Preserving Brazilian football history

As five-times World Champions, Brazil is respected worldwide as a leading football nation. Piql is proud to assist the Brazilian Football Confederation in preserving their impressive football history for coming generations of supporters.

The Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF) is known and respected in Brazil and worldwide for organizing and regulating all football related activities in Brazil, and for managing the National Football Team, proudly known as Seleção Brasileira de Futebol.

In its daily activities, CBF produces large amounts of legal and procedural documentation stored on paper and as digital files, as well as vast amounts of media content of historical value. The institution also manages a collection of information stored on microfiche. President of CBF, Mr. Marco Polo Del Nero, is responsible for modernizing and implementing a complete digital workflow for all football related activities in Brazil. With background as a Lawyer and Sports Manager, he considers that the digitization of Brazil’s football history is crucial but must comply with legal regulations that protects the players’ rights. Mr. Marco Polo’s objective is to guarantee that files are protected and preserved for future generations.

Football related documentation ranges from player contracts to doping tests that are executed after every game. The CBF workflow integrates all types of documents and allows access to state level entities as well as to individuals.

CHALLENGE

Integrating CBF’s paper, microfiche and born-digital files into a transparent environment is a challenge. Some of the storage medium require digitization, and the metadata has varied over time and must be adjusted to modern-day requirements. As an example, when an athlete retires, the information generated during his career must be securely stored to ensure all rights are protected. As full retirement happens many years after players retire from the field, documents are usually stored in various formats that need to be digitized and integrated with CBF’s IT infrastructure. CBF legacy files stored in analog form on microfiche require special attention as access is needed on a daily basis for former players and staff that are now reaching the age of retirement. The IT department is also undergoing major infrastructure changes to implement paperless workflows for all football related activities in Brazil in compliance with ISO 14721 and regulations from National Legislation.

Piql has enabled CBF to preserve the memories of our world class Champions and protect the rights of all athletes and staff that form the football community in Brazil.

Marco Polo Del Nero, President of CBF

SOLUTION

CBF was interested in Piql’s technology because of its ability to preserve files for the long-term. The initial plan was to implement the technology for their historical documents. However, after tests and technical and legal discussions, CBF’s IT department understood that Piql’s technology would also enable nationwide digitization of all football related workflows as well as legal compliance for information preservation.

Piql was awarded a service and consulting contract to digitize analog documentation and to implement an OAIS-compliant digital workflow. Microfiche and paper documents are digitized, processed for OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and authenticated with digital signature. CBF’s cloud infrastructure is integrated with Piql, so files are easily transferred electronically for preservation and physical storage at the Arctic World Archive.

Piql provides all services related to digitization and IT integration, including the installation of digitizing equipment within CBF headquarters in Rio de Janeiro and implementation of a workflow that enables access to the CBF Cloud integrated with Piql Arctic World Archive from any soccer stadium in Brazil.

When access to a file is required, CBF IT department can provide access to digitally authenticated files. The digital workflow integrated with Piql enables the protection and preservation of all legal documents and historical media assets, and files may be retrieved by any authorized user of the CBF IT infrastructure.

Piql’s technology is like carving data in stone, piql- Film is a robust and migration-free medium that protects our data from any form of cyberattack and at the same time guarantees future access.

Fernando FranÒ«a, Director of IT, CBF

FUTURE

CBF will have a digital workflow where all media assets related to Seleção Brasileira de Futebol and all football related activities in Brazil will be preserved for future generations on piqlFilm.

As passionate football supporters, Piql Brasil expects that our biggest challenge will be to have sufficient storage space on our IT infrastructure and at Arctic World Archive for preserving assets from all future world titles that Brazil will conquer.