The Swiss Project Management Journal
The Creative Project
achieving 100% digitization. The Metamedia center was launched in 2010 by
Adrienne Corboud, Vice President Innovation and Valorization at EPFL. Alain, initially joined the team as the Project
Manager to manage multiple projects in
the Metamedia center with a special focus on the Montreux Jazz Digital project.
to seven years to keep up with technological trends.
As well as preserving the archive, the
Montreux Jazz Digital Project will provide
EPFL and other Swiss academic institutions with tools to access the Montreux
Jazz Festival digital archive for research
and educational purposes.
What are the main phases and deliverables of the project?
There are mainly four deliverables/phases as part of the project (refer to website
source+):
1. Archiving: Digitizing, capturing and ingesting audio-visual content from the
Montreux Jazz Festival archive for longterm preservation purposes
Digitization at such a level involves a lot
of challenges from the technology side.
Could you please share the technological
hurdles or situations you faced along the
project journey.
Consider this: 49 years of music and video
collections, 25 types of media, massive
disks, tapes and other media. The technology has evolved more in the past three
decades than it evolved during the past
200 years. The new technology practically render the older media useless and
it is getting increasingly difficult to find
good readers of the older media. We had
to build universal readers and interpreters for all kinds of media files, in order
to convert them into the latest media
formats. Even as we were converting the
media files, the technology continue to
evolve and we constantly felt the need to
catch up! It has been a very interesting
journey and quite an awesome experience for all those involved in the project.
What were the other key challenges
faced by the project?
Security of the files and confidentiality of
the media data: although artists have
agreed to sharing their files, it is very
important to respect confidentiality requirements and also to safeguard the data
from online hackers and pirates.
2. Metadata: Collecting, cleaning and enriching the Montreux Jazz Festival digital archive with pertinent metadata to
effectively search, find and access
media content.
3. Valorize: Focusing on technology incubation at EPFL by setting up valorization
and start-up projects that enhance the
Montreux Jazz Festival digital archive,
whilst enabling people to experience its
content in a smart and meaningful way.
4. Sustain: Future-proofing the Montreux
Jazz digital archive by devising and
implementing a strategy to sustain it on
a long-term basis. A migration to new
media platforms is estimated every five
Project Management Institute
SWITZERLAND Chapter
13
2016 Edition