AFA's Archivist, Chew Tee Pao, assessing 35mm film collection. Courtesy of Asian Film Archive
Aylesbury, UK – 11 April 2016: TMD, the leading provider of asset management systems for digital and physical assets, today announced that it has been awarded a contract with the Singapore-based Asian Film Archive (AFA) to deploy Mediaflex® Guardian, a new, productised version of TMD’s award-winning Mediaflex media asset management (MAM) solution, which has been optimised to address the specific needs of organisations that manage television and film archives on any level.
The AFA, a subsidiary of Singapore’s National Library Board, has a mission to preserve, nurture, and share Asia’s rich collection of highly valued films that while award-winning and culturally diverse, are rarely seen commercially outside international film festivals.
Currently, the AFA’s dedicated team of archivists manage the organisation’s vast collection of film stock and digitised copies using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, which is cumbersome, time-consuming, and counter to the organisation’s mandate to provide an audit management system for the collection; streamline its approach to preservation; and enable the collection to be more accessible to the vast Asian film audience and beyond.
The solution, Mediaflex Guardian, is a configurable workflow and asset management system for both physical and digital assets that provides acquisition, accessioning, preservation, storage, and access workflows. Migrating the AFA’s collection data from Excel to Mediaflex Guardian will provide the tools AFA archivists need to achieve the Archive’s wide-ranging goals.
Mediaflex Guardian scales from an entry level configuration with pre-configured workflows for smaller, sub-50,000 article collections to collections numbering in the millions. Importantly, Mediaflex Guardian also fully complies with the international reference model for an open archival information system (OAIS), which recognises systems with proven technologies to achieve long-term digital preservation of, and ready access to, archive material.
TMD will work with local IT integrator VSolutions Pte Ltd to deploy AFA’s Mediaflex Guardian system, which is expected to be operational in the second quarter of 2016.
AFA Executive Director Karen Chan said, “This will be a quantum leap forward in our ability to manage our growing collection and increase our ability to catalogue, preserve, and share a barely tapped reservoir of high quality content that deserves to be seen, studied, and enjoyed.”
TMD CEO Tony Taylor said, “The AFA was founded to preserve and disseminate the vast repository of high-quality Asian cinema, but that’s difficult to achieve with the speed, accuracy, and efficiency required in a digital age. Media Guardian will vastly accelerate access to the AFA’s digital assets in a way that will benefit not only the AFA, but thousands of film and art aficionados throughout the region, and the world.”
