Content Identification for Audiovisual Archives
Richard W. Kroon, Raymond Drewery, Andrea Leigh, Stephen McConnachie · International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA) Journal · 2015
Digital archives exist within a complex global web of interests and agencies with ever-increasing -and often conflicting -demands placed on their limited resources.Issues with work identification confront them during acquisition, reconciliation, and de-duplication of assets obtained from multiple sources.Furthermore, they must accommodate manual workflows and the resulting process delays, volume constraints, and costs of error correction.A curated system of unique, global identification for audiovisual works, their derivative versions, and physical and digital manifestations as provided by the Entertainment Identifier Registry Association (EIDR) can directly address many of these issues and enable the provision of systems and services that address many more.We identify several use case examples, including a federated system for archive search and retrieval, the collection of off-air television broadcasts, and addressing intellectual property rights assertions. Why Identify?Archives do not exist in isolation; they are part of a wider ecosystem with each institution catering to a particular audience.The value of an audiovisual archive, however you choose to measure it, is always less than its value when part of a larger, interconnected network of archives.32 Cooperation among archives helps fill the gaps in holdings and services that inevitably exist in any collection, while also providing opportunities for economies of scale, sharing costs, and collaboration on best practices.These advantages come at the cost of additional competition for an archive's already limited time and resources and sometimes may conflict with an individual archive's priorities, but the overall effect of collaboration is still significantly positive.A reliable method of shared identification minimizes costs and maximizes benefits: common assets are identified accurately; archives can easily exchange assets and metadata; federated search and cross-archive discovery become simpler; and digital delivery of assets becomes more streamlined.A system of globally unique, curated identifiers can also benefit an archive's internal operations, particularly during content acquisition, reconciliation of materials obtained from multiple sources, and asset digitization.Shared, curated identification also helps eliminate manual touch points in most workflows, leading to increased process accuracy and throughput while simultaneously reducing costs and errors.Many of these benefits mirror the improvements a shared, curated identifier has already brought to the commercial audiovisual sector.33 , 34 Once you can clearly articulate what exists in a collection, the next hurdle is making that information available to those who need it: if the people who need you cannot find you, then you may as well not exist.The Internet has made searching easier -both searching for archives and searching an archive for items in its collection -but this is still far from the ideal.Not all archives are online and not all collections are equally accessible, leading to a continued reliance on word-of-mouth and oral history to identify the holders of desired assets.35 At the same 32 The collective value of a network of archives follows the pattern established by Metcalfe's Law, with the network's value increasing at a greater rate than the simple sum of its individual members.("Metcalfe's Law, " http://www.businessdictionary.com