Broadcasting Archives digitalized over 100,000 recordings with ADMIRA 1.7

ADMIRA constitutes an extension to existing archive databases. While the database continues to contain the catalogue information, ADMIRA imports and administers the relevant digital media objects, such as audio titles, images and videos. The user is looking up objects as usual via the catalogue database. When the database is integrated with ADMIRA, the objects sought - such as music titles and CD covers - are retrieved and relayed to the workplace. ADMIRA thus substitutes online access for the often arduous process of looking up data offline.

A key feature of the new ADMIRA release is the agent concept by which independent programme units perform specific tasks in the archiving environment, such as saving a data file into the archive or compressing a linear file. Several agents can be launched at the same time and via more than one server. Communication via TCP/IP sockets makes integration with existing applications more easy.

Although the collection of time-honored recordings, comprising more than 100,000 shellac records and historic tapes, is one of the world's largest, it forms only part of the audio material in the possession of the German Broadcasting Archives (DRA). Established in 1952 as the "Audio Archive of the German Broadcasting Corporation", this ARD foundation is entrusted with the task of collecting, archiving, uncovering and documenting audio, visual and written material and to make this material available to the various ARD broadcasting stations as well as to public bodies concerned with culture, art, science, research and education.

In 1996, IBM ADMIRA was installed in an IBM RS/6000 under the AIX operating system. Linked to this server are a RAID disk array and, at the same time, an IBM Magstar tape robot system which has a present memory capacity of 2 Tbytes. This may sound like a great deal, but in digitized form, two hours of stereo-quality music recording require approximately one Gbyte of memory. This means that with the current configuration it is possible to store roughly 4,000 hours of sound recording. Considering that the DRA has a total of 250,000 hours in its archives at present, this represents only a small proportion. Although audio recordings with mono quality require only half as much memory space, the existing capacity will probably only suffice for the next two or three years.

To digitize the complete 250,000 hours of sound material, a total of 500,000 working hours will be necessary, since in addition to the playback and recording time due allowance must be made for preparation, processing and editing by the sound engineers. With current personnel levels, complete digitization of the archives would take no less than 300 man-years.