Mediaflex for AudioVisual Archives

The next generation solution for managing all the media in an audiovisual archive

The Mediaflex platform provides a flexible and scalable solution for the management of media content held in audiovisual archives and collections around the world. Organisations such as the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia have significant amounts of motion picture and audio content of cultural interest and have implemented Mediaflex to enable the management of it as well as to provide increased access to it.

Mediaflex goes beyond traditional Collection Management systems and Digital & Media Asset Management systems to deliver a solution that meets a major challenge facing contemporary audiovisual archives – how to manage all of the analogue and digital media in one system.

Mediaflex uses hierarchical data structures and workflow concepts to underpin all major archival processes. Audiovisual archivists and curators can use the functionality in Mediaflex to manage, preserve and deliver digital content in their collections while ensuring that the whereabouts of analogue content and artefacts are also strictly tracked and maintained.

Benefits of the Mediaflex platform for audiovisual archives includes:

• Full content traceability through comprehensive audit trail and reporting functionality
• Significantly improved access to content held within the collections
• Improved preservation capacity
• Increase digitisation capabilities and efficiency
• Improved vaults and space management for storage and tracking of physical media content
• Efficient cataloguing of content through both manual and automated processes

Mediaflex supports the major audiovisual business processes including:

• Acquisitions
• Accessioning & Cataloguing
• Preservation
• Rights Management
• Loans, Movements and Vaults Management
• Searching & Reporting

Acquisitions

For audiovisual archives with heritage responsibilities, it is essential to capture a substantial amount of information for any acquisition, particularly as material is often acquired in the form of collections of disparate media formats. Mediaflex provides a holistic view of an acquisition (which may comprise thousands of reels of film) together with accurate information on where the individual elements are in the processing of the collection.

Mediaflex features include:

• Tracking of a collection from the time of initial negotiation through all stages of processing including dispatch from donor, initial receipt and registration, initial storage of collection, accessioning of high priority items, re-canning and permanent storage
• Managing an acquisition as a whole without requiring that all items be accessioned
• Tracking of an acquisition where different material may be stored in totally different vaults (eg colour film in cold storage, videotape in cool storage)
• Printing of receipts for donors
• Printing of labels used in the initial processing and storage of newly acquired material

Accessioning & Cataloguing

Accessioning involves the recording of basic information about a work and the associated material that has been received by an archive. An accessioned record should include enough information to confirm that an archive has the material under a basic level of control and is able to retrieve it from its storage location. In contrast, cataloguing involves the recording of sufficient details to make works and their items fully accessible when the data is fully exposed to either a restricted audience or to the wider public.

Mediaflex features include:

• Management of analogue and digital content within a single system. For any one title, it is easy to identify holdings, the formats of the holdings and their accessibility
• Multiple levels of intellectual description eg titles of individual works such as a feature film, series titles, and episode titles. This makes it easy to establish hierachical “parent-child” relationships between titles or between titles and items or between a series title and episodes
• Full version control for titles and the media associated with each version
• Uniform Titles. For example, version control is used for works that may have some or all of an original release version, a director’s cut, a TV release version etc.
• Multiple levels of physical description eg items, carriers, collections
• Flexible accessioning and cataloguing processes for all formats of audiovisual media used in the film, television, sound recording and radio industries over the last century or so.
• The capture of basic accessioning information such as title, source of the material, number of items received, names of principal creators (eg producer, director, songwriter etc).
• The capture of more detailed information so that a title can be fully catalogued.
• Lookup table functionality for fields where codes are used and for the standardisation of data entry.
• Authority files for fields where names are entered (eg Director, Cast, Producer, Borrower etc).

Preservation

Preservation of material in an audiovisual archive collection involves numerous tasks including the management of climate controlled storage, conservation and repair work for physical media, creation of copies such as duping and access copies, digitising to create access copies and digitising to preserve content resident on fragile analogue media such as film and tape.

