Any organization with a significant store of documents, digital media and records can benefit from archive software. Digitizing materials, including audio recordings or video footage, allows far more people to access that information without needing to physically visit an organization’s facility.
Hard copies don’t need to be brought out and played by researchers. The risk for hard copy damage from overuse or misuse is eliminated when the media is digitized and uploaded to a platform like SoundCloud or YouTube.
The value of a digital archive as a means of safeguarding historically important media makes it a worthwhile investment for cultural heritage centers or institutions. However, physical protection and security are far from the only benefits.
Putting an archive in the cloud makes it accessible to a global audience. Some Soutron archive clients specifically want a public-facing archive that can be searched through a portal embedded on their website. Others restrict access to some or all of their archived content to approved members of their organization.
How you use your archive and who your audience is should be an institutional decision, and Soutron’s customizable platform makes it easy for clients to make those choices.
Hierarchical Cataloguing
Archive entries rarely exist in a vacuum. Most have related entries that can be grouped together in a way that’s organic to users. This value-added feature of digital archives often proves to be one of the most important to archivists, librarians and other institutional users.
Librarians and archivists can group together specific series of video or audio materials or associate entries with specific subjects. For example, Soutron archive clients could add a series of presentations delivered at an event and hosted on YouTube. Each video entry could stand on its own, but searchers who find it can see that it belongs to the series of entries from that event and easily click through or browse other presentations from that event.
Various subject categories/tags can also be added to each entry, allowing searchers to find other relevant materials or entries with a click.
There’s no rule that fonds and sub-fonds hierarchical relationships can only be established between materials of a uniform type. A document, report or eBook can be supplemented with a series of meeting recordings, or a recorded interview with a cultural figure can be linked to a series of interviews from members of their family.
The contextual value of the entire fonds can make the knowledge stored within significantly more valuable to the searcher. This can be especially true when audiovisual materials are included, as those materials frequently make topics and history more relatable and vibrant.
How Soutron Clients Have Used Archived Audio and Visual Files
Law libraries, industry institutes, cultural heritage organizations and private businesses are just a handful of organizations that have leveraged Soutron’s archive platform. Some organizations include journal recordings, audio from meetings and internal video materials. Some have old interviews on cassette tapes that they encode, upload to a platform like YouTube or SoundCloud, and catalogue in their public or internal archive.
Librarians and archivists using Soutron can easily create entries for essentially any document, media or material, including physical items. Soutron Archive’s flexibility and customizability allows it to adjust to your needs, not the other way around.
Capabilities of Soutron Digital Media Archive Solution
- Template driven structure
- Allows organizations to archive digital content hosted on other video or audio platforms, including YouTube, Vimeo, SoundCloud and others
- Ideal for archiving relevant audio or video materials, from training videos and tutorials to historical video recordings or podcasts
- The simple search makes performing accurate searches easy
- Built-in playback features allow searchers to watch or listen to content without needing to navigate off your archive to where the video or audio file is hosted
Learn More About Soutron Digital Media Archive
Would you like to learn more about Soutron Archive’s ability to catalogue audiovisual materials and digital media? Request a demo today.
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