About SF Media Data Systems

Background

A media metadata practice built around catalogues that have to last

SF Media Data Systems is the trading name of SF MEDIA (SW) LTD, a small media metadata practice working from the south west of England. We build and maintain the systems that hold descriptive information about audio, video and still image collections: the titles, contributors, dates, rights, technical properties and subject terms that let an archive be searched, licensed and reused. Our clients are broadcasters, production companies, libraries, museums and rights holders who hold substantial collections and need the records to be consistent across them.

The work usually begins because a catalogue has grown faster than the rules behind it. Fields that were populated by hand in one decade sit beside records imported from another system, and the same programme appears under three different titles. We map what is there, agree a set of standards with the client, and then apply those standards across the collection, whether that means cleaning existing records, creating new ones or migrating everything into a system that will hold the structure properly.

We work to established frameworks such as Dublin Core, EBUCore and the PBCore schema, and we are comfortable adapting them where a collection has needs they do not cover. Controlled vocabularies matter to us because they are what make a catalogue usable years later, when the person who built it has moved on. Where a client already has a thesaurus or a house style, we follow it rather than replacing it with our own preferences.

Much of our time goes into the unglamorous parts of the trade: checking that dates are stored in one format, that contributor names are inverted consistently, that rights information is attached to the right level of the record and that technical metadata from the ingest process actually matches the files it describes. These details determine whether a search returns what it should, and they are the part of the work that clients most often inherit without anyone having maintained them.

We are a small team and we take on a limited number of projects at a time, which means the people who scope the work are the people who carry it out. We do not subcontract cataloguing to other firms, and we do not hand a project to a junior team once the contract is signed. If a collection falls outside what we do well, we say so at the enquiry stage rather than halfway through.

If you hold a media collection and the records behind it need attention, the enquiry page sets out what to send us. A short description of the collection, the formats involved and the system it currently lives in is enough for us to tell you whether we can help and what the work would involve.