Tech notes
Apr 6 2006 By Herb Kim, The Journal
Herb Kim is chief executive officer of Codeworks, the North-East's centre of excellence in digital technology.
A year ago, an investigation into moving image and sound archives discovered 10 million hours of film, video and audiotape gathering dust in warehouses throughout Europe.
Estimates put the worldwide total at 250 million hours of undigitised audiovisual content.
What's more, researchers couldn't tell what 60% of it contained. A video could hold anything from the fall of the Berlin Wall to an episode of It's a Knockout.
This is hugely important. Over the past century, audiovisual technology has given us a new kind of heritage. Key events were recorded and audiovisual media became a new form of cultural expression and an expansion of memory.
However, these historical, cultural and commercial assets are much more fragile than conventional artworks, such as paintings or monuments.
They are literally rotting away and, in 20 years' time, 70% will probably have disappeared. Imagine losing forever the footage of the 1966 World Cup Final or Zapruder's film of JFK's assassination.
In the North-East, Codeworks and a number of leading organisations, including the BBC, ITV and Imperial War Museum, are investigating how to develop a solution to the problem.
We're looking to stop the rot by digitising these audiovisual archives, making them available over the Internet and putting the North-East in prime position to take advantage of the commercial opportunities these archives present.
It's not an easy process. To digitise the footage, each piece of film needs to have "metadata" attributed to it.
These are cataloguing tags which make the film, video or audio easier to search on the internet - so if you type in "Clark Gable", for example, you'll get a list of his films.
Putting these tags in place is time- consuming and expensive and, the "tagger" needs to be expert in the film/ video they're watching. The BBC alone would need to spend £500m to catalogue its archive accurately.
A key challenge Codeworks is addressing is the development of technologies and processes to cut the cost of cataloguing, while maintaining the quality of the metatags.
Another difficulty in cataloguing is that people use different tagging techniques. For example, a martial arts enthusiast would tag The Matrix in a very different way to a technical person, who'd look more closely at the film's special effects. We need to find ways of ensuring our cataloguing system is relevant to all potential users.
As we overcome these problems we will be able to ensure essential moments in our recorded history are preserved and shareable, hopefully forever.
