Governor’s Office Has All the Facts

Puerto Rico is a self-governing commonwealth, with executive power exercised by the governor who leads a cabinet of 15 ministers. The government offices are located in the beautiful, historic city of San Juan.

Puerto Rico's Central Communications department is responsible for monitoring all television and radio news programs as well as newspaper articles relevant to the current administration. This office presents and coordinates all public communications for the governor of Puerto Rico. Its purpose is to provide coherent, consistent and effective communication related to all governmental issues, broadcasted or printed.

Media Monitoring
The previous operation consisted of recording video feeds to VHS tape, audio to cassettes and making multiple photocopies of printed newspapers. In addition, approximately 12 people would monitor radio and TV programs to take written notes on content. The VHS and audiocassettes together with notes were stored in filing cabinets. This system was extremely time-consuming, and cumbersome from the standpoint of both capture processes and future retrieval. If the governor needed to review a broadcast or a piece of printed media from six months ago, it could take up to 24 hours to find it. Other issues were related to security for the stored media, a major concern being the lack of a disaster recovery strategy.

As a result, in April, 2005, the Government of Puerto Rico Central Communications Office issued a request for proposal for a digital asset management system for capture, management, retrieval and storage of the TV, radio and print media. The following system components were key to this project:

• Media monitoring system (TV and radio);
• Electronic document management system (EDMS); 
• Network attached storage (NAS) system; and
• Digital archive library system.

The system had to capture multiple video streams (nine local TV channels), multiple audio streams (12 radio stations), digitize printed documents and index and archive three types of content for retrieval and long-term archiving.

The Central Communications Office received four proposals and selected a turnkey solution from a local company, RGB Broadcast Services Inc. RGB is one of the most recognized telecommunications companies in Puerto Rico, specializing in sales, services, consulting and installation of technical products related to broadcast, professional, audiovisual, production and post-production areas. Their solution encompassed the following key components:

• Volicon Observer (www.volicon.com) for digital video recording and broadcast monitoring; 
• LibertyNET (www.libertyims.com) Electronic Data Management Solution for capture, management, storage and access point of the video, audio and scanned media; 
• Rorke NAS 1600, for network online storage solution; and
• Rorke Plasmon DVD Series jukebox management system, for digital archive.

The media captured on the system is available on-line for 90 days. After that time, the content is automatically copied, as invoked by workflow rules, and stored in the DVD-RAM archive library. The data becomes part of an historical archive and available for "near-line" retrieval.

The database for the EDMS is redundantly stored and automatically backed-up on a regularly scheduled basis, providing a reliable, secure disaster recovery strategy.

System Summary
The operating system is Windows Server 2003 (two servers), including workstation that runs the management applications. Network infrastructure is a dedicated gigabit Ethernet network where only application servers, capturing devices and users have secure access to the data.

The system simultaneously captures and stores both live TV and radio broadcasts, enabling users to view, analyze, edit (cut ads and content not relevant to the administration), annotate, repurpose and export files. The system stores the audio/video file to the local network, and polls or scans the network location and accesses the files, automatically generating an e-form template (a.k.a. multimedia file launcher). This is the tool that launches files in the appropriate multimedia player and displays any related text notations. It also shares index information; initial indexes include the express code and date of the capture. Further indexing is accomplished via database lookup to the Volicon database. Some manual indexing is also done by the governor’s staff.

Security is set up for each department user who has been granted access to the system. This is provided via secure login and password. The system restricts users to not only the data, but also functionality he/she needs to perform their duties. Users have either network or Web portal access (although both can be provided). Searches are provided via three search mechanisms: multi-field search (e.g., type of media file and date), single-source search (provides a list of audio, video or image files) and full-text search (enabled through OCR capabilities; all words in the newspaper articles and any notes relating to the audio or video files are full-text indexed). Users can extract, export, print and/or email data from the system.

When the governor or his staff performs a search, a single file or a "hit list" of results is displayed. The user then mouse-clicks on the file, launching the multimedia file launcher template. This template offers the user a button or link to the file. By selecting this button, the file is launched in its multimedia player. If related notes or a transcript has also been captured, the file launcher template will display a button to launch and view these as well. The scanned images of the newspaper clippings are easily retrieved via full-text or date/newspaper/title searches, launching the image into a view window. Full annotation and markups are available. Full reporting is available for user/audit activity tracking purposes.

The resulting solution has been a boon to the Puerto Rico Department of Communication, providing integration of all three media (audio, video, images) into one single point for indexing, high-level security and archive management, providing quick retrieval/access via both network and Web portal to the Puerto Rico governor and his office.

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