How do preservation projects start? Typically with the availability of
technology and a belief in feasibility to manage the project with
available budgets.
Back in 2016 , storage became affordable for radio archives, ingest technology from NOA was very attractive because it has been built by sound engineers – so an EU tender has been launched by RTV Slovenia, and several NOA ingest systems for three media centers (LJU, MB, KP) have been delivered and awaited their usage within the database driven workflow system jobDB .
It soon turned out that the legacy metadata databases existing at RTV were not at all suitable to be extended with a media management extension.
With the expertise of the NOA team it turned out quickly that the mediARC product could be used as a new host for a WAN wide solution to cope with
With Bojan Kosi as brilliant system administrator the
mediARC
system grew to a state driven workflow engine which was used to manage people, organize resources and have a perfect overview on all catalogued items via dedicated dispatched workflows.
The start of the digitization of the radio archive was launched and successfully performed over the years to come.
mediARC
became THE central media library for all DALET productions in the radio for the time being.
NOA, CTO
"We are quite glad to be able to work with RTV, as important and very valuable feedback has been presented from Bojan Kosi towards us in a way, which makes it simple to enhance the functionality with minor cost impacts. The decision to provide an own well balanced workflow engine furthermore, pays now back: We can very fast and efficiently respond to the needs of our customers in a way which is easy to handle for both sides."
It does not happen very often anymore that preservation projects need also to include a beautified version of the digital facsimile, simply because the amount of available budgets to perform such a restoration is not available and technologies available today perform much better tomorrow.
After longer discussions the NOA cooperation with CEDAR Ltd. UK turned out to be beneficial – as users could order from the archive preserved objects and order 'on the fly' a complete automated restoration via CEDAR tools without user interaction. De-clicking and de-hissing tools which run on server-side unattended are not easy to get - the used software modules proved to be the success for it.
This phase opened up the archive to several hundred users which could with a simple click order from the archive their media essence - including a live beautifying and leaving the facsimile as facsimile - towards different production systems:
The principle of
mediARC
“order to a beneficiary” follows always the simple pattern of delivering “media essence + tandem XML file” which contains all necessary remapped metadata.
Access towards the central archive was given by a web-based flexible interface - the next NOA product: mediARC WEB .
RTV, technical director
Regional Center in Maribor
"The NOA system is well received amongst the users even without heavy persuasion work - and one of the many obvious advantages, is that we do not need to handle the archive assets in the regionals anymore. We can benefit directly from the centrally managed content of Ljubljana in a way as if it would have been local in Maribor. Even more, the mediARC model has become the system to describe all our assets as well, this has led lead to the advantage of one central consolidated metadata repository.”
An incredible amount of hundreds of thousands of videotapes were waiting for preservation. By then NOA has already started to deliver its new flagship
FrameLector
to the broadcast industry and one of the main aspects for RTV Slovenia here was the inclusion of an open source lossless preservation format based upon FFV1.
The first lines were installed and finally a totality of 14 parallel systems have been setup together with a complete QC chain based upon transfer quality control.
With all video assets stored as preview files in MP4 as well as in FFV1 preservation format – another step has been taken to concentrate all archival information towards ONE system.
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