Overall Objective: Audiovisual Preservation Services.

The main deliverable of the PrestoSpace Project is to develop and launch actual facilities and services for audiovisual preservation. The project will start these preservation factories by preparing the business plan, contacting potential investors and working with commercial partners to set up the actual services. These services will exploit the technological and industrial results of the project. A strong economic factor supporting these preservation factories is a commitment by the major PrestoSpace consortium members to use these services.

Audiovisual archiving is a complex and multi-disciplinary domain spanning such diverse fields as chemistry, physics, signal processing, robotics, artificial intelligence and semantic interpretation. 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 centres and universities, industrials, and international non-profit institutions.

The site that System Simulation has designed and is implementing for the SAM (digitisation and storage management) section of the EU IST project Prestospace ca be found at http://prestospace-sam.ssl.co.uk/. In developing this site we have worked closely with the BBC broadcasting Archives, who have supplied much of the text. Although work on the site will continue over the next year or so, its main features are evident. Its purpose is to encourage broadcasting organisations to make use of the preservation, digitisation and storage processes that have been developed elsewhere in the project and there are a series of features to engage such organisations in these processes. The site provides first of all a series of tools to assist the planning of preservation projects. These tools provide the means to assess storage requirements and calculate preservation costs. A cost-benefit calculator is under development. Although some of these calculations can be complicated, the tools present the processes involved in a clear step-by-step fashion. The calculators are supported by a series of tutorials explaining central issues in the preservation and storage of broadcast material and by a series of supplementary features presenting news items, references to related publications, links to other relevant sites etc.

Of considerable importance is the attractive visual presentation of the site that our design team developed. This plays an important part in encouraging users to make use of the facilities and to become engaged in the assistance the site has to offer.

We are also involved in the sub-project on the development of metadata schemata and exploitation of broadcast archives.

The main organisers and managers of the project are the seven core partners composing the Steering Board. The core partners are audiovisual archive owners, research and integration institutions and academic representatives.

The Steering Committee of PrestoSpace are:

Institut national de l'audiovisuel (Ina) France
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) UK
Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI) Ita

lJoanneum Research (JRS) Austria

Netherlands Institute of Sound and Vision (B&G) Netherlands

Oesterreichischer Rundfunk (ORF) Austria

University of Sheffield, Computer Science Dept (USFD) UK


The Core Partners are:

Advanced Computer Systems (ACS) Italy

Roroco Germany

Hi-Stor France

CRCDG-CNRS France

Media Matters LLC (MMatters) USA

Stream UK Media Services Limited (Stream UK) UK

University of Southampton (IT Innovation) UK

System Simulation Ltd (SSL) UK

Eurix Italy

SAI - OntoText Lab., Sirma AI Ltd. (SAI) Bulgaria

Osterreichische Mediathek Austria

CubeTec Germany

Snell&Wilcox (S&W) UK

HS-Art Digital Service GmbH (HSArt) Austria

University of Surrey (UniS) UK

University of La Rochelle (ULR) France

Trinity College Dublin (TCDublin) Ireland

Gdansk University of Technology (GUT) Poland

University Roma Tor Vergata (UTV) Italy

Vectracom (Vectra) France

Centrimage France

Stichting Nederlands Filmmuseum (Fmuseum) Nederlands

NOB Cross media facilities (NOB) Nederlands

Studio Hamburg (STH) Germany

TI Partners Sweden