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The digitalization, filing, documentation and reuse of multimedia Radio and Television documents that make up Italy’s and the world’s audio-visual and cultural heritage is one of the strong points of the Discovery Reply offer. The Discovery Reply™ Storage Manager, a module of the Discovery Reply™ Multimedia suite, provides HSM (Hierarchical Storage Management) services for the filing of digital contents with a highly automated Digital Tape Library management system. Each master document is kept on digital tape and inserted in a robotized library. A low-resolution copy is made of each document, which is made available on the web to all users of the television. The users can search the archive for material at any time, see its preview, and request the high-resolution copy by means of simple interactive commands. The process automates the recovery of the master material and makes it available to radio and television editing and broadcasting systems. This solution has enabled the RAI (Italian state television) to archive 100 years of audio materials transmitted on various channels, equal to 1.4 million high-quality audio documents. Today, with the same application, the Radio and Television of Italian-speaking Switzerland have archived more than 1500 terabyte of high-quality audio and video material, 760,000 video contents amounting to about 87,000 hours of recording. This has enabled Switzerland to preserve and promote audio-visual memories that are closely interwoven with its own history.
Discovery Reply has won the challenge of transforming an endless archive, often synonymous with old and dusty, into a tool to be used daily: The Discovery Reply Multimedia Catalogue. The system facilitates the recovery of repertory information, videos, and images that can be used daily for television and radiophonic production, like the editing of services for a television news program. Thanks to input indexing tools and simple and advanced searches, the catalogue enables journalists and documentalists to explore the available audio-visual contents and recover them in a few seconds, thereby enhancing their value through reuse in other programs. Over recent years, a Speech-to-Text and Semantic Analysis service has been introduced to facilitate the work of operators responsible for documenting programs.
Many companies, even if their core business has little or nothing to do with the multimedia sector, need to safeguard their own industrial heritage with a digital historic archive containing photographic material, drawings of prototypes, sketches, and audio-visual contents. Discovery Multimedia Digital Asset Management is the perfect solution for companies with an industrial heritage to be safeguarded from potential deterioration and dispersion, and to be promoted through corporate initiatives, edutainment, or aimed at consolidating the brand and marketing in general. The Discovery DAM meets this need, as it is capable of classifying, tracking, converting, and filing all the contents in different formats, grouping them according to company product logics, and making it possible to search for, consult, and handle them for potential reuse in the future. In the Fashion & Luxury sector, for one of the most prestigious Italian fashion houses, Discovery Reply digitalized, catalogued, and made available 18,000 drawings and sketches, 30,000 photographs, 300,000 press review articles, and 400 hours of historic video. The Multimedia Catalogues is now accessible to all the employees via the company Intranet and is also used to promote the company’s history in the world of fashion. For the MIBAC, The Italian Ministry of Cultural Assets and Activities, Discovery Reply created the Portal of Twentieth-Century Fashion. Eighty stylists’ biographies, 2200 products between garments and accessories, 550 digital objects, documents, images, and videos make up the Portal content, or the historical digital memory of Made in Italy and the history of Italian fashion. The documents, the photographs, the audio and visual testimony, and the digitalization and cataloguing of numerous products created by fashion houses, are all integrated with the description of complex documentaries kept at the State Archives. Discovery Reply, through this Portal, has thereby contributed to introducing a vast user basin to one of the leading sectors of Made in Italy, whose entrepreneurship has succeeded in combining art and creativity.
Always for the MIBAC, Discovery Reply created the Verdi Portal for the bicentennial celebration of the birth of Giuseppe Verdi, dedicated to both the man and his works, www.verdi.san.beniculturali.it, with the collection of photographs, caricatures, portraits, letters, documents, musical scores, librettos, sketches, scenic posters, and historical recordings presented as a list of musical compositions with the possibility to listen via links to the tracks present in the archive of the Istituto Centrale Beni Sonori e Audiovisivi (ICBSA).