The climate crisis is at hand. Our generation will likely know the success or failure of our efforts to address human impacts on the environment. The next generation will look back on what we have done: a future that we can make but not yet fully know; a past they will know but not any more change. This keynote will discuss the prospects for digital remembering of a time before the crisis for the generations that come after it. Their perspectives will depend on the records and the archives which we create, curate and hand on to them. Standing in the way are the numerous challenges which we face in developing economically and environmentally sustainable preservation of digital materials. The presentation will end with a call to action, to secure the inheritance of our digital collections. The preservation community has never not cared for the generations that will follow, but there’s never been more important time to take our stand with the future.

William is the Executive Director of the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), a dynamic sector-making charity that provides community engagement, advocacy, workforce development, capacity, good practice and standards in digital preservation. William started his career in archaeology in the 1990s with an unusual mix of qualifications in computing and archaeology when the discipline’s enthusiasm for new technology outstripped its capacity to manage the resulting data. In 2020 he was jointly named ‘Information Manager of the Year’ by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, and in 2022 made Honorary Professor in the College of Arts at the University of Glasgow.

Transforming and researching the news: the National Corpus of Irish project – The National Corpus of Ireland project is an initiative to develop a large national corpus of contemporary Irish encompassing both written and spoken sources. Various subcorpora and related specialised corpora will also be created in what will become a hub for corpus-based research on the Irish language. In this talk, the need for such a resource will be explained, the steps in the project will be set out, and we will look at some examples of research that might result from it. We will focus on the capture and reuse of news archives (RTÉ, Irish Times, Tuairisc, TG4 and others) and the possibilities afforded by audiovisual archives for corpus development. Compilation of this corpus is being undertaken by the Gaois research group, Fiontar & Scoil na Gaeilge, DCU, with funding for the period 2022-2024 from the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media.

Dr Úna Bhreathnach (DCU) is Editorial Manager of www.corpas.ie, www.tearma.ie, www.logainm.ie, www.ainm.ie, www.duchas.ie, www.gaois.ie and several other terminology and related projects. She is principal Investigator (PI) on the Dúchas and National Corpus of Irish projects. Her research interests include terminology (the subject of her PhD), language planning, sociolinguistics, the Irish language, digital humanities, placenames, and corpus-based research.

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Dr Brian Ó Raghallaigh is an Assistant Professor at Dublin City University, where he is a member of the Gaois research group. He is the Principal Investigator (PI) on the Logainm Placenames Database of Ireland project and Co-PI on the Decoding Hidden Heritages (AHRC–IRC) project. He is a member of the Historical Dictionary of Irish (RIA) management committee and the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) Expert Advisory Group. His background is in computer science, linguistics and Irish. His research is focused on the creation of digital Irish-language resources for language technology and other applications.

The carbon footprint of the ICT sector has been stable around 0.7 billion ton CO₂e for nearly a decade. Even as more people than ever use a smartphone or mobile phone (8+ billion), and the Internet (5+ billion). Energy efficiency improvements has countered the growth in number of users. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, the aviation sector’s carbon footprint was about 3 times larger, 2.2 billion ton including so called high-altitude effects, for serving only about 10% of all humans a few times per year. That the ICT sector’s carbon footprint is larger than aviation is based on an old erroneous comparison.

During the pandemic, the ICT sector helped the world with working online from home, online education, online shopping for, e.g., food, and with support to the health care system to handle the pandemic. And then with all forms of online entertainment and media during the lockdowns. Total data traffic increased by about 50%, yet the footprint stayed nearly the same.

It has, however, also been claimed in media that streaming video, or downloading digital media, or having videoconferences, consumes a lot of electricity. These claims are not supported by any real measurements. It would have been easy to measure e.g., a Wi-Fi router and a laptop during a video conference or when streaming video and seeing a small power increase. Even downloading a large PC game consumes only a few Watts over Wi-Fi depending on signal quality and significantly less using a network cable.

Netflix and its use of AWS CDN (Content Delivery Network), together with Akamai, represents about 30% of total Internet data traffic. Yet their data centers and CDNs consume only about 1.1 TWh. Meta/Facebook consume over 9 TWh for about 15% of total Internet data traffic, showing the large difference between only storing and sending data, compared to also processing large amounts of data.