For preserving fragile media, a digitising process involving use of mass migration technologies may be employed. The end results are very large files usually with metadata wrappers and often, compressed using a lossless technique. Mediaflex’s preservation functionality supports the mass migration of content from analogue and digital formats, such as videotape and CD's to, other preservation and access digital formats. Given the short lifespan formats such as tape and CD's, it is imperative to use technology systems, such as Samma, or Ripstation to perform mass migration projects. Mediaflex is integrated with both Samma and Ripstation and fully supports the associated workflows, including extracting metadata from the resulting digital files into Mediaflex item records.

Mediaflex features include:

• Analogue and digital moving image, still image, audio and artefact preservation workflows
• All stages of the digital preservation process from the movement of the analogue media from its permanent storage location through to the writing of preservation files on LTO tape for storage in the digital repository.
• Tight integration with third party hierarchical storage management products such as FPD DIVArchive, SGL Flashnet and Xendata Archive Series. This integration underpins audio, video and documentation (eg photographs, posters, lobby cards) digitisation workflows.
• Wrapping metadata into preservation items including the major formats such as – audio (BWF), documentation (TIFF) and video (JPEG2000).
• Generating access/browsing items in formats such as – audio (MP3), documentation (high resolution JPEG copies and thumbnails) and video (Windows Media 9).
• Using digital checksums, such as MD5, in the automated validation of the integrity of digital content.
• Support for the tracking of over 80 different digital file types
• Automatic harvesting of metadata from all digital sources (eg JPEG2000, MXF, BWF). For example, the digital preservation process for an audiotape generates a lot of metadata in the WAV file created. Mediaflex captures this information and stores it in the individual item record, which, in turn means that the data is searchable and can also be used in reports.

Rights Management

In order to provide access to items in their collections, archives need to capture information about who owns the copyright to those items. It is also necessary to know the duration of such rights, territorial restrictions (if any), and importantly, contact details for those who are able to negotiate and grant clearance of usage of material by clients of the archive, or indeed, the archive itself.

Mediaflex features include:

• Rights Management and use permissions of content and items in the collections.
• Workflow based approach to the copyright clearance processes
• Digital delivery across the Internet according to use permission.
• Both internal and extrenal access restrictions for all items in the collections 
• Name authority records for rights holders along with full contact and history records

Loans, Movements and Vaults Management

Physical vaults and media management for most udiovisual archives is a significant part of the operation. In particular the need to record information about the movement of material around the archive’s premises. Especially when the material is removed temporarily from its permanent storage location. Mediaflex’s functionality supports both internal movements and external loans of archival material and also provides the tools necessary to manage vaults.

Mediaflex features include:

• external loans
• movement of material across all locations in an audiovisual archive
• extensive use of barcodes and portable scanners
• management of vaults including specific temperature contolled environments
• recording details of an item’s permanent location down to the exact row, bay and shelf
• management of acclimatisation processes for material that has special storage conditions (eg very cold) so that retrieval of such material includes a short period in temperature controlled transitory storage whilst the physical re-acclimatises to standard room temperatures
• stocktaking

Searching & Reporting

The ability to easily retrieve both information and content relating to items in the collections is a significant factor in the efficiency that any system can bring to the archive. Flexible search and reporting options are therefore critical. Mediaflex provides a wide range of search and reporting functionality such as simple title searches, where a user knows what they are looking for, through to complex search query creation including Boolean operators and Query by Example (QBE). All searches can be saved for later recall.

Mediaflex also provides flexible reporting functionality for organisations to create their own custom reports with the built in Report Designer and Data Dictionary. All reports can be saved to the system and recalled by any user with appropriate permissions.

Mediaflex features include:

• Simple search criteria for users who know what they are looking for
• Comprehensive advanced search including Boolean, Query By Example, and the ability to save and recall search criteria
• Searching of digital documents in multiple formats including PDF
• Faceted searching and navigation
• Extensive audit trail captured through all workflow processes providing a comprehensive reporting foundation
• Comprehensive report design tool built into the Mediaflex application
• Data Dictionary eliminates the requirement to access the underlying data structures and reduce complexity.