SONUMA, the subsidiary of Belgium’s RTBF (Radio Télévision Belge Francophone) responsible for the digitisation and commercialisation of audiovisual archives, has given new life to the broadcaster’s archives using the NETIA Content Management System (CMS). SONUMA uses NETIA CMS not only to preserve and manage RTBF’s legacy of content on a variety of media, including VCR tape, DAT tape, LP, MD, 16mm film, and 78rpm vinyl, but also to provide fine-grained access to the library for the hundreds of RTBF journalists who use it to enhance their daily output. To achieve the detailed and precise metadata structure required SONUMA incorporated a range of metadata sources and formats, using NETIA CMS to overhaul the existing thesaurus and build in the facility for multilevel, multicriteria searches. “Our archive is a real goldmine, stretching back more than 80 years of radio and nearly 60 years of television, but digitising all that material to preserve it for posterity is only part of the challenge. A critical part of the project is to provide high-quality access to it for the journalists and staff,” said Eric Denis, IT manager at SONUMA. NETIA CMS provides a high degree of workflow automation in ingest, metadata logging and output to streamline the process initiated when an item is ordered in a specific format. These automated processes have allowed SONUMA and RTBF to achieve highly efficient delivery of archived media to the company’s partner news organisations. The broadcaster’s website provides the general public with selections from the archive representing the history of radio and television in French-speaking Belgium, with a workflow that enables journalists to select the chosen material using the NETIA media asset management (MAM) module, provide a short summary and then post the content online. The NETIA CMS organises SONUMA’s media management processes, harmonises exchanges between different applications, handles prioritisation across the system, and automates content distribution processes. To streamline content delivery itself, the CMS provides tools for content packaging, metadata tagging, and rights management, with workflow supervision guiding these processes. The system is fully integrated with RTBF’s newsroom systems. www.netia.com
