The European Parliament has completed a large-scale upgrade and redesign of its video, audio and image archive using Invenio digital asset management from Harris. The upgrade, developed and installed by the European Parliament’s own audiovisual unit in association with systems integrator VideoPromotion, allows the archivists in Brussels and Strasbourg to cope with increasing demands for content. The Invenio archive includes a 35 GB database indexing 15,000 tapes as well as 65,000 high resolution video files together with the same number of low resolution proxies. The database is growing daily with the addition of up to 20 new files, which can be as large as five hours each. New content comes from more than 40 different types of event within the European Parliament. “The archive handles requests from journalists at up to 30 external television stations during the plenary sessions, as well as web requests and access by researchers and the parliament administration,” said Adelino Pires André, the project manager for VideoPromotion. “In one week, up to 80% of requests will be demands for original archived content. With Invenio, you can search within a large video file and pinpoint the exact clip you are looking for.” The project first involved the migration of all existing tape content from the legacy system to video files within Invenio. This involved the use of Invenio Motion for workflow design and integration with third-party systems, and Invenio Insight for front-end users. Because of the democratic importance of maintaining a complete record and access to all activities of the parliament, the system is highly redundant and can withstand three points of failure. The plenary sessions of the parliament are recorded in 18 languages, automatically fed into Invenio by a custom application developed by Harris for the European Parliament. The application, known as EPlogger, also provides facilities for manual logging of other meetings, and allows archivists to add qualitative data after the event. www.broadcast.harris.com