Jens Malmodin has 25 years of experience of energy efficient design, LCA (Life Cycle Assessment), environmental assessments in general and environmental data reporting at Ericsson. He has published many papers and articles about LCA of ICT products, systems and services, including studies on the ICT sector level and how ICT can help society reduce its impact on the environment. Jens holds an MSc in material engineering from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden

This talk explores the challenges and opportunities surrounding the design of sustainable infrastructures for the storage of large digital collections. Rather than approaching sustainability from a traditional environmental standpoint, this paper uses the lens of sustainable infrastructures to explore the value of long-lasting, modular, repairable, and extensible digital storage. Using the experience of designing an archival storage system for the ITMA as a case study, the aim is to show that sustainable infrastructures may be a promising approach used to contribute to the goals of sustainability in archives.

Adam Girard is Digital Archivist at the Irish Traditional Music Archive. He holds a PhD in Information and Communication Studies from UCD, and an MLIS from the Dominican University (River Forest IL). Adam’s professional career has primarily focused on culturally significant audio-visual collections in a variety of settings, including audio-visual libraries and internationally known archival institutions. Adam has developed a special interest in the storage and preservation of all types of audio recording media, ranging from antiquated formats to modern born-digital files.

Meemoo manages a large quantity of mainly audiovisual material from more than 170 partners in cultural heritage and media. More than 6 million objects are currently stored, ranging from digitised newspapers, photos, videos, and audio. In addition, a number of access platforms make the digitised content available to specific target groups, including teachers, students, professional re-users, or the public.

Metadata is a key element in all of meemoo’s processes. An important part of our activities is to collect, integrate, manage, and search a large variety of heterogeneous metadata across the archived content. The scale of this has increased enormously, so a good and integrated approach is needed to deal with the amount of metadata, its need for flexibility, and how easy it is to find. One of the specific challenges is modelling and storing data from machine learning algorithms (speech recognition, face detection and entity recognition) for reuse.

In this talk, we will discuss the key points and lessons learned from implementing the new metadata roadmap at Meemoo, which is focused on a Knowledge Graph-based infrastructure. The goal of the roadmap is to establish a better data practice within the organization and offer application-independent, uniform access to (meta)data that is spread across various systems and formats.

Miel Vander Sande is a Data Architect at Meemoo, Flemish Institute for Archives. Meemoo manages a large quantity of mainly audio-visual material from more than 160 partners in cultural heritage and media. More than 6 million objects are currently stored, ranging from digitised newspapers, photos, video, and audio. As a Data Architect, Miel is responsible for the organisation, quality, and usability of metadata, both today and tomorrow. Miel has a background in Web technology and a PhD in publishing Linked Data.

In this talk, we would like to discuss questions like:

• How many files do we store and why?
• What should we know about file quality?
• Which factors affect file quality, and what has the archive got to do with it?
• Short-, Mid- and Long-Term Strategies to deal with imperfect files?

The talk will not go into technical details but will focus on the aspects concerning archive media management.

Gerhard Stanz works at the Multimedia Archive of the ORF (Austrian Broadcasting Cooperation). He started his work as a Television Archivists in all the classical job-roles of archiving, documenting, researching of, as well as creating out of archive material. The informatization of the media business led him to his current job-role as “Systems Developer”. In this position he acts as an intermediary between the technical departement and archive users in operating, maintaining, troubleshooting,testing and further developing the it-infrastructure of the archive. His main responsibility at the ORF is the file-archive.

Sound & Vision’s archiving activities traditionally revolve around ingesting and preserving the radio and television of Dutch public broadcasters. However, as a result of different fusions, acquisitions and tenancies, different types of materials (both audiovisual and non-av) and accompanying non-standardized metadata are becoming a steadily larger chunk of our collections. Sound & Vision will present the impact of these changes in terms of metadata ingest, thesaurus use and overall work practices.

Annelies started at Sound & Vision as team leader of the Digitization Department and is currently working as a Project Coordinator. As Project Coordinator, she is involved in various digital ingest projects, including the digital archive service Tenancies at Sound & Vision.

