DAVID Systems, a Munich-based product and system solutions provider, is supporting the "Memories of Forced Labor" project by providing a zero-cost systems solution for the digitization, editing, management, and playout of the collected audiovisual sources. "Memories of Forced Labor" is a joint project of the German government s "Remembrance, Responsibility and Future" foundation, Freie Universität Berlin, and the German Historical Museum in Berlin.
The archive contains 1,200 audio recordings and 800 video recordings of interviews with contemporary witnesses, and will provide online access for education and research to 600 life stories by Nazi regime victims from 27 different countries (www.erinnerungen-an-zwangsarbeit.org). The aim of the project is to aid the preservation of individual memories, and to encourage further societal, educational, and academic engagement in the lives of forced laborers. DigaSystem supports the project by providing a technological basis for the digitization, editing, and management of the audiovisual sources.
Professional Workflow from Ingest to Playout
Project workers at CeDiS / Center for Digital Systems (Freie Universität Berlin) are currently digitizing the interviews, which were collected on a variety of tape formats by the German Historical Museum. "In order for the sources to be accessible to a wide range of digital formats in the future, we are importing the audio and video data at a very high quality using our high-performance workstations. From there, they are automatically replicated to a file server," explains Michael Burkhardt, DAVID Systems Project Manager.
Also during the ingest stage, the metadata from the project s MySQL database is linked to the corresponding audio and video files. "This greatly simplifies the archiving and management of the media," says Dr. Nicolas Apostolopoulos, Head of CeDiS. "The DAVID Systems solution is perfect for us - it lets us automatically optimize our source files for the different access formats. The system is both uncomplicated and flexible."
For more information about DAVID Systems and its products and services, please visit the company online at www.davidsystems.com.