Corporate Information Audiovisual Asset Management System

High Level Requirements

The Science Museum Group comprises of a group of UK institutions:

• Science Museum, London
• Science & Industry Museum, Manchester
• National Science & Media Museum, Bradford
• National Railway Museum, York
• Locomotion, Shildon
• Science and Innovation Park, Wroughton

The requirement is for an internal (non-public facing) Asset Management System that colleagues across the group can use to search, manage and access audiovisual materials that have been created or commissioned by the Science Museum Group (Corporate Records).

These materials fall into three major categories, each which has its own use cases and workflows.

• Video Production. At the end of a video project, whether it is a video for one of our YouTube channels or video content for our galleries and exhibitions, the deliverables (H.264, Apple ProRes 444), the edit project (ZIP, TAR) and camera rushes will be stored for long-term reference. The expectation is that the original files will be accessed very infrequently and, in most cases, can be managed via low bitrate “access copies”.
• Oral Histories. This is a collection of interviews on a specific topic, normally audio only, but could include video. The management of such content requires consideration for time-based metadata (topics covered) as well as versioning as we may often have to produce a redacted version of an interview to remove Personally Identifiable Information.
• Complex Digital Objects. This can cover multiple scenarios, but the key one would be the storage and management of multi-file multimedia deliverables such as Macromedia Director or Unity Projects that are used throughout the museums. These are large archive packages, such as ZIP or TAR, or disc images like ISO, IMG or VDHX.

Alongside these content types would be general document storage – Microsoft office files, Adobe Acrobat – and potentially design documents – high resolution stills photography, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator working files.

The chosen system must demonstrate support for:

• Audiovisual materials encoded using a variety of codecs, including camera files, with technical metadata extraction and “access copy” creation.
• Metadata support for hierarchical structured collections, time-based logging and building relationships between assets and titles.
• Ability to integrate with third-party tools and export assets with all associated metadata to a defined metadata standard.
• Ability to share a selection of materials with a third party for a limited time with limited permissions.
• Storage management based around 3:2:1:1:0 methodology, including the ability to schedule fixity checking across the content held.
• Support for multiple storage technologies including cloud and LTO tape.