Czech Radio trusts Piql to preserve their “Golden Treasure” of radio history, including speeches by Albert Einstein and recordings from Prague’s uprising in 1945.

CHALLENGE

As Europe’s second oldest radio broadcaster, Czech Radio has a rich archive of great national and international value. Their historical recordings have been digitized since 2002, and stored in three copies on a tape-based solution.

Despite applying best practices of digital preservation, Czech Radio was concerned their most valuable radio recordings could get lost over time. The largest threats were identified as bit rot during tape migrations, software and hardware obsolescence, and the unpredictability of costs related to required migrations. They also struggled with ensuring the authenticity of the digital material.


SOLUTION

Piql has provided Czech Radio with a digital master copy that will keep their most valuable sound recordings available and accessible for future generations.

In the project, we jointly worked to improve the metadata descriptions of the contents. Furthermore, it was advised to use open-source WAV format, allowing us to write file format specifications as readable text on the film to ensure the files can be retrieved regardless of technology development. The content written to piqlFilm never has to be migrated, and can be kept in Czech Radio’s archive for centuries with no need for future resources to keep it alive.

Piql represents an intriguing solution for secure data storage and long-term preservation, and we find the solution to be very relevant to us

Ing. Karel Zyka, Director of IT, Czech Radio