This document discusses the digitization of audiovisual materials at the University of Innsbruck. It outlines the university's plans to digitize over 90,000 hours of audiovisual content from its collections over the next 5-10 years. As a pilot project, the document focuses on digitizing 2000 VHS cassettes containing 3000 hours of video from the Slavonic Studies Department. It describes the proposed mass digitization process, including using a custom VHS digitization machine to capture content, extracting descriptive and technical metadata, and ingesting the content and metadata into a digital preservation system for long-term access. The goals are to develop an institutional strategy for digitizing and preserving all analog audiovisual materials at the university.

1. PrestoPRIMEFP7-ICT-2007-3 231161 Higher Education Institutions and AV digitisation Günter Mühlberger & Andy StauderUniversity of Innsbruck Library 24 June 2010

2. Department for Digitisation & Digital Preservation (DEA) Founded in 2002 Currently 3 permanent staff, 11 FTEs from third party projects (9 from R&D, 2 from commercial projects) Specialised in book and paper digitisation, digital library technology, Optical Character Recognition, software development, etc. Coordinator of eBooks-on-Demand Network (27 member libraries delivering every public domain book in digital format) Involved in several EU projects, e.g. IMPACT (mass digitisation and OCR processing), PrestoPrime (preservation),... Currently finishing one of the largest non-Google projects: Digitisation of 216.000 theses, with more than 24 M pages (1800 m shelf) AV digitisation & preservation: A new terrain for us! Our ambition: Set up a university wide Digitisation and Preservation Strategy (currently in the stage of negotiations with the University Management board) Apply our experiences from other mass-digitisation projects to the AV domain In 5-10 years all the analogue AV material of the university should be available in digital format

3. Higher Education Institution Scenario Defined a scenario for Higher Education Institutions in PrestoPrime University of Innsbruck as example 25.000 students, 3000+ researchers AV material More than 25 research collections, 90.000+ hours of AV material 90% comes from broadcasters, but many rare programmes Also unique material (research and cultural value) 95% still not available in digital format Switch to digital workflow (semi-professional production of AV content) Usage Research, teaching, cultural activities,... Copyright privileges. Goal of PrestoPrime To find a practical solution for preservation and access To provide guidance to other HEI

4. Pilot project Collection of the Slavonic Studies Department Multimedia collection of research papers, newspaper clippings, photos and audio & video material (since more than 25 years ago) Medium sized: around 2000 VHS cassettes with about 3000 hours of video material Rare programmes from Russian and former Soviet countries from the early 80ies until today Important material for research and teaching Heavily used by students and researchers Technical situation In-house Oracle g10 database for metadata (mainly descriptive) No specific preservation strategy Currently highly ineffective “on-demand-digitisation” for VHS cassettes

5. Our approach Run a mass-digitisation project, where all processes are carried out as a batch process including metadata extraction, quality control, storage, etc. Afterwards it should not be necessary to touch the analogue material again Digitise with a reasonable quality which is adequate to the original material (VHS) and corresponds ot the fact that we are not in a broadcaster environment In cases where unique material in high quality (e.g. DigiBeta is available certainly higher quality would be necessary) Use a sub-set of the descriptive metadata for the digital repository but do not touch the metadata management system currently in use Systems have developed, researchers and users are familiar with “their” database, etc... Highly political aspect Adapt the digital repository so that it is able to handle AV material Storage strategies, etc.

6. Implementation: Mass-digitisation ‘DEA-VHSS-1’ VHS digitisation machine One server architecture computer 8 USB 2.0 analogue-to-digital converters (external) 8 VHS video recorders (S-VHS recorders or audio cassette recorders could be used as well) Standard computer peripherals (human input devices, monitor etc.) Output 4:2:0 sub-sampled Intel video Capture Rate PAL up to 720x576 pixels/25fps Capture Rate NTSC: up to 720x480 pixels/29,9fps PCM raw audio 16 bit depth 44.1 kHz sampling rate Encoding Currently h.264 video and mpeg I audio layer 3 (mp3) in AVI-container format Productivity 4 runs per working day (=32 cassettes resp. 40-50 hours per day with one machine) with a minimum of human effort Several machines in several university departments for parallel processing

7. Implementation : Metadata, quality control Descriptive Metadata XML Export from Oracle database, mapping to simple Dublin Core within the repository Linked via a barcode (ID of the record) which is scanned with a barcode scanner during the digitisation process Technical metadata Joanneum Research develops a content based quality control tool within PrestoPrime It needs to be specified what shall be done during the ingest process and what shall be done as routine process in the preservation life cycle Output again a XML file with technical information (to be defined in detail, first version available e2010) Structural metadata Annotation and tagging tool from B&G Course participants, students, researchers have a clear interest in the material, e.g. write a thesis, diploma, etc. and are therefore very likely willing to annotate the video

8. Implementation: Storage

9. Implementation: Storage Netapp storage Relatively expensive Extension is not that easy Currently 25 TB available for our unit IBM band storage Very cheap (once it is available) Currently 10 TB used by our unit, but a lot more would be available Disadvantage: slow! Takes some minutes to retrieve a file As a rule of thumb we expect 600 MB for one hour – so 100.000 hours would sum up to 60 TB This cannot be managed with the current infrastructure, but infrastructure can relatively easily be upgraded

10. Implementation: Preservation PrestoPrime: Exlibris Rosetta – Digital Preservation System Integration and validation Library already runs Aleph and PRIMO Test installation Institutional repository In-house solution (beta version) Oracle 10g XDB METS objects Descriptive, technical and structural metadata will be transformed into METS file which is than ingested into the database Features: user management, searching, browsing, OAI-PMH interface, etc. Our task To compare both solutions

11. What can you expect until the end of the project? A paper with a more detailed description of the Higher Education Institution Scenario We will contact several universities Carry out a survey on their collections, usage, preservation strategies, experiences, etc. of AV material Structured interviews for a closer look A paper describing in detail our approach for some pilot projects as the one described above Considerations, approaches, workflows, used tools, etc. Real world data A technical description of the VHS digitisation machine We believe that a number of institutions will be in the same situation, i.e. that they are holders of S-VHS or VHS collections which need to be digitised We are also willing to assemble such machines on a contractual basis

12. Thank you for your attention!