Birth, First : two new EU supported projects
Presto Space : the preparation of an integrated project

Birth : Building of an Interactive Research and delivery network for Television Heritage

• A Media Plus project (12 months from January 2003)
• Coordination : Joanneum Research (Austria)
• Archive partners : ORF, Nederlands Instituut voor Beels en Geluid, BBC, SWR, RTBF, Telewizja Polska
• Technical partner : Streamcase (Belgium)
• The project BIRTH aims at building up a multimedial and multilingual pool of archive material from the first broadcasting days 50 years ago for on line access by different user groups. Audiovisual content as well as accompanying text and stills will be collected from a number of broadcast archives in order to give attractive on line access to the first years of European television history in a way it has never been presented before. Both factual information and the atmospheric touch of a new media's early days will be accessible to the user.
• For more information, contact Georg Thallinger : Georg.Thallinger@joanneum.at

First : Film Restoration & Conservation Strategies

• IST Programme (24 months from July 2002)
• Coordination : Royal Film Archive in Belgium
• Partners : ACE, Belgacom, EMF, INA, ORF, RTBF
• The objective is to analyse the digital solutions for preservation and access to film collections. The project will issue the state of the art for digitisation, restoration, storage and indexing ; through discussions with the actors of the domain, it will propose standards, best practices and recommendations for R&D, sketching economical scenarios for the application of Digital techniques to Film Heritage.
• First workshop in Berlin during the Berlinale on the 12th of February 2003.
• For more information, contact Nicola Mazzanti : mazzanti.ritrovata@iol.it - Web site : www.film-first.org

Presto Space

• IP proposal for 1st Call of FP6
• The Presto Space project is the continuation of previous projects in the field of preservation, restoration and access to audio-visual archives. The main objective is to offer to televisions, radios, private companies, institutions, small archives and general public, the possibility of developing patrimonial initiative.
• This will be achieved through technological and industrial innovations, and will be implemented by ensuring the set-up of facilities and services that will provide to these actors an integrated, scalable and affordable preservation service. The project will provide equipments, tools and products, and will stimulate the creation of laboratories and services answering to collections owners and users requirements.
• Building an integrated system will permit a fast, good quality and cost reduced archive digitisation. It intends to solve technical problems related to the processes, ranging from playback of films, video and audio-disks to storage. Management and control of digital preservation migration will be strongly improved. Presto Space will propose full solutions for medium and small archives as well as optimisation of existing processes for large archives allowing to improve archive services and user access.
• The first meeting took place in Paris, last 20 and 21 January with 50 potential partners. The core partners are BBC, INA and RAI but we expect to gather a large group of archives institutions through FIAT, FIAF and IASA members and to work with standardisation and EBU task forces.
• For more information, contact Philippe Poncin : pponcin@ina.fr or Richard Wright : richard.wright@bbc.co.uk

Philippe Poncin - INA & Christoph Bauer - ORF
30th January 2003