Audiovisual Cultural Heritage: From TV and Radio Archiving to Hypermedia Publishing

Abstract

Abstract. In this article, we present a model of digital audiovisual (AV) library. We describe how AV library users need to be provided not only with accurate and efficient ways to retrieve images and sounds, but also with new environments allowing to read and interpret these images and sounds as AV documents. We show how library users perform an active reading of documents by contextualizing them using corpora of structured meta-information. This documentation consists of documents elaborated from previous readings of this AV content, such as producers’ files, critics, etc. It provides a good alternate representation as defined in [34]. We propose a model allowing library users to read AV documents not only along their documentation but from their documentation. This model is based on concepts from the electronic publishing world: it defines different levels of editorial control over the semantics, the structure and the layout of documentation and, in the end, allows the automatic generation of hypermedia applications, which we can be used as a new and efficient AV reading environment by library users. We also describe a prototype implementing parts of this model.

INA, Institut National de l’Audiovisuel, is the French TV and Radio Archives. It has been archiving French TV since 1949 and French Radio since 1929. Its repository contains more than 3 millions documents, which comes up to 400 000 hours of video and 500 000 hours of audio programs.