ARKive (www.arkive.org) is the world's digital library of images and recordings of the planet's endangered species. The rich media collection will include high-quality video, stills and sounds, which are being freely donated by commercial partners and private individuals. ARKive is an initiative of The Wildscreen Trust (www.wildscreen.org.uk) who will use the media for educational outreach and digital preservation. HP Labs went into collaboration with The Wildscreen Trust to design and develop ARKive, as part of the HP Labs' Digital Media Systems research programme.
Problem Addressed:
The ARKive technical systems are made up of three related parts:
- A Media Production system for digitising, cataloguing and tracking the very high-quality video, stills, and audio that ARKive will preserve.
- A large-scale Media Vault for storing, managing, transcoding and preserving the resulting digital media and metadata which describes the media.
- A collection of Publishing systems, for making the media available to different audiences. The initial Publishing systems are three Web Sites.
Our Contribution:
ARKive's requirements for the Media Production and Media Vault systems were hugely challenging. The HP Labs team delivered state-of-the-art solutions to the key technical challenges, including
- The scale of the very high-quality media to capture : The architecture of the digitisation and storage systems supports the capture and management of very high-quality video, which is digitised at 40 megabytes per second, and also the capture of scanned still images of 60 to100 megabytes each. Media is digitised to the highest available quality without compression and encoded to open standards. The initial storage capacity is around 74 TB (Terabytes), and this is scalable to a Petabyte of digital media or more.
- The complexity of metadata to describe the media : HP Labs has developed a suite of Web applications and services to support the efficient capture, management, query, and extension of a wide variety of metadata. The metadata includes information to describe the origin of the media, its content, and processes used to digitise the media.
- The acquisition of diverse media types : The platform supports the capture and management of a full range of rich media types, including video, stills, audio and structured text.
- Storage management and preservation : The Media Vault is an open platform to store and manage the critical high quality media assets for preservation. The storage systems are highly robust, including duplicate hardware to avoid single points of failure, and also support the automatic generation of duplicate copies of media to be stored on multiple sites. To ensure that the storage systems are easy to manage and cost effective, then media is automatically migrated between different storage sub-systems, such as online disk arrays and a near-line Ultrium tape library. Services are also provided to re-encode media as preservation standards evolve over time.
- Efficient repurposing of media in many formats and bandwidths : HP Labs has also developed services to efficiently manage the encoding of very high-quality preservation media assets down to a variety of media formats suitable for publication and distribution. These tools can also be used to re-encode media, as distribution standards change frequently. The encoding services automatically embed copyright information in the distributed media, including visible attribution of the donor of the media and invisible information to enable tracking of the origin of the media.
The ARKive hardware platform integrates a variety of HP industry standard servers, workstations, fibre channel disk arrays, Ultrium tape library, and high-speed fibre channel and ethernet networking.
For More Information:
Andrew.Nelson@hp.com
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