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A digital search tool for VRT’s film collection
Journal of Digital Media Management,
11
(4),
300-309
(2023)
Abstract
The film collection at VRT — the public broadcaster of the Flemish community in Belgium — includes around 108,000 titles, dating from 1953 to the 1980s. This paper describes how VRT Archive has made this collection digitally accessible and searchable. The paper explains how optical character recognition and field recognition were employed in the digitisation of film index cards in order to create a fully searchable database, and includes a summary of the lessons learned. Based on these lessons, VRT Archive is now ready for future digitisation projects.
Keywords: historical film collection; digitisation; preservation; information retrieval; optical character recognition; OCR; field recognition; smart capture; multimedia asset management; electronic information management
The full article is available to subscribers to the journal.
Author's Biography
Kathleen Bertrem is responsible for internal and external communications/collaborations for the archive at VRT, the Flemish-language broadcaster in Belgium. Prior to joining VRT Archive in 2008, she spent 14 years working for VRT’s television news department. The opportunity to participate in an interesting film digitisation project led to her joining VRT Archive, where she was the team lead for film renovation and digitisation. She also participated actively in the renovation and digitisation work.
Marieke Lycke is a system engineer in VRT’s Technology department, where she is part of the media application group responsible for the archive domain. In 2020, she was responsible for the digitisation of VRT’s film index cards. She joined VRT in 2012 as a researcher in the Research & Innovation department, specialising in media analysis tools. She has been involved in various speech and language technology projects.
Tom Vanderbiest is Head of Portfolio and Presales Management at IRIS Information Management Solutions, which is part of the Information Management division of Canon Benelux. Tom was involved throughout the presales and proof-of-concept phase of the VRT renovation and digitisation project, and continued to follow the project when the technical consultants at IRIS were responsible for its implementation.
