100 million hours of audiovisual content: digital preservation and access in the PrestoPRIME project

We report preliminary results of PrestoPRIME, an EU FP7 integrated project, including audiovisual (AV) archives, academics and industrial partners, focused on long-term digital preservation of AV media objects and on improving access by integrating media archives with European on-line digital libraries, specifically Europeana. Project outcomes will result in tools and services to ensure the permanence of digital AV content in archives, libraries, museums and other collections, enabling long-term future access in dynamically changing contexts. PrestoPRIME has a special focus on digital preservation in broadcast environments, where very large files of digital video must be preserved at high quality (suitable for future re-use in an AV production environment) in affordable distributed and federated archives. The adoption of standard solutions for digital preservation processes (metadata representation, content storage, digital rights governance, search and access) enables the interoperability of the proposed preservation framework and guidelines. The OAIS model was chosen for the reference architecture, METS is adopted as wrapper for metadata representation, while relevant standards (e.g. from W3C, ISO/IEC and others) are used for content and rights description. Project outcomes will be delivered through a European networked Competence Centre, to gather knowledge and deliver advanced digital preservation advice and services in conjunction with Europeana and other initiatives.