Series of EU projects to preserve Europe's historical broadcast heritage
The European Commission has recognised the importance of preserving and accessing Europe's historical broadcast heritage through funding for three separate projects under the IST section of the Commission's Fifth Framework Programme. It has awarded 2.4 million euro to the PRESTO project, which involves seven technology partners from ten nations working towards preserving some of the rarest, richest and broadest historical broadcast heritage of the 20th century. The project is part of the Cultural heritage application programme. A related project, AMICITIA was launched on 1 October 2000. AMICITIA will focus on the digital preservation of audiovisual material. The third project, PRIMAVERA is researching new technologies and algorithms for indexing, retrieval, browsing and presentation of visual content. Work began on the PRIMAVERA project on 1 November, and will continue for two years. PRESTO (preservation technology for European broadcast archives) will last 18 months. The project aims to survey the current preservation requirements of Europe's archives, develop a best practice model in audio, video and film media, identify key links (those points in the preservation process that are labour intensive or have technological shortcomings) and develop new technology and innovative ways of working. This will include improved playback for one inch and U-matic tapes, equipment to automatically handle film which needs re-splicing, software to manage a transfer process from beginning to end and technology to automatically monitor signal quality. 'What we're talking about is ensuring this huge audiovisual history is there for the future. At the moment we have to go through a constant cycle of archiving and re-archiving every time a format becomes obsolete, which is both time consuming and expensive. PRESTO should break that mould - finding new ways of preserving the past which circumvent this cycle' said Paul Fiander, head of BBC information and archives. 'The PRESTO project will enable us to pool experience and research new methods of preservation, such as increased automation. These could reduce costs by as much as 30 per cent - a huge saving across the board.' The BBC is also participating in the AMICITIA project, along with five partners from Germany Austria and Sweden. AMICITIA aims to build a base for continued and viable digital preservation of, and access to television and video content through the construction of various vital components. This will enable a digital archiving system to serve all required roles in ingest, management, access and distribution of audiovisual material. A special focus is being placed on enabling remote, multilingual access to archive content stored in a distributed environment. The system will be designed to serve both the needs of professional users and the needs of public access. The implementation work will be based on an existing digital media asset management system developed as part of a previous EU research project: EUROMEDIA.