component. Felix Meehan and Kieran O’Leary from my team are hosting practical workshops as part of that. It is a really interesting departure for us is the first time that we've ever done anything like this and we think it's the first time that they ever have and it's a project that wouldn't have happened if we didn't have that partnership and a relationship already. It's really exciting. It was always the plan for it to be mutually beneficial.
And it's all being done in a purpose built facility.
We could have gone anywhere and said "do you have an old building that we can convert into a store" because that's essentially what we need. You can retrofit buildings. there's always problems with that. This was great because it was a greenfield site and it was purpose built for us. Everything that we wanted we were able to get pretty much. It's kind of weird in a way. I was kind of pinching myself going "is that actually there?" From the little sketches that we did it has been 15-16 years to this. There will be a lot of chances for us to collaborate more and more, especially now that we've digitised so much material and that it's available. Where we were 10 years ago as an archive in terms our skillset, and what people would be interested in, is completely different to where we are now. We have staff that are world leaders in terms of devising digital preservation workflows and tools for digital preservation. I will give you an example, Kieran O'Leary who I mentioned earlier writes a lot of programs or scripts of code to do preservation actions. He has a tool kit, a set of tools that he put together for tape digitisation and categorisation, that the British Film Institute have piloted on one of their big projects. They are going to implement a lot of his tools. A lot of places around the world are using things that we've come up with and we are using a lot of things that other people came up with. It's really fascinating community of preservationists that are using technology to empower themselves so that they are not at the mercy of the Microsofts or the Apples of the world. They could just decide that they were getting rid of Final Cut Pro or that they are changing something entirely because it doesn't fit for their shareholders. What we are doing is removing ourselves from the vendors, from the big companies, and creating open-source tools that we share amongst the community so that we are not tied in to any one vendor and we are not at their mercy.
Digital formats change rapidly as technology progresses, but the IFI is well placed to meet the challenges.
We have a fairly robust preservation plan. The digital preservation strategy that I wrote, and that we launched in 2014, we're still using and it is still fit for purpose. We're very lucky in the way because a lot stuff to comes into us is from the Broadcasting Authority collection and from the Film Board. And because of that they have contracts with the production companies which mean that we get to choose what people deliver to us. Which is very unusual for an archive. Usually you would just get whatever is left over, but because it's a planned arrangement it's great. We do our research every year and we look to see what's going on in terms of digital preservation in how the specs have changed and in terms of formats we can accept. We have a delivery requirement which is sent out to the production companies and they have to deliver to that. If they don't the computer says no and they don't get their funding. It puts us in a really strong position. It means that one of the things that we are able to do is influence standardisation across the sector, because everybody has to do everything the same, which is to everyone's benefit in the long run. It means that we can normalise as well.
We accept what is considered best archival practice in Europe. We will always look to European standards to centralise as much as possible because the last thing that you want is 15 different standards and then you just can't manage that kind of preservation because everyone would have completely different needs and then when you go to migrate it they all have to be migrated separately. So we need to make sure that they're all normalised, that they are all the same type of file and then at least you can automate and you can do a batch migration. If somebody does try to deliver to us on XDCAM, or something that isn't what we accept, they would have to go away and they would have to make that into the format that we would accept. Because otherwise our digital preservation workflows don't work because they are very specific to the components of that particular format. It's all been very well thought out and we're in a very lucky position because we don't have people just randomly dumping a lot of digital files on us. We get to choose how they came into us. Having said that that's not always the case. We are doing a project at the moment with the Broadcasting Authority Archiving Scheme on Sé Merry Doyle's Loopline collection and there was a huge amount of born-digital data there. You had a lot of camera cards, stuff that he was just shoot, and there are hard drives and camera cards. We had never taken in that kind of quantity of born-digital before. That was completely different for us because we weren't getting to choose what we got. We have to come up with different workflows for each type of material and this is when you need
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