Member Article

North East aims to lead the way for digital archiving

A pilot project exploring the possibility of the North East becoming a centre for digital archiving has been launched. N-CODE (Northern Centre of Digitisation and Encoding) will showcase the region’s technical capability and act as catalyst to help advance the state of the art in the digitisation and commercialisation of digitised archival film and media. The N-CODE pilot is being delivered by Codeworks with financial support from regional development agency One NorthEast.

Andy Walton, eBusiness Manager at One NorthEast, said: “With so many hours of footage which could be potentially digitised, and the fact there is little large-scale capacity for analogue content conversion and encoding, there is a real opportunity for the North East to take the lead in the market. “Because of the spread of broadband networks, the need for footage to be digitally converted has never been greater or more valuable. So if, through the N-CODE project, the North East can prove it has the capabilities to carry out this work, there’s no reason why we couldn’t become a centre for digitisation services.”

Paul Vaclik, Head of Digital Media Technology at Codeworks, said: “I am confident that the N-CODE pilot will prove our capability to deliver a cost effective digitisation facility, and will also provide a resource for entrepreneurs and companies within the region to explore new business models using archive material.”

The N-CODE project is based at the University of Sunderland, which has significant strengths in technologies associated with the archiving and indexing of audio-visual content. The project also draws on the resources and expertise of the NRFTA (Northern Regional Film and Television Archive) based at the University of Teesside.

Leanne English at One NorthEast on 0191 2296738 or email Leanne.English@onenortheast.co.uk.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .