IBM has introduced a 'digital library solution' to help companies, especially in media and entertainment, manipulate vast amounts of information.
The company says the system already has found favour in North America with the world's premier ice hockey association, the National Hockey League (NHL), and with SKG DreamWorks, the film studio founded by moguls Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen.
The digital library is a universal multimedia technology that allows for storage and management of all forms of information, including books, movies, music, documents, pictures and letters.
It is not simply a digital version of a traditional library but a complete infrastructure, allowing access to digital information integrated with interactive, intuitive and automatic tools for cataloguing, searching and navigating.
Richard Selvage, IBM's general manager, media & entertainment, global telecommunications and media industry, said the digital library had helped the NHL package its statistics in a format that allowed archival information to be sold along with live updates.
The league has existed for decades and has thousands of games captured on video from broadcast. Its vast trove of video/audio files had been kept in different formats in remote locations, making access cumbersome.
With IBM's help the audio/video clips are being digitised for storage in the digital library, creating a powerful tool for broadcasters.
