Richard Wright – United Kingdom

Richard Wright is a Senior Researcher in BBC Research and Development and a manager on European Commission projects Presto PRIME (digital audiovisual preservation) and PrestoSpace (audiovisual preservation technology for Europe).

Besides many other activities he represents BBC on UK/US project Spoken Word (with Glasgow Caledonian, Northwestern and Michigan State Universities; 2003-2008 and continuing. Mr. Wright studied engineering science at Michigan State University, computer science at University of Michigan and digital signal processing (speech synthesis) at Southampton University.

Abstracts

Digital Preservation – a practical workshop

• Audiovisual Preservation, Digitisation — and Digital Preservation: the strategy, workflow and architecture for digital preservation of audiovisual content. Information and support from the PrestoPRIME project.
  1. Digitisation: most audiovisual content remains on discrete carriers, on shelves. The workshop will summarise: conservation; how (and when) to digitise; formats and encodings; metadata and preservation metadata.
  2. Digital preservation: what to do with files (and with digital content not yet in files — eg DV, DVD, DAT). There is extensive digital library and digital preservation technology — OAIS and all that, but much of that technology only works on text, and needs a lot more consideration to be effective on audiovisual content. We will present a clear strategy, workflow and architecture for digital preservation of audiovisual content.

BBC online archive and Digital Public Space

• The Web has affected broadcasting in several ways, but we argue that the biggest effect is about to come: “opening the archive” makes all the ‘goods’ of a broadcaster available, not just ‘the schedule’ of goods that have traditionally been broadcast. This session reviews the development of audiovisual technologies and their business consequences, including a simple conceptual framework for media and business categories. We also review the definition and development of economic ‘goods’, as reminders of the concepts of value and public value. We conclude with a BBC proposition around a general digital public space. Heritage content is currently held in bondage by economic constraints (particularly copyright) that need to be transcended to release the greater value of “the goods” held in national archives and other heritage institutions.