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4 April 2000

Here are some questions the papers raise for me:

1. Any proposal for broad access to multi-media archival resources is captive of limitations imposed by available communications systems.
   
   Has the comparatively rapid development of British projects in this area been influenced by British Telecom's two-year plan to offer widespread (70%) high-speed internet access via ADSL phone lines, including two-megabyte subscriber lines?
   
   Can anyone comment on the prospects for parallel availability of telecommunications utilities on the continent?
   
   How will differences between the U.S. and Mexican telecommunications services affect McCartney/Robinson's project design?
   
   
2. There seems to be a basic difference of opinion about how widely common standards (in terms of templates, hardware, and/or software) are ever likely to be adopted.
   
   Thinking about the "interoperability" model Julian Richards describes, are any of the speakers familiar with the "digital asset management" systems being adopted by many (multi)media archives. These include large scale commercial ventures (for example, see the report prepared for the Association of Moving Image Archivists at www.amianet.org/questionnaire/vendors, particularly the responses by Informix and Teams: Artesia to Question 7), but also (in Europe) smaller scale state-funded ventures (minimum project budget $100,000) For the latter see, for example, Media Archive a system developed by Tecmath in Germany (at www.media-archive.de), which, however, is more exclusively focused on the manipulation of video footage.
   
   Do these represent versions of the model Julian Richards anticipates will process the metadata he describes?
   
   
3. It seems clear that joint access will need to be mediated by various kinds of vocabulary indexing. The WordNet thesaurus developed at Princeton (available free on the web at www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~wn) is used by one of the commercial digital asset management systems mentioned above with adaptations for more specialized use according to the client's requirements. (It is very comprehensive, but far less specialized than those on the ADS list.)
   
   Have any of the participants had any experience using (or adapting) it?

Return to index of papers for April, 2000, SAA Session "Digital Data: Preservation and Re-Use"

About this document:

• Title: "Response to Posted Papers," for the April, 2000, SAA Session "Digital Data: Preservation and Re-Use"
• File name: lazio.html
• Author: Carole Lazio
• Revision history: First posted 6 April 2000. There are no anticipated revisions to this document.
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