News December `13
7000 mediARC Users benefit from Multi-role Archiving Capability:
NOA Audio Solutions has reached a milestone of 7000 users of its mediARC™archiving system, with Belgian broadcaster VRT (Vlaamse Radio- en Televisieomroep).
VRT's Muziekbeheer project is migrating the broadcaster's music library of over 150,000 CDs to a managed, digital archive with secure, accessible preservation at the best possible audio quality for the long-term use.
mediARC's base of customers involved in large-scale audio and video archiving projects includes broadcasters such as VRT, SRF, HRT, RTV, RTVS, and SRR, and national cultural heritage initiatives such as Fonoteca in Mexico.
"One of the reasons mediARC is so widely successful is that it satisfies the needs of both broadcasters and dedicated archivists -which are quite distinct and specialised,"said Christophe Kummer, CEO of NOA Audio Solutions."Archivists have to ensure the long-term integrity and availability of the archive and preserve a direct digital correspondence to the original physical carrier, while broadcast production teams have more immediate priorities and see the archive mainly as a collection of content clips."
Some archiving solutions do not address these differing requirements effectively, but mediARC has gained a strong base of users in both broadcasting and institutional archiving, and the system's ability to meet the needs of archivists and production teams is especially useful when the two rôles are required within the same organisation.
mediARC was widely commended by speakersat the 2013 conference of the IASAI (International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives), particularly for its powerful and very flexible approach to data structure and metadata, and its suitability as a platform for advanced semantic linking to create a future generation of machine-readable archives.
To provide customers with structured and flexible high-performance content management that will last for decades, mediARC allows access to a deep level of the database. Customers can therefore create extremely specific business processes using complex and sophisticated workflows. This places an emphasis on a continuing in-depth relationship with NOA's engineering team, which helps optimise the ownership experience by providing detailed support for customer-developed workflows.
Over thirteen years of consistent growth, NOA's business has been built on stability and uncompromised service to its customer base, together with an unbroken commitment to build lasting relationships with users.
"The key to good archiving is the combination of speed and efficiency with long-term accessibility and value,"said Christophe Kummer. "Our service to customers with service contracts means that whatever their own personnel changes, their investment in NOA technology is protected for the future, no matter how much they have customised the way they use the system."
IASA in Vilnius 2013:
Interesting to see that many different customer experiences have been mentioning NOA as the basis workflow and systems management.
1. CDI Mexico, the commission for the development of the indigenous communities in Mexico gave a report about the successful archive digitisation of the first radio archive with their travel station (statione itinerante).
2. Bojan Kosi of RTV Slovenia reported about the finalisation of most of the audio archive in Slovenia
3. Nadja Wallaskovits strenghtened the successful partnership with NOA for the magnetic tape head replacements
4. Semantic Web Technologies were highlighted within mediARC from S. Cavaglieri and Guy Maréchal as the viable tool to do contextual annotation
5. Sebastian Gabler (NOA) held an overview about possibilities in metadata exports from mediARC and gave a tutorial about information integrity principles in storage and servers.
Vivd discussions on the choice for video archivists about allowing AVI in the video archive have also taken place in context of the technical comittee, as ffv1 now seems to get more and more attrative as a choice for video archivists.
