Introduction to Audiovisual Archives

Chapter 8

The ASW Digital Environment ¹

8.1. Introduction

As already stated in the introduction to this book, the working environment developed as part of the ASW-HSS project is the result of studies conducted from 2001 onwards as part of the Audiovisual Research Archives (ARA) program. Hence, it is an evolved version of an existing environment, and the culmination of nearly 10 years of research and development:

– 2002–2006 saw the simultaneous development of a database, a dynamic and multilingual Web portal connected to this database, and a software package for managing publications on the portal, in partnership with Microsoft France Education.¹ In 2002, distributing video on the Web and putting a tool in place for the multilingual management of the content represented rather bold challenges: let us not forget that YouTube² and Dailymotion³ were only created in 2005, that CMSs⁴ such as WordPress⁵ and Joomla!⁶ have only been in existence since 2003 and 2005 respectively, and SPIP⁷ only began offering multilingualism in 2004.

– 2006–2009, witnessed the development of a software package for indexing videos and producing of specialized publications as part of the SAPHIR⁸ and LOGOS⁹ projects;

– since 2009, we have developed a whole new environment for the ASW-HSS¹⁰ project.

Thus, this environment exploits the results of the preceding years of research and responds to two mutually complementary types of contexts for using audiovisual documents:

– standard production/publishing as ...