:

• stock evaluation, identification and selection
• the digitisation process and its control
• the storage
• the production of content information (metadata) allowing for access and delivery

There is a strong motivation to achieve this work in a continuous way - for technical and economic reasons and to limit, when possible, human intervention. Thus it is expected to collect all information available during the process, including assessment of equipment and technical quality ; this approach minimises poor playback, material damage and any limitation on later use of the results.

For quality enhancement through restoration and for time-based content description through analysis and knowledge management, other processes can be used « off-line » from the preservation chain.

These technical processes management tools are needed for planning the activities and for cost-quality-efficiency optimisation. The management requirements are high because the staff involved can be a combination of both internal archive staff and external subcontractors of facilities houses.

The above considerations are summarised in the diagram below :

As the archive management questions are tightly interrelated to the cost of storage and the long term investment planning, storage and archive management issues are therefore addressed within one Work Area.

It is the project’s view that the real significance of metadata is to ensure easy access to the essence (the images and the sound), and that this would be best handled by having the developments in the metadata area integrated within the delivery and access systems.

Description of the consortium

Audiovisual archiving is a complex and multi-disciplinary domain spanning such diverse fields as chemistry, physics, signal processing, robotics, artificial intelligence and semantic interpretation. The challenge is to integrate partners of all domains representing the variety of competencies needed. The Project therefore brings together participants including archive owners, research centres from archive institutions, general research centres and universities, industrials, and international non-profit institutions.

The main organisers and managers of the project are the seven core partners composing the Steering Board. The core partners are audiovisual archive owners, research and integration institutions and academic representatives. No industrial is present in the core group since the diversity of the technological solutions addressed by the Project does not allow singling out a common representative for the whole domain.

A wide-range of participants constitutes the associated partners. They may be characterised by the following categories:

• A strong group of Users, Service providers and Industry representatives will provide the requirements, functional feed-back and the knowledge on possible existing solutions for particular addressed problems. Users associated with the project will provide the first collections for setting-up the Preservation Factory.
• Industrials and SMEs representing the main actors in the audiovisual, preservation, restoration, storage and delivery domain are present. They are eager to address directly the archiving problems, to implement the results of research and to build the tools and components for the preservation chain, for restoration innovations and for access solutions.
• Universities and Applied Research Institutes which will provide solutions to identified research problems and will work in close relation to archives and industrials for the development of solutions.
  

Out of the 37 partners planned to date, already 34 are identified. Among them there are:

• 7 archive institutions, most of them representing the archives as well as their R&D departments,
• 4 applied R&D institutions,
• 6 university institutes,
• 17 industrial partners. Practically all of them are SMEs. This reflects the situation in the market that requires innovative and flexible solutions. A few of them are not only offering specialised solutions for specific areas, but are also service providers and thus potential candidates with high interest in the later exploitation of the Preservation Factory services. One of the industrial partners is a US based company (pls. cf. also to section B.5.3).
  

Full integration and consistency of the project will be guaranteed on three levels: first and most prominently by the core partners who will participate in more than one work area or transversal work package. Secondly, also associated partners will work in more than one work area or work package, if needed for the project. For instance, the industrial partners will also contribute to system architecture, user requirements and to exploitation wherever appropriate. Details on that may be seen from the table on work distribution to work packages. Thirdly the user requirements will be built on the experience and input of a user group that comprises about 50 institutions of different size with a broad spectrum of experience. Some of them are already described in the list of participating institutions.

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SPEAKER BIO

Born in 1952, La Plata, Argentine, Daniel Teruggi studied composition and piano in Argentina. In 1977 he came to France and studied at the Paris Conservatory (Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris) in the department of Electroacoustic Composition and Musical Research. In 1981, he became member of the INA, at the GRM department where he first was in charge of the pedagogy of digital systems for composers, and then became Artistic Director of the group. In 1997 he become Director of the INA Groupe de Recherches Musicales.

Since October 2001 he directs the Research and Experimentation Department in INA.

PhD in Art and Technology in the Paris VIII University. He teaches Sound and Visual Arts, at the Paris I Sorbonne University. He is director of a Seminar on new technology applied to Musical analysis at the Paris IV University.

He has developed an important activity as composer and researcher, mainly on the relations between creation and technology and the concepts underlying interfaces.