THE TEN COMMANDMENTS

Thou shalt not re-invent the wheel

There may be systems which promise to bring the world of your archive easily to digital by just selfmade components. Arent´you tired to newly develop such systems if they are already existing in standard software tools such as mediARC and N6000?

 1. Thou shalt digitise with plan and system
     There is the need for a quality control to make workflow efficient and meaningful. A stamp-of-approval, issued by
     the same person who just did 8 digitisation jobs in parallel during a 8 hours’ shift is not worth a dime! Just copying
     tapes onto a computer is irresponsible! Just letting 1000 files through a process without branched decision
     possibilities is not the demand of the real world.

 2. Thou shalt use the power of your people the best way you can
     FIRST you have to define the condition and demand of every single carrier in your archive and decide how to
     save the content. In a SECOND step this predefined job has to be carried out. Mixing up those steps increases
     the possibility of mistakes.

 3. Thou shalt not destroy cultural heritage
     No restoration should during the archiving process! First: If a “historic” trancript is being needed some time and
     you will only have transcripts from 1950 that sound as if they were from 1980. Second: Algorithmics are getting
     better by the minute. Don’t limit yourself to just today’s possibilities.

 4. Thou shalt find Shostakovich
     Naturally grown archive systems use complex and very helpful thesaurus functions to find content even if you
     don’t know the exact words. Replacing those with simple multimedia databases will result in very unhappy
     archive masters. Shostakovich? Schostakowitsch? Shostakowich? NOA mediARC allows here for multiple
     alias searches, which also allow for data consolidation.

 5. Thou shalt be able to retrieve content as easily as you used to do before
     The unique functionality of the NOA mediARC allows you to search in full text within less then a second, and
     display mediacontent at least in a way which you were used before, but with much more ease of use.

 6. Thou shalt not mix up competences
     A production system is not an archiving system and vice versa! Any attempt to combine those worlds into
     one software package will result in a compromise and has to be avoided. There will always be an archiving
     system AND a production system, simply because the needs for the people working with those systems are
     different.

 7. Thou shalt work in best possible quality
     No 16/44 audio CDs for archiving! Follow the rules of the IASA TC04
     recommendations and stick to highest possible resolutions especially for material which is in a bad replay shape.
     Quote:” The better you describe the error with your resolution, the easier you will be able to remove it in the future.”

 8. Thou shalt keep the storage structure open
     Trust your IT department and give them the possibility to work out the best mirrored NAS solution with an offline
     backup from a provider who is market leader and will still be around in the years to come. Calculate which kind of
     throughput you really need from/to the archive - that way you will be able to afford it, too.

 9. Do not invent the wheel.
     Seeking for the most open and simple archive format is good as long as your production and distribution chain really
     supports it. So go for widely accepted archive and file standards which are playable by many different systems
     andwhich are widely supported by the industry before trying to set a new standard.

10. Thou shalt keep the costs at a reasonable level!
      No need to exlain No 10, right?

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