S&T: Preserving the treasures of Romanian public radio

Integrated archiving system is a unique project in Romania

An integrated IT solution implemented by S&T is preserving almost one hundred-year-old voice recordings of great Romanian cultural personalities and politicians. In the course of this one million euro project financed by the Romanian government, the traditional storage interface of Romanian “Fonoteca Radio” will be gradually converted into a digital archive.

The implemented archiving solution is a complex and powerful tool for cataloging, indexing and managing the audio content and metadata associated with a workflow. Once introduced into the system, the audio content is encoded and saved automatically in high quality formats.

The core of the project is comprised of the mediARC system provided by the Austrian company NOA Audio Solutions. Able to transfer digital audio tapes, vinyl records, ebonite discs or CDs, the system will convert 132,000 hours of recordings now stored in about 600,000 media into a digital format over the next 15 years.

The digital radio archiving application was complemented with additional new features and custom configurations adapted to the specific requirements of the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Society. A joint team, consisting of S&T Romania and local partners, built the fiber optics communication network serving the Radio Digital Archive, developed the hardware infrastructure and deployed software applications. Installation and configuration of the infrastructure (servers, storage devices, communications equipment, workstations) were followed by an Oracle database management system, Tivoli backup and a recovery solution. S&T also created the working environment for the digitalization and documentation of the archive, considering specific requirements of workstations and data centers, such as air conditioning, access control, fire detection etc.

The back-up system requires that double storage volume is made available for the archive. This volume will be covered gradually in direct relation to the data generated in time. Instead, the communication system between the primary and the secondary location and the disaster recovery solution had to be in place and fully operational at project completion. A dedicated portal including digital documents of the archive will be launched to enable public access within the next four years.

S&T Romania upgraded and customized a standardized archiving solution with many new features from its portfolio in less than a year: backup system, disaster recovery, online portal, data centers and workstations.

National pride for future generations

Speaking about the project, Constantin Burloiu, Technical Director of the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Corporation, said: "We are pleased to have completed this first and crucial step towards achieving the Radio Digital Archive! Together with S&T Romania, we have built an integrated system that allows us to share with the Romanians all our "treasures" gathered for 81 years in Fonoteca Radio, thus fulfilling one of the public radio’s missions – to preserve and promote Romanian cultural values.”

This project is a successful continuation of the partnership between NOA and S&T, started in Croatia for a similar implementation project, and lays the groundwork for a regional collaboration of the two companies.

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