For years now, the move towards service providers for archive digitization has been the seemingly obvious approach for heritage owners with abundant budgets and funding.
However, many broadcasters and national archives worldwide are by law not allowed to send their physical assets abroad. Nowadays, borders are felt more than ever with quarantine and lockdowns in place due to COVID-19, and budgets for archive departments are in danger of being cut down even further than many already had to endure in the past. Although reactive, production driven archive digitization is being replaced by systematic and retrospective digitization by the majority of institutions, the wrong apprehension that speed and results will slow down if such projects are again insourced is still present in some people’s minds.
By SWOT-ing the pros and cons including a dedicated risk-cost-analysis in combination with respective results from various successful installations with the example of Sharjah Broadcasting Authority, NOA will show the advantages of investing into a workbench for 90+% of the archive rather than spending millions towards outsourcing tasks and jobs, which could otherwise remain within the institutions.