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Hester is currently working at the ingest department of Sound and Vision. As an analyst, she is involved in various digital ingest projects, with a main focus on metadata solutions. Within the digital archive service Tenancies at Sound and Vision, Hester ensures that metadata from depositors are carefully ingested into the MAM system.

In this talk, we will explore how we changed persons and organisations from uncontrolled metadata to a controlled vocabulary during the migration of metadata from an old MAM system to a new in-house built MAM.

Anna Abenius started at SVT Archive (Swedish Television) in 2003. From 2015 onward, she has been a coordinator of metadata in the MAM and, during the last years, also of the SKOS thesaurus system that is going live in spring 2023.

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Cathrine Kjær Knudsen works as an archive researcher assisting productions with archive footage and rights guidance as well as being a part of developing the new SKOS thesaurus system at SVT Archive, Sveriges Television. She is experienced in quality control of metadata and rights, is originally from Denmark and has previously worked at DR Archive and research.

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Jonas Engström is the co-founder and managing director of the company Mayam. Coming from a background in IT and high-performance computing, Jonas has spent over 20 years building IT systems for broadcasters.

RTÉ Archives is in a process of digital transformation. This presentation will look at our approach and progress with digitisation, digitalisation and digital transformation; how we are restructuring our teams and developing new skills and juggling both digital and analogue workflows in parallel; and what opportunities and challenges will arise with the provision of digital access to our archive content in the future.

It will also look at RTÉ’s new digital storage solution examining the options considered and the approach taken to consolidate disparate digital storage systems into one system that is sustainable, resilient, secure and scalable. It will explain how object storage manages resilience and security and how it facilitates RTÉ Archives’ storage and digital preservation requirements.

Conrad is the Technical Architect at Radió Teilifis Éireann (RTÉ), the public service broadcaster in Ireland, where he is working on modernising and transforming RTÉ’s technology architecture as part of the ongoing digital transformation in the organisation.

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Miroslav Culjat is the Manager, Archiving and Preservation for all projects across RTÉ Archives. His leadership in digital archiving and preservation is instrumental to the digital transformation and continuous improvements with business process efficiencies within the department, resulting in a positive impact for all stakeholders, internal and external to RTÉ.

Content preservation, high-quality production and process automation are at the core of the current transformation of Public Service Media (PSM) from its traditional business to the modern digital era. Broadcasters’ archives play a central role in this change, being a valuable source of information to run the business. On the other hand, accessing and retrieving desired content (and metadata) may be a non-trivial task. This is where artificial intelligence comes into play, providing solutions that help users extract knowledge and organise data more efficiently and effectively.

This presentation highlights how emerging AI-based technologies can support the mission of PSMs in this transition by exploiting AI’s potential to facilitate archive organisation and valorisation. Sample tasks in this area are those aimed at AI-based metadata extraction, like Natural Language Processing, geographical landmark recognition or TV celebrity identification.

In this context, we describe a use case based on the main tasks usually performed by media professionals during their everyday job. To validate our vision, we collected opinions from industry experts, which let us rank AI functionalities according to users’ needs for their implementation.

Maurizio Montagnuolo is a Senior Research Engineer working at the R&D Department of the Italian public broadcaster RAI. He graduated in Telecommunications Engineering and holds a PhD in “Business and Management”. His interests are mostly addressed in the context of multimedia data mining and artificial intelligence, fields in which he counts several publications in international journals and conferences. He has been working on several EC-funded projects in the area of digital archiving, automated metadata extraction and cloud technologies.

AI technologies have been used at the RTS for automatic metadata extraction for several years. Currently, we are in the final stages of implementing speaker recognition. This presentation will show how documentalists have been involved and the role they play in the development and use of these new tools.

As a specialist in new information technologies and data management, Janique Sonderegger participates in the implementation of new AI tools at the RTS and in the business analysis around these developments. She also has a role in monitoring the evolution of the documentalist profession in the Data and Archives department of RTS.

The RTÉ archives house vast amounts of analogue audio/-visual material from 20th-century radio and television broadcasting, which are being digitised as part of an ongoing initiative.

These materials are associated with varying degrees of metadata, but in the absence of transcription, the raw data (i.e. audio) cannot be searched. While human transcription remains the gold standard in terms of accuracy, automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems offer a speed and a scale that can be used in tandem with transcribers to improve workflow efficiency.

