Managing the assets and metadata in the ITV archive: A strategy led by content rights

Abstract

To sensibly manage an archive consisting of more than one million assets, ITV has used rights data to make the collection's potential transparent to senior management and to drive decisions and effort, both strategic and practical. This paper describes the categorisation of the content into a ‘gold’, ‘silver’, ‘bronze’ and ‘heritage’ framework based on a combination of ownership, sales and distribution rights. This information forms the basis for the allocation of all operational procedures associated with metadata-gathering, digitisation and security, and drives a new content management structure.