Metamorphosis of a Digital System:
A Retrospect to 7 Years of Growing
Experience for Audio Digitizing

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Hermann Lewetz
Austrian Mediathek, Vienna

With the start of the new millennium, the Austrian Mediathek installed a complex digital system consisting of several modules: digitising station (supported by a job data base), catalogue database combined with a special audio player, automatic procedures, mass storage system etc.

The system is ever changing, however, and especially the digitising has been improved considerably since the initial start of the system. At first, we digitised with a ratio of more than 1 to 7. The documentation was done manually, that is without the metadata produced automatically by the recording application. The quality control was imperfect.

There have also been developed defined workflows which consist of separated action modules. Some of them are automated while others have to be executed manually. This allows splitting the whole workflow in quick and slow steps. The workflows do not have to be completed one after the other. Therefore, complicated steps can be collected and executed at another time perhaps by another person without interrupting the working processes.

The recordings can be done parallel up to 4 carriers at once. There is an automatic analysing tool. Lots of different metadata - including the workflow steps, used parameters and comments – are collected.

There are several other features of our system, which had to be improved; especially the controlling of the enormous amount of interrelated files the system is handling now. The paper will identify these developments in our system and other critical fields in which practice still forces us to change or to improve our workflow.

Hermann Lewetz
Hermann Lewetz has been living in Vienna since the mid-1980’s following schooling at Elektrotechnik in Fachhochschule Augsburg Kamera and Film-Editing in Filmschool, Vienna. He has been working at the Österreichische Mediathek since 2001. He also gives lectures concerning mass storage and digitization workflows.