Information System Development in the “E-Age”

Abstract

Audio-visual content plays increasing role in cultural and scientificlife, however preservation and accessibility methods of such objects isstill under research and development in all over the world. The problemarises from the multidisciplinary and heterogeneous nature of content onthe one hand, and the continuos and high speed change ininfocommunication technology on the other hand. Successful co-operationof several different kinds of multicultural, multilingual repositoriesrequire the use of widely accepted open standards and systems, howevertailored collaboration among the project participants, the institutesand experts of information technology, media and regulation is anexciting challenge for project management.The project for the initiation of the National Audio-visual Archive(NAVA), Hungary was founded in 1999 by the Ministry of National CulturalHeritage, and planned to be completed in December 2001. Now thetheoretical and modelling aspects are already cleared and described indetails, a test-bed is established, appropriate contacts withco-operating institutes are made. Further research is needed for theextending and propagation of metadata scheme, and the experimentalintegration of existing archives. This case study emphasises theimportance of a manageable system development method, however concretedevelopment results and technological problems related with managementfunctions and decisions are also mentioned. The project is an edifyingcase of information system development in the beginning of the new``e-age{''} - when fundamental rules become unstable.The paper introduces an extended model of the Controlled IterationMethod. Real example shows, that a proper information system can bedesigned and realised rapidly even if the functional requirements aremodifying in the late phases of the project and the specification haveto be defined in a very complex space.