Integrated Digital Systems hosts conference on digital data archiving challenges and innovations

"We have been working in the field of Archiving and Content Management for over 18 years, and feel that now more than ever before companies need to capitalize on their assets, and be in control of their archives. With the abundance of tools, including our solution, and the demand for Arabic content and media on the web, companies, especially in the media field are losing out on the opportunity of monetizing their existing archives. We wanted to highlight this during our event through showcasing case studies from the various industries that we have been working with successfully." - commented Jamal Anouti, IDS General Manager.

The event focused on highlighting the challenges commonly faced within organization when it comes to building their archives and managing, searching and retrieving through their databases, whilst highlighting best practices in the field through success stories. One of these success stories presented was by Ms. Mona Mounayer, Cofounder of Firehorse films, who after converting their tapes archive into digital are now working on launching the first video archive for the Arab world aiming to capitalize on the demand for video content from the Middle East worldwide.

In the newspaper field as well, successful integration of the archiving process within the newspaper's workflows and best practices in documentation and thesaurus management have yielded positive results for newspapers such as Assafir (Lebanon) and Al Qabas (Kuwait) who have been using IDS Engram Archiving to build their archives and are using their archives both for internal research and reselling to researchers and other third parties. Mr. Rabih Harb, the IT Director of the Union of Arab Banks also presented an impressive case study on how the organization has utilized the archiving solution for initially classifying their internal library of researches, books and periodicals, and has now moved to using the Engram Archiving System as a backbone for their Content Management Systems of their websites and launching an Arab Banking Network, where industry stakeholders can purchase specific items from UAB's archive.

"In the conference, we dedicated a special segment of the program to the challenges of Arabic archiving and search and retrieval, which were highlighted by Dr. Mahmoud Rammal, Professor in the Lebanese University and Head of Computer sciences Department - Center of Studies & Research on Legal Informatics. We were really proud to demonstrate how all of the challenges presented by Dr. Rammal were resolved by our technical team in our Engram Archiving Solution." - Added Sami Slim, IDS Technical Director and Cofounder.