IT Innovation Centre

The IT Innovation Centre (www.it-innovation.soton.ac.uk) is an applied research centre within the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science. We research, develop, architect, engineer and integrate innovative IT systems. We have experience in knowledge management, business processes, security, multimedia, digital libraries and archiving in distributed systems. IT Innovation has worked on preservation, archiving and access projects in the cultural heritage and creative industries sector for almost a decade. In the IST PrestoSpace project we developed strategies, processes and cost models for business planning of audiovisual preservation projects. This gave us a good understanding of the pressing issues of digital preservation of AV material in Europe’s archives (e.g., technical obsolescence, processes, threats, lack of resources) including strategies and workflows for transferring and storing assets in digital form. We are building on PrestoSpace in the UK TSB AVATAR-m project funded where we lead the research work in partnership with the BBC and others. AVATAR-m is developing innovative tools for planning and managing large-scale, sustainable and integrated digital archive solutions, in particular for remote archive hosting and integration of archiving into inter-organisation supply-chains. Through the EC ARTISTE, SCULPTEUR and eCHASE projects we have experience of building systems for the search, navigation, retrieval, packaging and delivery of multimedia, including semantic data integration through collaborative processes.