Leading collection management specialist for audiovisual archives focuses on the practical implementation of advanced technologies to provide opportunities for collections managers
TMD, a leading provider of collection management solutions to archive organisations will demonstrate how advanced technologies can provide a complete management system for both digital and physical assets at the Association for Moving Image Archivists annual conference, AMIA (Savannah, Georgia, 8 – 11 October). Demonstrations will underline how TMD’s workflow orchestration and a flexible and extensible data model combine with cloud services to deliver real benefits for audiovisual archives globally no matter how big or small.
TMD is a UK company with a global capability, including a major presence in the USA and a regional office in Australia. It recently completed the delivery of a collection management system for the National Archives of Australia which built on the success of the solution that was delivered to the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. This has driven further extensions to the vaults module to recommend physical storage locations based on format and conditions and automate the tracking of loans and lending requests. This was also the first project to use Mediaflex® Archive to directly control the IBM robotic tape library and LTO drives to archive digital files to data tape using LTFS.
The Mediaflex data model is extremely flexible, can easily be extended by end users and recognises the need that all organisations have different requirements. Creating and updating archival description records has been made easier with support for bulk updating of metadata values and the processing of acquisition transfers using Excel. The solution also provides workflow orchestration using Mediaflex CI (Content Intelligence), which allows users to design and build their own workflows using a graphical user interface. Workflows can be generated based on metadata which describes the content or has been harvested from the content. The end-to-end solution is readily integrated with other technologies to provide video, audio, film and image preservation, duplication and access workflows.
The Mediaflex architecture also makes it an ideal system for virtualised and cloud services. Support has been added for Amazon S3 storage and cloud transcoding using encoding.com and the integration of these services and others going forward combined with a modular and flexible approach to licencing provide opportunities for the smaller archives.
“At TMD we understand that a collection management solution needs to provide different functionality to the solutions used by broadcast and media organisations. All metadata is important and needs to be consistent. The terminology is different and although the workflows are similar the reasons for carrying out this work are very different,” said Jo Sims general manager of TMD Inc. “We also recognise that archives differ in size, resources and funding and have established a flexible licencing model to work with these variables.”
Visitors to AMIA2014 can talk to the TMD team at Booth 203.
