What is Archive Asset Management?
Broadcasters and archivists today face a challenge when it comes to ensuring that media content and it's descriptive metadata is preserved and accessible for the long term.
Many broadcasters see their media archive as the heart and soul of their organization. Yet the sheer number of content sources and formats, and the fact that content is constantly changing and evolving, makes it difficult to manage, especially when it comes to digitizing, describing, linking, and storing that content in a way that makes it easy to find and access. Broadcasters and archivists need an Archive Asset Management system (AAM) that can ingest, describe, archive, and deliver content so that it fits archival requirements not just for the present, but also for decades into the future. Whereas production departments typically focus only on the next playout date, archival description of content has to serve history, cultural identity, and cultural heritage. As a consequence, production systems and their MAM layers cannot serve as archive repository. A true AAM system has to be a dedicated system, that follows OAIS recommendations and can exchange content with production systems and their MAM layers.
NOA's ARCHIVE ASSET MANAGEMENT products focus on the archiving of media and metadata to build sustainable archives for years and decades to come, production of those media files (including technical and electrical metadata) may also be a part of the entire process, if there are still non-digitized archival holdings. In contrast, NOA's ARCHIVE TRANSFER TECHNOLOGY is specialized solely in processes of carrier digitization, to produce files which can be taken over by pre-existing MAM or PAM systems.
NOA's Archive Asset Management system mediARC holds and maintains the database containing and managing all available metadata and operates as a management layer between the main entities of an archive:
- the physical archive, from which carriers are ordered to be sent to digitization
- the digital archive storage, containing media essence files
- user interfaces, from which editors and researchers are able to order content (which is either already available in the digital archive or which has to be digitized)
- the interface to production or media asset management or playout systems
According to OAIS guidelines, all entities of the archive are separated into individual sections with clearly defined access rights.
Archive Asset Management takes into consideration, that any A/V content worth archiving, has to be preserved for the long term. In the context of cultural heritage, this means as long as possible, ideally for eternity. Therefore a digital archive cannot be dependent on any writing system. It has to be an open database and repository that can be accessed even without the writing system. An Archive Asset Management (AAM) system has to guarantee this accessibility. Further, the AAM system shall not be dependent on any vendor specific hardware, but provide functionality on standard IT infrastructure with the ability of scaling according to future requirements.
NOA is able to provide required transfer technology as well as workflows and processes to successfully engage in the task of digitizing entire archives of 100,000+ carriers successfully and economically.
Some corner stones of an industrial digitization facility based on NOA solutions:
- Optimized end-to-end processes
- Flexible towards input and output (multiple carrier and file formats available)
- Multiple levels of quality control for media files as well as the overall process
- Reduction of manual carrier handling time
- Labor and decision separation
- Scalability of all system components
- Based on standard IT components”