ASR has been thoroughly researched and developed for major languages like English, but the Irish-language equivalent is still at an early stage. Although impressive results have been achieved for careful read speech, performance is markedly worse for conversational, spontaneous speech, the dominant style found in broadcast materials. This is primarily due to a lack of sufficiently large Irish speech corpora. However, recent advances in self-supervised learning have seen the inclusion of unlabelled data in training corpora i.e. audio materials without transcriptions, significantly reducing the amount of paired audio-transcription data required to achieve good performance. Thus, the application of research-stage Irish ASR systems to unlabelled speech corpora in, e.g., the RTÉ Archives presents an opportunity to accelerate both (i) the training of these systems and (ii) the conversion of these data to a format more accessible for cultural and academic purposes. This, in turn, can contribute to ongoing linguistic research, the results of which may themselves be fed back into speech technology development.

Connor McCabe is a Research Fellow with the ABAIR project. He is a phonetician and phonologist by training, having recently completed a PhD, his thesis for which examined prominence marking in the Munster varieties of Irish. In his current postdoctoral role, he is involved in managing ABAIR’s collection of speech data for linguistic research and technological development. Connor is interested in the research and development potential represented by media archives, having used 1928 archival data from the Doegen Records as key data for his PhD.

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Liam Lonergan is a PhD student working with the ABAIR project in the Phonetics & Speech Laboratory of Trinity College, Dublin. He completed a B.A. (Mod.) in Computer Science, Linguistics and German at Trinity in 2019, after which he joined ABAIR as a research assistant. His work since then has centred around developing speech recognition technology for the Irish language. For his PhD in particular, he is investigating the role of dialect and language variety for speech recognition in the Irish context.

In many types of content, lower-third graphics contain valuable information. Up until 2022, archivists at VRT used lower thirds character graphics as a visual source of data for manual annotation. This meant scrubbing through footage, looking for occurrences of lower-third graphics, and entering the metadata manually into the system. In this presentation, Marijn Daniels will explain how VRT used A.I. to automate the process of speaker labelling, using lower-third character recognition.

Marijn Daniels holds a Masters degree in computer science. At VRT, Marijn works as a Technology project manager and product owner. In his 23-year-long career at VRT, he had the opportunity to work on the transformation of VRT from a tape-based workflow to file-based production, first in SD and later upgrading VRT production to HD. Since 2019, Marijn has been responsible for all Technology projects regarding the VRT Archive.

For the last decade INA has engaged in a wide digital transformation. The fresh redesign of our data model quickly allowed to experiments with AI based tools such as machine learning. This speech aim to present the solution we built to assist the documentary processing of TV news channel and will focus on the business aspects. What changes do recent technical progresses bring for the librarians and heritage community?

Anne Couteux is a project manager in the unit Management of Data and Media. She is in charge of the standards of the description of the audiovisual archive content of the controlled vocabularies, among which the thesaurus is used to describe, index and retrieve the Ina multimedia archives. She is currently involved in the refoundation of the collections management IT system, including a new data model and artificial intelligence technologies.

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Olivio graduated in audiovisual & heritage management after studying movies and visual arts. He joined Ina as an intern in 2019, assigned to an experimental and cross-departmental mission focused on experimenting with AI-based solutions. Working alongside data scientists and media librarians, trained in machine learning models management, he contributed to developing automatic segmentation and indexing processes for TV content as a go-between and participated in changing management. Since 2020, Olivio joined the Data Department and serves as a project manager and product owner to pursue the coordination of various AI projects.

Following an intensive digitisation process of their archives, M6 launched 2015 a B2B portal to expose their legacy production videos to potential business customers. Within five years, all the key objectives set in the original plan were reached, and the archive unit turned from a cost centre into a profit centre. What lessons were learnt from 7 years of operating such a content sales portal? What organisation was put in place? Today M6 is gearing up their approach by launching a new portal allowing it to expose and sell all media produced by the group (audio, pictures, etc.). The aim is to double the revenue and activate a new monetisation stream of their legacy assets. The session will cover the initial project M6VideoBank in 2016, our seven years of experience, and the improvement of the portal and its new version with the Perfect Memory technology.

