The Project

The consortium

Audiovisual archiving is a complex and multi-disciplinary domain spanning such diverse fields as signal processing, artificial intelligence, semantic interpretation and all digital technologies applied to archiving from preservation to Web publishing. 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 centre and universities, and SMEs industrials for development and integration.

The main organisers and managers of the project are the core partners composing the Steering Board. The core partners are three audiovisual archive owners including research activities, two research institutions and an industrial as integrator in the project, each of them being responsible of at least one work package. The Core group brings together the major and highly complex audiovisual collections in Europe. The partners have the experience of launching and running large and effective digitisation and delivery programs. The research partners have already proven their ability to find solutions for various problems in the area (e.g. projects PRESTO, GATE, MUMIS, ECHO) and have involvements in several other preservation research projects (SHAMAN, CASPAR). They also bring to the project the results from PrestoSpace. Among the fifteen partners are:

• Five Archive institutions and a University Library, most of them representing the archives as well as their R&D departments involved in research and experimentation for audiovisual archiving
• Four Research partners including two applied R&D institutes and two University research centres.
• Four industrial partners, two of which are SMEs. This reflects the situation in the market that requires innovative and flexible solutions.
• The European Foundation, associating major European actors of archives, audiovisual archives, museums and libraries.

Full integration and consistency of the project will be guaranteed by the participation of the archive partners in all work packages with the purposes to integrate specific technologies for long-term preservation and access, and to provide services for audiovisual actors within the Competence Centre.

The research partners will be in charge of high level innovations and responsible of providing exploitable results from the academic approaches on distributed services or interoperability.

The industrial partners will be in charge of integration and evaluation, extending their competences on digital asset management and on software framework solutions for their customers and final users (Eurix and Ex Libris) or for service provider ( Doremi).

In order to give a concise overview on how collaboration and distribution of work are envisaged, the partners and their roles are summarised in the following tables.