The Project

The consortium

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 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. No industrial is present in the core group since the diversity of the technological solutions addressed by the Project does not allow singling out a common representative for the whole domain.

A wide-range of participants constitutes the associated partners. They may be characterised by the following categories:

• A strong group of Users, Service providers and Industry representatives will provide the requirements, functional feed-back and the knowledge on possible existing solutions for particular addressed problems. Users associated with the project will provide the first collections for setting-up the Preservation Factory.

• Industrials and SMEs representing the main actors in the audiovisual, preservation, restoration, storage and delivery domain are present. They are eager to address directly the archiving problems, to implement the results of research and to build the tools and components for the preservation chain, for restoration innovations and for access solutions.

• Universities and Applied Research Institutes which will provide solutions to identified research problems and will work in close relation to archives and industrials for the development of solutions.

Out of the 34 partners planned to date, already 32 are identified. Among them there are:

• 8 archive institutions, most of them representing the archives as well as their R&D departments,

• 3 applied R&D institutions,

• 6 university institutes,

• 15 industrial partners. Practically all of them are SMEs. This reflects the situation in the market that requires innovative and flexible solutions. A few of them are not only offering specialised solutions for specific areas, but are also service providers and thus potential candidates with high interest in the later exploitation of the Preservation Factory services. One of the industrial partners is a US based company.

Full integration and consistency of the project will be guaranteed on three levels: first and most prominently by the core partners who will participate in more than one work area or transversal work package. Secondly, also associated partners will work in more than one work area or work package, if needed for the project. For instance, the industrial partners will also contribute to system architecture, user requirements and to exploitation wherever appropriate. Details on that may be seen from the table on work distribution to work packages. Thirdly the user requirements will be built on the experience and input of a user group that comprises about 50 institutions of different size with a broad spectrum of experience. Some of them are already described in the list of participating institutions.