Louis Matignon has over 9 years of international experience in the broadcasting industry, where he has managed global software and service portfolios as well as teams of engineers and pre-sales architects. Today Chief Revenue Officer at Perfect Memory, he applies himself to generate the maximum value for its clients.

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After nearly 25 years of experience in the audiovisual sector (at VOYAGE, TV5Monde and the last 15 years in the dubbing department of M6, in charge of products follow-up), Sandra Koch now turns to the Documentation Department, which is aiming for strong international deployment via its future M6MEDIABANK portal. She is trilingual and passionate about everything related to archives and new technologies.

The covid crisis motivated ERT Archives to transform itself in the past two years not only by adjusting to the new distance-working conditions but also by updating and adopting a MAM that quickly became the basic tool for the ERT S.A. workflow operations (Dalet). Within two years, ERT S.A. as a whole transformed into a fully digital working environment, and specifically ERT Archives are undergoing a considerable transformation with a digitization program of more than 200.000 beta tapes that is about to begin. The challenges are many, and the lessons to be learned are equally important: How is the sustainability of an Archive maintained while its primary goal is to facilitate the broadcaster’s day-to-day needs? How can a broadcasting MAM be optimized and customized to serve as an archive’s MAM? What is the cost of speed of operations? How are Archival requirements prioritized? How can planning solve digital storage issues, and how can training ensure a minimum of Metadata quality standards? The presentation will explain the 2-year timeline of this transformation and its technical aspects, milestones and results, prospects and lessons. It will also describe ERT Archives’ new digitization program and discuss the challenges and issues that need to be addressed in order to optimize operations and maintain the Archives’ standards, along with the new roles that ERT’s Archivists are called upon to assume.

Komninos has a PhD in Communication and Mass Media Studies and works as Documentalist at the Department of Restoration, Digitization and Documentation of the ERT S.A., Hellenic Radio & Τelevision, Archives. He has a long experience in audiovisual archive research, study and cataloguing while collaborating with private audiovisual productions and major Greek audiovisual institutions such as Thessaloniki Film Festival, the Museum of Telecommunications of OTE, the Greek Film Archive, the Hellenic National Audiovisual Archive and of course ERT Achive.

At Sound & Vision in 2012, speaker labelling and, later in 2019, face recognition was implemented and hooked up to the broadcast archive in an effort to reduce time spent on manual annotation. Also, in the training of models and correction of the AI output, manual intervention by archivists is minimal.

At RTVE, the integration of massive automatically generated data only started in 2021 after some years of training. Since then, archivists have been involved in a complex process to discern the optimal application of these AI tools in our daily work and understand the overall impact on the archive.

In this presentation, RTVE & Sound & Vision will compare their use of AI and human annotation practices.

Virginia Bazán-Gil is Deputy Director of the TVE archive at RTVE, where she is in charge of innovation projects connected with automatic metadata creation and image recognition tools. As a member of the RTVE University of Zaragoza Chair, she is also involved with research on Speech Technologies, Natural Language processing, and Computer Vision applied to the AV archive. She is the Secretary General at FIAT/IFTA.

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Tim Manders works as an Information Advisor (Data Wrangler) at the Exploration Department of the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. He is experienced in operationalising automatic annotation techniques, such as speaker labelling and face recognition, applied on daily ingest into the archive with the purpose of pinpointing fine-grained access points into our collection items.

A reflection on the large-scale audio content digitisation (and migration) from magnetic tape and optical disk carriers with an emphasis on knowledge and skills -nascent and prevailing- throughout the project’s key activities of planning, pre-digitisation, digitisation, and post-digitisation.

Anja is the Senior Archivist for Sound at Radió Teilifis Éireann (RTÉ), the public service broadcaster in Ireland, leading the audio content digitisation of quarter-inch audio tapes and the migration of optical disk carriers. Anja has a background in cultural heritage with an in-depth understanding of audio-visual preservation from her previous position at the IFI Irish Film Archive and digital preservation from her career at the Digital Repository of Ireland. Alongside her work in cultural heritage, she is an active member of the visual arts in Ireland, where she has developed a successful practice in time-based art.