This document summarizes the development of a biography tool by SRF to provide access to its extensive audiovisual archives. It describes the amount of content in the archives, the goals of making the archives permanently preserved and accessible to the public. It then outlines the initial development process, including selecting metadata and content from the archives in the first few weeks. It discusses improving the tool by adding more metadata and content over time, as well as developing the frontend user interface and navigation. The overall aim is to create a disruptive and sustainable tool to explore SRF's archives through personalized biographies.

1. The biography tool. A new way to explore the
vast richdom of audiovisual archives
FIAT-IFTA World Conference, Venice, 11 October 2018
Christian Vogg, Head of Archive, SRF Data Manager

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3 TV
6 Radio
Online
Apps
Social Media

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275’000 HiRes Videos
1.2 PB HD-Video
3.4 PB SD-Video
1.1 Mio Audios
87 TB HiRes Audio
129 TB MedRes Audio
Approx.
360’000
pictures
(photos)
383’000
Musicfiles
70’000
Soundfiles
Audio
950’000 hrs
Video
350’000 hrs

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1. SRG ensures that its programs are permanently preserved.
2. It makes its broadcast archives accessible to the public in
appropriate form for private and scientific use, respecting the
rights of third parties.

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1. SRG ensures that its programs are permanently preserved.
2. It makes its broadcast archives accessible to the public in
appropriate form for private and scientific use, respecting the
rights of third parties.

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Seven-Days-Catch-Up

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What about the «old» TV programs? The real archive.

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Where are you born?
Where did you go to school?
In which town/village do you live today?
What is your profession?
Which type of music do you like?
Which hobbies do you have?
What is your favorite sport?
Do you have a pet?
…..

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Target groups

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Selling arguments
• Supports corporate strategy:
Archive Opening, Cultural Property, Public Service, Swiss
• Personalized, aiming at a wide audience: everyone, including
schools, museums, local history researchers, …
• Introduces disruptive technologies: semantic search, chat bot,
video on the fly, agile programming
• Sustainable, to be connected even with external databases
(statistics), scalable
• Playful elements at a later stage: «What if ...»

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1940 to 2017 – more than 100 Milestones selected

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One week
3 developers
Selection of metadata

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Sources
Archive
Selected programs 1990-2000
45’639 videos
PlaySRF
51‘698 videos: Tagesschau
1990-2018
(excluding 2000-2009, because of flash)

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• There are plenty of useful metadata
• But first they need to be
• processed properly
• supplied in a central hub
• External solutions for an index are
expensive, whereas internally we don’t
know how long it would take us to solve the
problem ourselves
• In order to be fully functional the biography
tool needs sufficient video content spread
over the whole time scale

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1 developer
All available metadata
External matching

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Sources
Milestones
512 videos
PlaySRF and Archive
445‘511 videos indexed
1935-2018
Metadata used
Title
Similar Title
Publish date
Description (abstract)
Personas
Tags (incl.geolocation)

37. • The more metadata the better
• Matching metadata helps a lot
• We need to learn more about
elastic search indices
• Player starting speed is too slow

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8
2 weeks
1 developer, 1 designer
Frontend

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TASK (pitch)
• Concept as such
• Navigation
• User Interface
• Mobile product

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Theme-Tool
Geography-Tool

47. christian.vogg@srf.ch