Information Management Between Academic and Internet Communities

Abstract

The concept ‘digital archive’ can be approached either from the concept ‘digital’ (represented by the Internet) or from the concept ‘archive’ (represented by traditional collections as libraries). In our days these two approaches and the techniques used by them seem to be merged. This chapter describes the work-in-progress for a project of the National Audiovisual Archive (NAVA), Hungary. The project intents to use the software and social techniques developed for Internet applications to handle large number of very different kind of documents. The project also adopts and develops techniques to combine conventional content management systems using relational database and file-based systems. The primary collection of NAVA is the legal deposit of the programs of six television and three radio channels. However, several other valuable audiovisual contents are offered by content owners and embedded as special collections for long-term preservation. The applied research project was initiated by the data management problems that we met while integrating the special collections with very different quantity and quality of metadata, however, usability issues were also included. At the moment there are more questions than solutions, however, requirements of a new archive architecture using semantic web 2.0 techniques are outlined. Besides internal resources the work is also funded by the P2P Fusion FP6 EU project.